AI Shopping Assistants for E-Commerce
The Business Case for AI Agents That Sell
About 30% of U.S. consumers now use generative AI to compare products and decide what to buy, and Amazon’s assistant reached more than 300 million customers in 2025. The conversational storefront has stopped being a demo.
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- of U.S. consumers use generative AI for product comparisons and recommendations
- ~30%
- in incremental annualized sales Amazon attributes to its shopping assistant
- $12B
- the conversion Magalu’s WhatsApp assistant reached against its own app and website
- 3×
- of global online holiday sales were influenced by AI and agents
- ~20%
Search monetizes the intent a shopper can already express; the assistant works on everything they cannot.
Report Overview
What the retailer results show, where a conversation adds sales rather than moving the same order, and how to size a pilot that survives returns, cannibalization and operating cost.
Get the Free Report- Foreword
- What we mean by an AI shopping assistant
- Executive summary
- The intent e-commerce can already monetize
- From product query to shopping brief
- What the deployments already show
- Seven sources of revenue, not just conversion
- Proactivity: who gets offered help
- Shopping tasks, not product categories
- Customer service as a sales channel
- The limits of the current evidence
- How to design the pilot
- The retailer’s assistant vs. general-purpose AI
- Commercial constraints, not just technical ones
- The end of the shopper’s translation burden
“That is why we built Ayro: understanding a customer’s situation should not be a function of company size.”
Key Findings for Your Team
Explore the findings most relevant to your team — each section is tailored to a different set of priorities.
- E-Commerce & Merchandising
Where richer intent expression beats an already-functioning search box. Covers the shift from product query to shopping brief, multi-item missions, and why understanding a mission and executing it are separate design problems.
- Customer Service & Operations
Service is a sales channel, not a cost centre. Covers revenue protection over deflection, the return flow as a product-discovery moment, and post-purchase context that creates legitimate cross-sell.
- Growth & Analytics
The incrementality question, in full. Covers holdout design, the Etsy cannibalization result, first-principles pilot economics, and why assistant-attributed revenue should not be the primary KPI.
- Retail Media & Marketing
Conversation is a new first-party intent surface. Covers Amazon’s Sponsored Products and Brand Prompts inside its assistant, proactive outreach, and where sponsored recommendations have to stay visibly distinct.
Where in your customer journey do shoppers know what they want but fail to say it in a form your store can monetize?
Bart TurczynskiHead of Growth, TidioGet the Free Report
About 30% of U.S. consumers now use generative AI to compare products and decide what to buy. What the retailer results show, where a conversation adds sales rather than moving the same order, and how to size a pilot that survives returns, cannibalization and operating cost.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
A shopper-facing assistant operating as part of a retailer-controlled commerce experience: grounded in the retailer’s catalog, policies, and commercial context, and connected where relevant to inventory, cart, account, checkout, or service systems. It does not have to be built in-house — a technology vendor can supply the assistant while the retailer still controls the experience.
Ready to automate customer service with a quality agent?
Configure Ayro from your editor, or stand it up from our UI. Same agent, same skills, same evals — your choice of entry point.