AI-Assisted Shopping to Rise 130% During Holidays, Adobe Says

What people buy online this holiday shopping season will be increasingly influenced by chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to Adobe Inc.

AI-assisted traffic to US retail sites will increase 130% from a year ago, the firm said on Monday. Shoppers using artificial intelligence as a research tool are more likely to buy something and will spend more on each transaction than those coming from non-AI channels, Adobe said.

Online sales will rise 6.7% to $275.1 billion in November and December, according to Adobe, which tracks more than 1 trillion visits to US websites. The annual spending binge will provide clues about how bot-assisted shopping could one day transform the $400 billion digital advertising market dominated by Alphabet Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.

“Consumers are getting much more comfortable having dialogues with an agent, getting recommendations and going to the retail site from those conversations,” said Vivek Pandya, Adobe’s director of digital insights. “They’re really leaning on the agent to do this research for them and synthesize the results quickly.”

Adobe’s analysis of AI-assisted shopping focuses on traffic from an independent platform like ChatGPT or Anthropic PBC’s Claude to retail sites. It doesn’t include chatbot searches that start on an online store like Amazon.com or Walmart.com because those shoppers are already there.

While consumers are starting to trust bots to simplify their product searches, only a small fraction are using AI to make a purchase. And even if people wanted to use a shopping bot to buy something on Amazon, they can’t because the company has blocked AI assistants from Perplexity and Meta.

Electronics and apparel will continue to be the biggest categories during the holidays, but spending on groceries and toys will grow at a faster pace, according to Adobe. The steepest discounts will be offered in the five-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, when vacuum cleaners and video games will see the fastest sales growth, the firm said.

“We are going beyond big-ticket items to everyday essentials,” Pandya said.