Dive Brief
- Adobe expects AI traffic to U.S. retail sites this holiday season to more than double, up 130% year over year, according to Adobe’s annual online shopping forecast released Monday. It measures traffic through shoppers’ link engagement.
- Consumers using AI engage with brands’ offers at a higher rate than non-AI traffic and 43% generate more revenue per visit, Adobe found in a complementary survey of 5,000 U.S. consumers. This represents a complete inversion of what Adobe found 18 months prior — that non-AI traffic was worth 128% more than AI-referred visits.
- More than three-quarters of shoppers using AI assistants reported feeling more confident in their purchases, Adobe found. Over two-thirds said they are less likely to return an item they bought with an AI assistant’s help.
Dive Insight
Consumers are comfortable using AI-powered tools to find deals and compare products, and show early signs of trusting the technology to short-circuit their buying process.
As a result, CX leaders need to start thinking about how they appeal not just to consumers, but to generative AI-powered assistants, as well.
AI tools sit atop all the channels brands have built to reach their customers. “It also behaves as a discovery channel through AI search and a referral channel through the AI chatbots themselves,” Rebecca Wettemann, CEO and principal analyst with Valoir, told CX Dive in an email. “Brands need to think about whether AI can find, accurately explain and differentiate their products.”
Early indications suggest that current-generation tools are already good at sifting through online and surfacing relevant results to shoppers. Consumers arriving at sites because of AI assistance added items to their carts at a 32% higher rate than those not referred by AI, Adobe found.
Even so, this holiday season may see an additional wrinkle in consumer use of AI thanks to the debut of “next-gen” AI tools, such as personal AI agents. One recent example is Meta’s Muse personal AI agent app which reached a reported 2.8 million downloads in the first 12 days of its availability.
Meanwhile, Apple’s revamped Siri AI may upend consumer AI use as it rolls out, even though it only works on Apple’s newer hardware and software.
Given the rapid rise in consumer adoption of AI tools in shopping, and the proliferation of those capabilities in devices people already use — from third-party applications and web browsers to smartphones — brands need “to start designing for a world in which there are effectively two customers: the human and the human’s agent,” Bill Staikos, founder of Be Customer Led, told CX Dive in an email.
“For business leaders generally, customer loyalty is fundamentally turned on its head when your customer isn't the entity making every decision,” Staikos said. “This is going to be a hard problem to solve.”
