My not-so-perfect holiday shopping excursion with AI chatbots

In addition to Shopify, chatbots have emerged in the past 12 months from Instacart, the food delivery company; Mercari, a resale platform; Carrefour, a retailer; and Kering, owner of Gucci and Balenciaga. Walmart, Mastercard and Signet Jewelers are also testing chatbots, which may become publicly available next year.

“In a way, it mimics a retail environment, but online,” said Carl Rivera, a vice president at Shopify who oversees the Shop app, which hosts Shop AI. He said the chatbot broke down people’s questions into key terms and searched for relevant products from Shopify’s millions of sellers. It then recommends products based on reviews and a customer’s purchasing history.

Retailers have long used chatbots, but previous versions lacked conversational power and typically answered only a few preset questions, such as the status of an order. The latest chatbots, on the other hand, can process prompts and generate customized responses, both of which create a more “personal and authentic interaction,” says Jen Jones, the chief marketing officer of the Commercetools platform.

Whether shoppers want this technology remains a question. “Consumers like simplicity, so they don’t necessarily want to have five different generative AI tools that they would use for different purposes,” said Olivier Toubia, a marketing professor at Columbia Business School.

Nicola Conway, a lawyer in London, tried to search Kering’s luxury personal shopper, Madeline, for a pink bridesmaid dress for a spring wedding in August. Madeline was “intuitive and new,” she said, but she gave only one recommendation: an Alexander McQueen corset dress. Mrs. Conway ultimately didn’t buy it.