For years, commerce teams optimized for discovery: more choice, more content, more inspiration. But our latest research shows consumers are now seeking the opposite. This endless flood of information, delivered through myriad channels, platforms, and streams, is debilitating.
AI wins when your customers’ decisions must be thoroughly rationalized.
In categories like electronics, apparel, beauty, toys, and home, consumers used AI tools to compare options, validate tradeoffs, and find the best price. These are not emotional browsing moments. They are relief-seeking moments. AI absorbs the cognitive burden, allowing consumers to close tabs, narrow options, and restore confidence.
This aligns with what we explored in our December Member Brief on agentic commerce. Chatbots serve the modern consumer as a co-thinker. It compresses consideration. It removes friction. It turns “I should research this” into “I know what I’m buying.”
But where does chatbot-based shopping lack?
When purchases are core to your customer’s identity, driven by identity, symbolism, or deep brand affinity (luxury, certain sporting goods, and passion-led categories), AI adoption drops significantly. Not because the tech fails, but because the decision logic changes. These purchases aren’t about optimization. They’re about meaning and belonging.
Your customers are human, after all. And what we buy is core to who we are as individuals and as a collective society. Our purchases are an extension of our very being. Our research shows that consumers want bots to assist with their purchasing decisions, not replace them.
Despite the rise of AI-powered bots and shopping companions, commerce remains inherently human.
AI can synthesize information. It cannot synthesize taste, memory, or belonging.
The brands that will win this AI arms race will be the ones that know when to optimize for chatbot shopping by incorporating structured data, clear attributes, transparent pricing, and availability information that machines can trust.
But if that is all your brand can do, you will lose your customers’ trust, especially if you are a less-utilitarian brand. Storytelling, worldbuilding, context, and point of view will reinforce why someone chooses you, even when cheaper or faster options exist.
The deepest signal in this research isn’t technological. It’s psychological. Consumers aren’t outsourcing shopping. They’re outsourcing decision fatigue.
And they’re doing it selectively.
