AI Holiday Shopping: Two-Thirds of Consumers Use AI to Find Gifts

What happened

With the holiday shopping season approaching, a significant majority of consumers are turning to artificial intelligence tools to guide their purchasing decisions, according to new research from customer engagement platform Attentive. Roughly two-thirds of shoppers report using AI in some capacity — primarily to discover products and hunt for deals — marking a notable shift in how people navigate the pre-purchase journey.

The findings suggest AI is moving from a novelty to a functional shopping companion, with consumers using it to filter options, compare prices and surface gift ideas that might otherwise require hours of manual browsing. Attentive's data points to a holiday season in which AI-assisted discovery is becoming a mainstream behaviour rather than an early-adopter edge case.

Why it matters

For customer experience and service-design practitioners, this shift carries real structural implications. When AI intermediaries sit between a brand and its shoppers, the traditional levers of influence — visual merchandising, homepage placement, email subject lines — lose some of their potency. Instead, the quality and structure of product data, the clarity of value propositions and the strength of a brand's digital signals all become the new battleground for attention. Retailers who have not optimised for AI-readable content risk being filtered out before a human ever sees their offer.

From a behavioural economics standpoint, AI-assisted shopping also compresses the consideration phase. When an algorithm pre-selects a shortlist, the anchoring and framing effects that retailers traditionally engineer in-store or on-page are partially displaced. Understanding how consumers are prompting and trusting these tools — and where doubt or friction re-enters the journey — is now a legitimate CX design challenge, not just a technology question.

By the numbers

• Two-thirds of holiday shoppers report using AI to assist with gift purchases, per Attentive's research.

The Renascence take

Most retailers will read this headline and immediately ask their tech teams about AI-powered chatbots or on-site assistants. That is the wrong instinct. The more pressing issue is that consumers are using external AI tools — not the brand's own — to make decisions before they even arrive at a website. The experience battle is now happening upstream, in a layer the brand does not control.

The real CX risk here is not that AI will replace the human shopping experience — it is that brands have spent years optimising journeys that begin on their own properties, while the actual decision is increasingly being made elsewhere. A customer-obsessed operator should be asking: what does our brand look like when an AI summarises it in three sentences? Is our product information structured, specific and trustworthy enough to survive that compression? Investing in content clarity and data integrity is now, effectively, investing in the top of the funnel. Brands that treat this as a content-governance problem — rather than a technology problem — will be better positioned when the AI layer becomes the default starting point for every category, not just gifts.