AI Shopping Tools Set to Influence Over Half of Holiday Buyers

What happened

Industry reporting from Retail Customer Experience indicates that more than half of consumers now expect to use artificial intelligence tools at some point during this year's holiday shopping season. The coverage points to a shift in how shoppers are approaching gift research, price comparison and purchase decisions, with AI-powered assistants and recommendation tools becoming a mainstream part of the seasonal shopping journey rather than a niche behaviour.

While the underlying survey detail is limited in the available reporting, the headline finding is consistent: a majority of consumers are planning to lean on AI in some form — whether through retailer chatbots, generative AI search, or AI-driven product recommendations — as they navigate holiday purchasing decisions this year.

Why it matters

For retailers and customer experience leaders, this signals that AI-assisted discovery is no longer experimental — it is becoming a default entry point into the shopping journey for a majority of consumers during the highest-stakes commercial period of the year. That changes where brands need to show up: not just on shelves or search results pages, but inside the AI tools and conversational interfaces shoppers are now consulting before they ever reach a retailer's own site.

It also raises the stakes for how retailers structure product data, descriptions and inventory information, since AI assistants depend on accurate, well-organised content to make reliable recommendations. Brands that have not optimised for AI-mediated discovery risk being invisible at the exact moment consumers are forming purchase intent.

By the numbers

• More than half of consumers surveyed say they intend to use AI tools at some stage during this year's holiday shopping season.

The Renascence take

The real story here isn't that consumers are curious about AI — it's that AI is quietly becoming the new front door to retail, and most organisations are still designing experiences as if that door doesn't exist.

Retailers have spent a decade perfecting on-site search, merchandising and checkout flows, but a growing share of shoppers are now forming their preferences before they ever land on a retail website — inside an AI assistant's answer. The operators who win this holiday season won't just have great product pages; they'll have structured, trustworthy data that AI tools can confidently surface and recommend. Treat AI discovery as a new channel with its own service-design rules, not an extension of existing search optimisation, or risk losing the moment intent is actually formed.