Can AI chatbots make your holiday shopping easier?

Are you tired of thinking about what gifts to give to everyone this year? Artificial intelligence Chatbots can help, but don’t expect them to do all the work or always give you the right answers.

Anyone who searches the internet Cyber ​​Monday deals will likely see more conversational versions of the chatbots that some retailers and e-commerce sites have built to provide shoppers with improved customer service.

Some companies have infused integrated models with newer models generative AI technologies, allowing customers to seek advice by asking naturally worded questions, such as “What is the best wireless speaker?”

Retailers hope consumers will use these chatbots, commonly called shopping assistants, as virtual companions to help them discover or compare products. Previously, chatbots were mainly used for task-oriented functions, such as helping customers track online orders or returning orders that did not meet expectations.

Amazonthe king of online retail, has said its customers have been asking questions Rufus – the generative AI-powered shopping assistant it launched this year – for information like whether a specific coffee maker is easy to clean, or what recommendations it has for a lawn game for a child’s birthday party.

And Rufus, for which is available holiday shoppers in the US and some other countries, this isn’t the only shopping assistant out there. A select number of Walmart shoppers this year will get access to a similar chatbot that the nation’s largest retailer is testing in a few product categories, including toys and electronics.

Perplexity AI added something new to the AI ​​chat store world last month by rolling out a feature on it AI-powered search engine that allows users to ask a question like “What are the best women’s leather boots?” and then be able to receive specific product results that the San Francisco-based company says are not sponsored.

“It’s been adopted on a pretty incredible scale,” said Mike Mallazzo, an analyst and writer at retail research media company Future Commerce.

Retailers with websites and e-commerce companies started paying more attention to chatbots when using them ChatGPTan artificial intelligence text chatbot created by the company OpenAI went mainstream in late 2022, sparking public and business interest in the generative AI technology that powers the tool.

Victoria’s Secret, IKEA, Instacart and Canadian retailer Ssense are among companies experimenting with chatbots, some of which use the technology from Open AI.

Even before improved chatbots, online retailers made product recommendations based on a customer’s previous purchases or search history. Amazon led the way in offering recommendations on its platform, so Rufus’ ability to offer some isn’t particularly groundbreaking.

But Rajiv Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of search and conversational shopping, said the company can now make more helpful recommendations by programming Rufus to ask clarifying or follow-up questions. Customers also use Rufus to search for deals, some of which are personalized, Mehta said.

To be sure, chatbots are prone to hallucinations, so Rufus and most tools like this can do things wrong.

Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, wrote in a November blog post that his company tested Rufus by asking for gaming TV recommendations. The chatbot’s response included products that were not TVs. When asked about the least expensive options, Rufus came back with suggestions that weren’t the cheapest, Kaziukenas said.

An Associated Press reporter recently asked Rufus for gift recommendations for a brother. The chatbot quickly spit out a few ideas for “thoughtful gifts,” ranging from a T-shirt and a charm keychain to a more daring suggestion: a multi-purpose knife engraved with the phrase “BEST BROTHER EVER.”

After a five-minute written conversation, Rufus made more customized suggestions: a pair of Barcelona football shirts sold by third-party sellers. But the company couldn’t say which seller offered the lowest price. When asked for a price comparison for a popular skin serum during another search, Rufus showed the product’s pre-discounted price instead of the current price.

“Rufus is constantly learning,” Amazon’s Mehta said during an interview.

Shop AI, a chatbot that Canadian e-commerce company Shopify launched last year, can also help shoppers discover new products by asking questions of their own, such as asking for details about an intended gift recipient or features the buyer wants to avoid . However, Shop AI has difficulty recommending specific products or identifying the cheapest item in a product category.

The limitations show that the technology is still in its infancy and has a long way to go before it becomes as useful as retailers – and many consumers – wish it could be.

To truly transform the shopping experience, shopping assistants will need to be “deeply personalized” and able to independently remember a customer’s order history, product preferences and purchasing habits, according to giant McKinsey. & The company wrote this in an August report. said the McKinsey report.

Amazon noted that Rufus’s answers are based on information in product listings, community Q&Axis and customer reviews, including the fake reviews used to boost or reduce sales of products on the marketplace.

The large language model that powers the chatbot was also trained on the company’s entire catalog and on some public information on the Internet, Trishul Chilimbi, an Amazon vice president who oversees AI research, wrote in the electrical engineering magazine in October IEEE Spectrum.

But it’s unclear how Amazon and other companies weigh differently training components – such as reviews – in their recommendations, or how exactly the store assistants arrive at them, according to Nicole Greene, analyst at management consultancy Gartner.

Perplexity AI’s new shopping feature allows users to enter searches such as “best phone case” and receive answers derived from various sources, including Amazon and other retailers, such as Best Buy. Bewilderment It also invited retailers to share data about their products and said those who do would be more likely to have their items recommended to shoppers.

But Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas suggested in a recent interview with Fortune magazine that he didn’t know how the new shopping feature recommended products to customers. But in an interview with the AP, Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko walked back that characterization, saying Srinivas’ comment was “probably taken out of context.”

The context, he said, is that with generative AI technology “you can’t know in advance exactly what the output will be, just based on knowing the input” from the training materials.

Shevelenko said retailers and brands should be aware that their products cannot be recommended in Perplexity’s search engine because they block “keywords” in their websites or use various techniques to appear better in search results.

“The way you show up in an answer is by having a better product and better features,” he said.