Consumers Plan to Use AI This Holiday Season. 92% of Retailers Say They’re Not Ready.
Every shopper eventually learns that a delivery date is a suggestion. This holiday season, a lot of them will be shopping with something that keeps score.
Sixty-five percent of American consumers say they will use AI for at least one part of their holiday shopping this year, according to a survey Narvar released Monday. Only 8 percent of retailers describe themselves as “very confident” using AI to improve the shopping experience, which leaves 92 percent who do not, heading into the biggest quarter of their year. Asked what will change most this season, they put AI near the bottom of the list: only 14 percent expect AI shopping assistants to be the biggest shift in customer behavior.
What moved is the part retailers spent twenty years building for. Forty-three percent of shoppers said they use AI to find gifts, and 33 percent use it to compare products and summarize reviews. That is the browsing that search ads, category pages and product photography were all designed to capture. Seventy-eight percent said they would use the tools more if the results felt personal.
The bill comes after checkout
Three quarters of shoppers said they would take slower delivery in exchange for free shipping. But 11 percent still expect same-day arrival at no charge, and another 18 percent expect next day, a bar that WWD’s Sourcing Journal noted few retailers can meet profitably without charging for it.
The calendar moved as well. Fifty-eight percent of shoppers plan to start earlier than they did last year, and 77 percent of retailers have no early-shopping incentive in place. The demand arrives before the discounts.
“Retailers don’t need to win on speed alone,” said Anisa Kumar, chief executive of Narvar. “They need to be honest about the delivery window, consistent in meeting it, and ready for a shopper who now uses AI to hold them to that promise.”
Narvar surveyed 1,348 U.S. consumers aged 18 to 80 and 100 retail decision-makers in operations, finance, e-commerce and customer experience. The company sells AI-powered post-purchase software to retailers including Sephora, Levi’s and Warby Parker, and ran the survey itself.
None of it will show up on the retailer’s screen. An order a chatbot chose looks exactly like an order a person chose: same cart, same card, same shipping address. The biggest change in this season’s shopping behavior is invisible in the data retailers watch, which may be why so few say they are watching for it.
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