AI Shopping Assistants: The Future of Online Retail or Still a Work in Progress?

The race is on to make AI agents do your online shopping for you | TechCrunch

Millions of Americans will pop open their laptops to buy gifts this holiday season, but tech companies are racing to turn the job of online shopping over to AI agents instead. Perplexity recently released an AI shopping agent for its paying customers in the United States. It's supposed to navigate retail websites for you, find the products you're looking for, and even click the checkout button on your behalf. Perplexity may be the first major AI startup to offer this, but others have been exploring the space for a while -- so expect to see more AI shopping agents in 2025. OpenAI and Google are reportedly developing their own AI agents that can make purchases, such as booking flights and hotels. It would also make sense for Amazon, where millions of people already search for products, to evolve its AI chatbot, Rufus, to help with checkout as well. Tech companies are using a mix of new and old techniques to get around the barriers erected by retailers to block unwanted bots from using their sites. Rabbit released its LAM Playground earlier this month, which lets an AI agent navigate websites on your behalf using a computer in a data center. Anthropic's computer use agent does the same thing, but it's hosted on your personal computer. Meanwhile, Perplexity is partnering with Stripe to leverage some older payments features that have been repurposed for AI agents. Stripe is allotting single-use debit cards for Perplexity's AI agent to spend money with online -- a repurposed version of the Stripe Issuing feature. This makes it so the agent can buy you a pair of socks without needing access to your entire bank account. That way, if it hallucinates, the agent just buys the wrong socks for a few bucks, and doesn't spend your rent money on, well, socks. Google's AI agent reportedly needs access to your credit card information, which could give consumers pause. However, several companies already know your billing info - such as Google, Amazon, Apple, and Shopify - and they regularly fill out forms for you when you're shopping online. This could give these companies an advantage when they ship products in the space. These tools could reshape online shopping -- something retailers and advertisers making a fortune from the status quo may not be happy about. Just as AI chatbots have proven somewhat useful for surfacing information that's hard to find through search engines, AI shopping agents have the potential to find products or deals that you might not otherwise have found on your own. In theory, these tools could save you hours when you need to book a cheap flight, or help you easily locate a good birthday present for your brother-in-law. There's a long way to go before AI agents can buy everything on your holiday wishlist, but there's a lot of companies vying to do it. Based on our early attempts, Perplexity's shopping agent takes hours to process purchases, and sometimes runs into issues where it can't purchase items at all. Overall, using the agent today seems more complicated than buying something on Amazon. Perplexity also says there are human checkers involved to ensure its AI agent is working accurately. Having a "human in the loop" is not uncommon for the AI industry -- but then, most AI chatbots don't see the items I'm purchasing and my billing address. This raises some privacy issues for Perplexity, and whatever company is hiring its human checkers. TechCrunch tested out Perplexity's shopping agent by asking it to buy us toothpaste. After prompting Perplexity with, "I'd like to buy toothpaste," the agent returned several options from Walmart, Amazon, and some smaller websites. For a few options, Perplexity offers a button under the product called, "Buy with Pro" while other options take you straight to the website of the retailer. Buy with Pro is Perplexity's shopping agent at work. I chose a tube of Crest from Walmart. Without leaving the Perplexity app, I was able to checkout, and (seemingly) purchase the toothpaste. But instead of paying Walmart, my bank statement showed that I had paid Perplexity's agent. Three hours later, I received an email from Perplexity that its agent was not able to buy me the toothpaste, because it was sold out at Walmart. The next day, I tried to purchase another tube of Crest with Perplexity's shopping agent. Eight hours later, I got a confirmation from Perplexity that it worked. So what gives? Why did my first purchase get rejected, and why did both take hours to complete? While Perplexity Shopping might seem a lot like Amazon or the TikTok Shop, where you can buy items from a wide array of merchants who upload and manage storefronts on the platform, it's actually completely different. Perplexity's AI agent seems to be scraping retailers' websites and giving you information about their products. Because this process isn't necessarily real-time, it can cause a disconnect between what Perplexity tells you and what a store actually has in stock, which appears to be what happened in my case. Perplexity declined to comment on whether retailers like Walmart were aware that their products were appearing on its app. This suggests that their scraping and purchase process is not authorized by those companies -- something that could complicate buying or returning items. You're also not actually buying anything when you check out in Perplexity's app. You're paying Perplexity the exact amount that item costs, giving its AI agent instructions to buy a specific item, and telling it to fill out your name and shipping address in the process. Some time later, perhaps hours, the agent executes that task, or at least tries to. "This is the equivalent of giving a small pot of money to an assistant in the real world, and give them rules about how they're allowed to spend it," said Stripe product lead Jeff Weinstein, who helped build Stripe's AI agent toolkit, in an interview with TechCrunch. But instead of giving money (in a pot or otherwise) to a real human assistant, who I would trust to buy toothpaste on their own, Perplexity's AI agent occasionally needs to be monitored by another human. And even then, it doesn't always work. "I can't disclose specifics around how Buy with Pro works, but what I can say is that there is human oversight providing occasional support, which ensures that transactions are completed in a timely manner and we avoid issues like purchasing the wrong product," said Perplexity spokesperson Sara Platnick in an email to TechCrunch. These days, hiring human checkers to watch AI systems is commonplace. Companies like Scale AI and Turing have built large businesses around the service. But in this case, Perplexity declined to answer TechCrunch's questions around how often human oversight was necessary, how involved humans are in the process, and whether human checkers are watching AI agents make purchases in real-time. The lack of transparency here may not bother everyone, but it's certainly worth noting. If AI shopping agents really take off, it could mean less people going to online storefronts, where retailers have historically been able to upsell them or promote impulse purchases. It also means that advertisers may not get valuable information about shoppers, so they can be targeted with other products. For that reason, those very advertisers and retailers are unlikely to let AI agents disrupt their industries without a fight. That's part of why companies like Rabbit and Anthropic are training AI agents to use the ordinary user interface of a website. That is, the bot would use the site just like you do, clicking and typing in a browser in a way that's largely indistinguishable from a real person. That way, there's no need to ask permission to use an online service through a backend - permission that could be rescinded if you're hurting their business. Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu said in a recent interview that AI agents are getting better than humans at solving CAPTCHA, the human verification tests that have previously prevented bots from shopping online. That means website owners will need to develop more sophisticated ways to prove personhood online. It's possible that one day, AI agents could be part of a better online shopping experience than what exists today. Perplexity's shopping agent isn't that by a long shot, but it offers an early glimpse of what could be. In the next year, we're likely to see better versions of AI shopping agents from Perplexity, OpenAI, and Google. We may just be seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of how this could reshape the online retail industry, and what sorts of problems AI agent developers could run into.

Can AI chatbots make your holiday shopping easier?

Tired of thinking about what gifts to get everyone this year? Artificial intelligence chatbots might help, but don't expect them to do all the work or always give you the right answers. Anyone scouring the internet for Cyber Monday deals is likely going to encounter more conversational iterations of the chatbots that some retailers and e-commerce sites have built to provide shoppers with enhanced customer service. Some companies have integrated models infused with newer generative AI technologies, allowing shoppers to seek advice by asking naturally phrased questions like "What's the best wireless speaker?" Retailers hope consumers use these chatbots, which are typically called shopping assistants -- as virtual companions that help them discover or compare products. Prior chatbots were mostly used for task-oriented functions such as helping customers track down online orders or return ones that didn't meet expectations. Amazon, the king of online retail, has said its customers have been questioning Rufus -- the generative AI- powered shopping assistant it launched this year -- for information such as 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, which is available for holiday shoppers in the U.S. and some other countries, is not the only shopping assistant out there. A select number of Walmart shoppers will have access this year to a similar chatbot 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-shopping world last month by rolling out a feature on its AI-powered search engine that enables users to ask a question like "What's the best women's leather boots?" and then receive specific product results that the San Francisco-based company says are not sponsored. "It has been adopted at pretty incredible scale," Mike Mallazzo, an analyst and writer at retail research media company Future Commerce, said. Retailers with websites and e-commerce companies started paying more attention to chatbots when use of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence text chatbot made 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 the Canadian retailer Ssense are among other companies experimenting with chatbots, some of which use technology from OpenAI. Even before the improved chatbots, online retailers were creating product recommendations based on a customer's prior purchases or search history. Amazon was at the forefront of having recommendations on its platform, so Rufus' ability to provide some is not particularly groundbreaking. But Rajiv Mehta, the vice president of search and conversational shopping at Amazon, said the company is able to offer more helpful recommendations now by programming Rufus to ask clarifying or follow-up questions. Customers are also using Rufus to look for deals, some of which are personalized, Mehta said. To be sure, chatbots are prone to hallucinations, so Rufus and most of the tools like it can get things wrong. Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, wrote in a November blog post that his firm tested Rufus by requesting gaming TV recommendations. The chatbot's response included products that were not TVs. When asked for the least expensive options, Rufus came back with suggestions that weren't the cheapest, Kaziukenas said. An Associated Press reporter recently asked Rufus to give some gift recommendations for a brother. The chatbot quickly spit out a few ideas for "thoughtful gifts," ranging from a T-shirt and a keychain with charms to a bolder suggestion: a multifunctional knife engraved with the phrase "BEST BROTHER EVER." After a 5-minute written conversation, Rufus offered more tailored suggestions -- a few Barcelona soccer jerseys sold by third-party sellers. But it wasn't able to say which seller offered the lowest price. When asked during another search for a price comparison on a popular skin serum, Rufus showed the product's pre-discounted price instead of its present one. "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 its own questions, such as soliciting details about an intended gift recipient or features the buyer wants to avoid. Shop AI has trouble, however, recommending specific products or identifying the lowest-priced item in a product category. The limitations show the technology is still in its infancy and has a long way to go before it becomes as useful as the retail industry -- and many shoppers -- wish it could be. To truly transform the shopping experience, shopping assistants will "need to be deeply personalized" and be able -- on their own -- to remember a customer's order history, product preferences and purchasing habits, consulting giant McKinsey & Company said in an August report. Amazon has noted that Rufus' answers are based on information contained in product listings, community Q&As and customer reviews, which would include the fake reviews that are used to boost or diminish sales for products on its marketplace. The large language model that powers the chatbot was also trained on the company's entire catalog and some public information on the web, Trishul Chilimbi, an Amazon vice president who oversees AI research, wrote in the electrical engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum in October. But its unclear how Amazon and other companies are weighting different training components -- such as reviews -- in their recommendations, or how exactly the shopping assistants come up with them, according to Nicole Greene, an analyst at management consulting firm Gartner. Perplexity AI's new shopping feature allows users to enter search queries such as "best phone case" and to receive answers derived from various sources, including Amazon and other retailers, such as Best Buy. Perplexity also invited retailers to share data about their products and said those that do would have an increased chance of having 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 pushed back on 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 off of knowing what the inputs" are from the training materials. Shevelenko said retailers and brands need to know they can't have their products recommended in Perplexity's search engine because they're "jamming key words" into their websites or using different techniques to show up better on search results "The way you show up in an answer is by having a better product and better features," he said.

AI chatbots can make your Cyber Monday shopping a breeze, but they're not foolproof

Tired of thinking about what gifts to get everyone this year? Artificial intelligence chatbots might help, but don't expect them to do all the work or always give you the right answers. Anyone scouring the internet for Cyber Monday deals is likely going to encounter more conversational iterations of the chatbots that some retailers and e-commerce sites have built to provide shoppers with enhanced customer service. Some companies have integrated models infused with newer generative AI technologies, allowing shoppers to seek advice by asking naturally phrased questions like "What's the best wireless speaker?" Retailers hope consumers use these chatbots, which are typically called shopping assistants -- as virtual companions that help them discover or compare products. Prior chatbots were mostly used for task-oriented functions such as helping customers track down online orders or return ones that didn't meet expectations. Amazon, the king of online retail, has said its customers have been questioning Rufus -- the generative AI-powered shopping assistant it launched this year -- for information such as 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, which is available for holiday shoppers in the U.S. and some other countries, is not the only shopping assistant out there. A select number of Walmart shoppers will have access this year to a similar chatbot 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-shopping world last month by rolling out a feature on its AI-powered search engine that enables users to ask a question like "What's the best women's leather boots?" and then receive specific product results that the San Francisco-based company says are not sponsored. "It has been adopted at pretty incredible scale," Mike Mallazzo, an analyst and writer at retail research media company Future Commerce, said. Retailers with websites and e-commerce companies started paying more attention to chatbots when use of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence text chatbot made 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 the Canadian retailer Ssense are among other companies experimenting with chatbots, some of which use technology from OpenAI. Even before the improved chatbots, online retailers were creating product recommendations based on a customer's prior purchases or search history. Amazon was at the forefront of having recommendations on its platform, so Rufus' ability to provide some is not particularly groundbreaking. But Rajiv Mehta, the vice president of search and conversational shopping at Amazon, said the company is able to offer more helpful recommendations now by programming Rufus to ask clarifying or follow-up questions. Customers are also using Rufus to look for deals, some of which are personalized, Mehta said. To be sure, chatbots are prone to hallucinations, so Rufus and most of the tools like it can get things wrong. Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, wrote in a November blog post that his firm tested Rufus by requesting gaming TV recommendations. The chatbot's response included products that were not TVs. When asked for the least expensive options, Rufus came back with suggestions that weren't the cheapest, Kaziukenas said. An Associated Press reporter recently asked Rufus to give some gift recommendations for a brother. The chatbot quickly spit out a few ideas for "thoughtful gifts," ranging from a T-shirt and a keychain with charms to a bolder suggestion: a multifunctional knife engraved with the phrase "BEST BROTHER EVER." After a 5-minute written conversation, Rufus offered more tailored suggestions -- a few Barcelona soccer jerseys sold by third-party sellers. But it wasn't able to say which seller offered the lowest price. When asked during another search for a price comparison on a popular skin serum, Rufus showed the product's pre-discounted price instead of its present one. "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 its own questions, such as soliciting details about an intended gift recipient or features the buyer wants to avoid. Shop AI has trouble, however, recommending specific products or identifying the lowest-priced item in a product category. The limitations show the technology is still in its infancy and has a long way to go before it becomes as useful as the retail industry -- and many shoppers -- wish it could be. To truly transform the shopping experience, shopping assistants will "need to be deeply personalized" and be able -- on their own -- to remember a customer's order history, product preferences and purchasing habits, consulting giant McKinsey & Company said in an August report. the McKinsey report said. Amazon has noted that Rufus' answers are based on information contained in product listings, community Q&As and customer reviews, which would include the fake reviews that are used to boost or diminish sales for products on its marketplace. The large language model that powers the chatbot was also trained on the company's entire catalog and some public information on the web, Trishul Chilimbi, an Amazon vice president who oversees AI research, wrote in the electrical engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum in October. But its unclear how Amazon and other companies are weighting different training components -- such as reviews -- in their recommendations, or how exactly the shopping assistants come up with them, according to Nicole Greene, an analyst at management consulting firm Gartner. Perplexity AI's new shopping feature allows users to enter search queries such as "best phone case" and to receive answers derived from various sources, including Amazon and other retailers, such as Best Buy. Perplexity also invited retailers to share data about their products and said those that do would have an increased chance of having 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 pushed back on that characterization, saying Srinivas's 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 off of knowing what the inputs" are from the training materials. Shevelenko said retailers and brands need to know they can't have their products recommended in Perplexity's search engine because they're "jamming key words" into their websites or using different techniques to show up better on search results. "The way you show up in an answer is by having a better product and better features," he said.

Can AI chatbots make your holiday shopping easier?

Tired of thinking about what gifts to get everyone this year? Artificial intelligence chatbots might help, but don't expect them to do all the work or always give you the right answers. Anyone scouring the internet for Cyber Monday deals is likely going to encounter more conversational iterations of the chatbots that some retailers and e-commerce sites have built to provide shoppers with enhanced customer service. Some companies have integrated models infused with newer generative AI technologies, allowing shoppers to seek advice by asking naturally phrased questions like "What's the best wireless speaker?" Retailers hope consumers use these chatbots, which are typically called shopping assistants - as virtual companions that help them discover or compare products. Prior chatbots were mostly used for task-oriented functions such as helping customers track down online orders or return ones that didn't meet expectations. Amazon, the king of online retail, has said its customers have been questioning Rufus - the generative AI- powered shopping assistant it launched this year - for information such as 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, which is available for holiday shoppers in the U.S. and some other countries, is not the only shopping assistant out there. A select number of Walmart shoppers will have access this year to a similar chatbot 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-shopping world last month by rolling out a feature on its AI-powered search engine that enables users to ask a question like "What's the best women's leather boots?" and then receive specific product results that the San Francisco-based company says are not sponsored. "It has been adopted at pretty incredible scale," Mike Mallazzo, an analyst and writer at retail research media company Future Commerce, said. Retailers with websites and e-commerce companies started paying more attention to chatbots when use of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence text chatbot made 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 the Canadian retailer Ssense are among other companies experimenting with chatbots, some of which use technology from OpenAI. Even before the improved chatbots, online retailers were creating product recommendations based on a customer's prior purchases or search history. Amazon was at the forefront of having recommendations on its platform, so Rufus' ability to provide some is not particularly groundbreaking. But Rajiv Mehta, the vice president of search and conversational shopping at Amazon, said the company is able to offer more helpful recommendations now by programming Rufus to ask clarifying or follow-up questions. Customers are also using Rufus to look for deals, some of which are personalized, Mehta said. To be sure, chatbots are prone to hallucinations, so Rufus and most of the tools like it can get things wrong. Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, wrote in a November blog post that his firm tested Rufus by requesting gaming TV recommendations. The chatbot's response included products that were not TVs. When asked for the least expensive options, Rufus came back with suggestions that weren't the cheapest, Kaziukenas said. An Associated Press reporter recently asked Rufus to give some gift recommendations for a brother. The chatbot quickly spit out a few ideas for "thoughtful gifts," ranging from a T-shirt and a keychain with charms to a bolder suggestion: a multifunctional knife engraved with the phrase "BEST BROTHER EVER." After a 5-minute written conversation, Rufus offered more tailored suggestions - a few Barcelona soccer jerseys sold by third-party sellers. But it wasn't able to say which seller offered the lowest price. When asked during another search for a price comparison on a popular skin serum, Rufus showed the product's pre-discounted price instead of its present one. "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 its own questions, such as soliciting details about an intended gift recipient or features the buyer wants to avoid. Shop AI has trouble, however, recommending specific products or identifying the lowest-priced item in a product category. The limitations show the technology is still in its infancy and has a long way to go before it becomes as useful as the retail industry - and many shoppers - wish it could be. To truly transform the shopping experience, shopping assistants will "need to be deeply personalized" and be able - on their own - to remember a customer's order history, product preferences and purchasing habits, consulting giant McKinsey & Company said in an August report. the McKinsey report said. Amazon has noted that Rufus' answers are based on information contained in product listings, community Q&As and customer reviews, which would include the fake reviews that are used to boost or diminish sales for products on its marketplace. The large language model that powers the chatbot was also trained on the company's entire catalog and some public information on the web, Trishul Chilimbi, an Amazon vice president who oversees AI research, wrote in the electrical engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum in October. But its unclear how Amazon and other companies are weighting different training components - such as reviews - in their recommendations, or how exactly the shopping assistants come up with them, according to Nicole Greene, an analyst at management consulting firm Gartner. Perplexity AI's new shopping feature allows users to enter search queries such as "best phone case" and to receive answers derived from various sources, including Amazon and other retailers, such as Best Buy. Perplexity also invited retailers to share data about their products and said those that do would have an increased chance of having 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 pushed back on 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 off of knowing what the inputs" are from the training materials. Shevelenko said retailers and brands need to know they can't have their products recommended in Perplexity's search engine because they're "jamming key words" into their websites or using different techniques to show up better on search results "The way you show up in an answer is by having a better product and better features," he said.

Can AI chatbots make your holiday shopping easier?

Tired of thinking about what gifts to get everyone this year? Artificial intelligence chatbots might help, but don't expect them to do all the work or always give you the right answers. Anyone scouring the internet for Cyber Monday deals is likely going to encounter more conversational iterations of the chatbots that some retailers and e-commerce sites have built to provide shoppers with enhanced customer service. Some companies have integrated models infused with newer generative AI technologies, allowing shoppers to seek advice by asking naturally phrased questions like "What's the best wireless speaker?" Retailers hope consumers use these chatbots, which are typically called shopping assistants - as virtual companions that help them discover or compare products. Prior chatbots were mostly used for task-oriented functions such as helping customers track down online orders or return ones that didn't meet expectations. Amazon, the king of online retail, has said its customers have been questioning Rufus - the generative AI- powered shopping assistant it launched this year - for information such as 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, which is available for holiday shoppers in the U.S. and some other countries, is not the only shopping assistant out there. A select number of Walmart shoppers will have access this year to a similar chatbot 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-shopping world last month by rolling out a feature on its AI-powered search engine that enables users to ask a question like "What's the best women's leather boots?" and then receive specific product results that the San Francisco-based company says are not sponsored. "It has been adopted at pretty incredible scale," Mike Mallazzo, an analyst and writer at retail research media company Future Commerce, said. Retailers with websites and e-commerce companies started paying more attention to chatbots when use of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence text chatbot made 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 the Canadian retailer Ssense are among other companies experimenting with chatbots, some of which use technology from OpenAI. Even before the improved chatbots, online retailers were creating product recommendations based on a customer's prior purchases or search history. Amazon was at the forefront of having recommendations on its platform, so Rufus' ability to provide some is not particularly groundbreaking. But Rajiv Mehta, the vice president of search and conversational shopping at Amazon, said the company is able to offer more helpful recommendations now by programming Rufus to ask clarifying or follow-up questions. Customers are also using Rufus to look for deals, some of which are personalized, Mehta said. To be sure, chatbots are prone to hallucinations, so Rufus and most of the tools like it can get things wrong. Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, wrote in a November blog post that his firm tested Rufus by requesting gaming TV recommendations. The chatbot's response included products that were not TVs. When asked for the least expensive options, Rufus came back with suggestions that weren't the cheapest, Kaziukenas said. An Associated Press reporter recently asked Rufus to give some gift recommendations for a brother. The chatbot quickly spit out a few ideas for "thoughtful gifts," ranging from a T-shirt and a keychain with charms to a bolder suggestion: a multifunctional knife engraved with the phrase "BEST BROTHER EVER." After a 5-minute written conversation, Rufus offered more tailored suggestions - a few Barcelona soccer jerseys sold by third-party sellers. But it wasn't able to say which seller offered the lowest price. When asked during another search for a price comparison on a popular skin serum, Rufus showed the product's pre-discounted price instead of its present one. "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 its own questions, such as soliciting details about an intended gift recipient or features the buyer wants to avoid. Shop AI has trouble, however, recommending specific products or identifying the lowest-priced item in a product category. The limitations show the technology is still in its infancy and has a long way to go before it becomes as useful as the retail industry - and many shoppers - wish it could be. To truly transform the shopping experience, shopping assistants will "need to be deeply personalized" and be able - on their own - to remember a customer's order history, product preferences and purchasing habits, consulting giant McKinsey & Company said in an August report. the McKinsey report said. Amazon has noted that Rufus' answers are based on information contained in product listings, community Q&As and customer reviews, which would include the fake reviews that are used to boost or diminish sales for products on its marketplace. The large language model that powers the chatbot was also trained on the company's entire catalog and some public information on the web, Trishul Chilimbi, an Amazon vice president who oversees AI research, wrote in the electrical engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum in October. But its unclear how Amazon and other companies are weighting different training components - such as reviews - in their recommendations, or how exactly the shopping assistants come up with them, according to Nicole Greene, an analyst at management consulting firm Gartner. Perplexity AI's new shopping feature allows users to enter search queries such as "best phone case" and to receive answers derived from various sources, including Amazon and other retailers, such as Best Buy. Perplexity also invited retailers to share data about their products and said those that do would have an increased chance of having 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 pushed back on 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 off of knowing what the inputs" are from the training materials. Shevelenko said retailers and brands need to know they can't have their products recommended in Perplexity's search engine because they're "jamming key words" into their websites or using different techniques to show up better on search results "The way you show up in an answer is by having a better product and better features," he said.

Can AI chatbots make your holiday shopping easier?

Tired of thinking about what gifts to get everyone this year? Artificial intelligence chatbots might help, but don't expect them to do all the work or always give you the right answers. Anyone scouring the internet for Cyber Monday deals is likely going to encounter more conversational iterations of the chatbots that some retailers and e-commerce sites have built to provide shoppers with enhanced customer service. Some companies have integrated models infused with newer generative AI technologies, allowing shoppers to seek advice by asking naturally phrased questions like "What's the best wireless speaker?" Retailers hope consumers use these chatbots, which are typically called shopping assistants - as virtual companions that help them discover or compare products. Prior chatbots were mostly used for task-oriented functions such as helping customers track down online orders or return ones that didn't meet expectations. Amazon, the king of online retail, has said its customers have been questioning Rufus - the generative AI- powered shopping assistant it launched this year - for information such as 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, which is available for holiday shoppers in the U.S. and some other countries, is not the only shopping assistant out there. A select number of Walmart shoppers will have access this year to a similar chatbot 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-shopping world last month by rolling out a feature on its AI-powered search engine that enables users to ask a question like "What's the best women's leather boots?" and then receive specific product results that the San Francisco-based company says are not sponsored. "It has been adopted at pretty incredible scale," Mike Mallazzo, an analyst and writer at retail research media company Future Commerce, said. Retailers with websites and e-commerce companies started paying more attention to chatbots when use of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence text chatbot made 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 the Canadian retailer Ssense are among other companies experimenting with chatbots, some of which use technology from OpenAI. Even before the improved chatbots, online retailers were creating product recommendations based on a customer's prior purchases or search history. Amazon was at the forefront of having recommendations on its platform, so Rufus' ability to provide some is not particularly groundbreaking. But Rajiv Mehta, the vice president of search and conversational shopping at Amazon, said the company is able to offer more helpful recommendations now by programming Rufus to ask clarifying or follow-up questions. Customers are also using Rufus to look for deals, some of which are personalized, Mehta said. To be sure, chatbots are prone to hallucinations, so Rufus and most of the tools like it can get things wrong. Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, wrote in a November blog post that his firm tested Rufus by requesting gaming TV recommendations. The chatbot's response included products that were not TVs. When asked for the least expensive options, Rufus came back with suggestions that weren't the cheapest, Kaziukenas said. An Associated Press reporter recently asked Rufus to give some gift recommendations for a brother. The chatbot quickly spit out a few ideas for "thoughtful gifts," ranging from a T-shirt and a keychain with charms to a bolder suggestion: a multifunctional knife engraved with the phrase "BEST BROTHER EVER." After a 5-minute written conversation, Rufus offered more tailored suggestions - a few Barcelona soccer jerseys sold by third-party sellers. But it wasn't able to say which seller offered the lowest price. When asked during another search for a price comparison on a popular skin serum, Rufus showed the product's pre-discounted price instead of its present one. "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 its own questions, such as soliciting details about an intended gift recipient or features the buyer wants to avoid. Shop AI has trouble, however, recommending specific products or identifying the lowest-priced item in a product category. The limitations show the technology is still in its infancy and has a long way to go before it becomes as useful as the retail industry - and many shoppers - wish it could be. To truly transform the shopping experience, shopping assistants will "need to be deeply personalized" and be able - on their own - to remember a customer's order history, product preferences and purchasing habits, consulting giant McKinsey & Company said in an August report. the McKinsey report said. Amazon has noted that Rufus' answers are based on information contained in product listings, community Q&As and customer reviews, which would include the fake reviews that are used to boost or diminish sales for products on its marketplace. The large language model that powers the chatbot was also trained on the company's entire catalog and some public information on the web, Trishul Chilimbi, an Amazon vice president who oversees AI research, wrote in the electrical engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum in October. But its unclear how Amazon and other companies are weighting different training components - such as reviews - in their recommendations, or how exactly the shopping assistants come up with them, according to Nicole Greene, an analyst at management consulting firm Gartner. Perplexity AI's new shopping feature allows users to enter search queries such as "best phone case" and to receive answers derived from various sources, including Amazon and other retailers, such as Best Buy. Perplexity also invited retailers to share data about their products and said those that do would have an increased chance of having 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 pushed back on 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 off of knowing what the inputs" are from the training materials. Shevelenko said retailers and brands need to know they can't have their products recommended in Perplexity's search engine because they're "jamming key words" into their websites or using different techniques to show up better on search results "The way you show up in an answer is by having a better product and better features," he said.

E-commerce sites want AI bots to make holiday shopping easier, but don't expect them to do all the work or always give you the right answers

Tired of thinking about what gifts to get everyone this year? Artificial intelligence chatbots might help, but don't expect them to do all the work or always give you the right answers. Anyone scouring the internet for Cyber Monday deals is likely going to encounter more conversational iterations of the chatbots that some retailers and e-commerce sites have built to provide shoppers with enhanced customer service. Some companies have integrated models infused with newer generative AI technologies, allowing shoppers to seek advice by asking naturally phrased questions like "What's the best wireless speaker?" Retailers hope consumers use these chatbots, which are typically called shopping assistants - as virtual companions that help them discover or compare products. Prior chatbots were mostly used for task-oriented functions such as helping customers track down online orders or return ones that didn't meet expectations. Amazon, the king of online retail, has said its customers have been questioning Rufus - the generative AI- powered shopping assistant it launched this year - for information such as 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, which is available for holiday shoppers in the U.S. and some other countries, is not the only shopping assistant out there. A select number of Walmart shoppers will have access this year to a similar chatbot 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-shopping world last month by rolling out a feature on its AI-powered search engine that enables users to ask a question like "What's the best women's leather boots?" and then receive specific product results that the San Francisco-based company says are not sponsored. "It has been adopted at pretty incredible scale," Mike Mallazzo, an analyst and writer at retail research media company Future Commerce, said. Retailers with websites and e-commerce companies started paying more attention to chatbots when use of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence text chatbot made 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 the Canadian retailer Ssense are among other companies experimenting with chatbots, some of which use technology from OpenAI. Even before the improved chatbots, online retailers were creating product recommendations based on a customer's prior purchases or search history. Amazon was at the forefront of having recommendations on its platform, so Rufus' ability to provide some is not particularly groundbreaking. But Rajiv Mehta, the vice president of search and conversational shopping at Amazon, said the company is able to offer more helpful recommendations now by programming Rufus to ask clarifying or follow-up questions. Customers are also using Rufus to look for deals, some of which are personalized, Mehta said. To be sure, chatbots are prone to hallucinations, so Rufus and most of the tools like it can get things wrong. Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, wrote in a November blog post that his firm tested Rufus by requesting gaming TV recommendations. The chatbot's response included products that were not TVs. When asked for the least expensive options, Rufus came back with suggestions that weren't the cheapest, Kaziukenas said. An Associated Press reporter recently asked Rufus to give some gift recommendations for a brother. The chatbot quickly spit out a few ideas for "thoughtful gifts," ranging from a T-shirt and a keychain with charms to a bolder suggestion: a multifunctional knife engraved with the phrase "BEST BROTHER EVER." After a 5-minute written conversation, Rufus offered more tailored suggestions - a few Barcelona soccer jerseys sold by third-party sellers. But it wasn't able to say which seller offered the lowest price. When asked during another search for a price comparison on a popular skin serum, Rufus showed the product's pre-discounted price instead of its present one. "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 its own questions, such as soliciting details about an intended gift recipient or features the buyer wants to avoid. Shop AI has trouble, however, recommending specific products or identifying the lowest-priced item in a product category. The limitations show the technology is still in its infancy and has a long way to go before it becomes as useful as the retail industry - and many shoppers - wish it could be. To truly transform the shopping experience, shopping assistants will "need to be deeply personalized" and be able - on their own - to remember a customer's order history, product preferences and purchasing habits, consulting giant McKinsey & Company said in an August report. the McKinsey report said. Amazon has noted that Rufus' answers are based on information contained in product listings, community Q&As and customer reviews, which would include the fake reviews that are used to boost or diminish sales for products on its marketplace. The large language model that powers the chatbot was also trained on the company's entire catalog and some public information on the web, Trishul Chilimbi, an Amazon vice president who oversees AI research, wrote in the electrical engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum in October. But its unclear how Amazon and other companies are weighting different training components - such as reviews - in their recommendations, or how exactly the shopping assistants come up with them, according to Nicole Greene, an analyst at management consulting firm Gartner. Perplexity AI's new shopping feature allows users to enter search queries such as "best phone case" and to receive answers derived from various sources, including Amazon and other retailers, such as Best Buy. Perplexity also invited retailers to share data about their products and said those that do would have an increased chance of having 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 pushed back on 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 off of knowing what the inputs" are from the training materials. Shevelenko said retailers and brands need to know they can't have their products recommended in Perplexity's search engine because they're "jamming key words" into their websites or using different techniques to show up better on search results "The way you show up in an answer is by having a better product and better features," he said.

Can AI Chatbots Make Your Holiday Shopping Easier?

Tired of thinking about what gifts to get everyone this year? Artificial intelligence chatbots might help, but don't expect them to do all the work or always give you the right answers. Anyone scouring the internet for Cyber Monday deals is likely going to encounter more conversational iterations of the chatbots that some retailers and e-commerce sites have built to provide shoppers with enhanced customer service. Some companies have integrated models infused with newer generative AI technologies, allowing shoppers to seek advice by asking naturally phrased questions like "What's the best wireless speaker?" Retailers hope consumers use these chatbots, which are typically called shopping assistants - as virtual companions that help them discover or compare products. Prior chatbots were mostly used for task-oriented functions such as helping customers track down online orders or return ones that didn't meet expectations. Amazon, the king of online retail, has said its customers have been questioning Rufus - the generative AI- powered shopping assistant it launched this year - for information such as 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, which is available for holiday shoppers in the U.S. and some other countries, is not the only shopping assistant out there. A select number of Walmart shoppers will have access this year to a similar chatbot 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-shopping world last month by rolling out a feature on its AI-powered search engine that enables users to ask a question like "What's the best women's leather boots?" and then receive specific product results that the San Francisco-based company says are not sponsored. "It has been adopted at pretty incredible scale," Mike Mallazzo, an analyst and writer at retail research media company Future Commerce, said. Retailers with websites and e-commerce companies started paying more attention to chatbots when use of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence text chatbot made 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 the Canadian retailer Ssense are among other companies experimenting with chatbots, some of which use technology from OpenAI. Even before the improved chatbots, online retailers were creating product recommendations based on a customer's prior purchases or search history. Amazon was at the forefront of having recommendations on its platform, so Rufus' ability to provide some is not particularly groundbreaking. But Rajiv Mehta, the vice president of search and conversational shopping at Amazon, said the company is able to offer more helpful recommendations now by programming Rufus to ask clarifying or follow-up questions. Customers are also using Rufus to look for deals, some of which are personalized, Mehta said. To be sure, chatbots are prone to hallucinations, so Rufus and most of the tools like it can get things wrong. Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, wrote in a November blog post that his firm tested Rufus by requesting gaming TV recommendations. The chatbot's response included products that were not TVs. When asked for the least expensive options, Rufus came back with suggestions that weren't the cheapest, Kaziukenas said. An Associated Press reporter recently asked Rufus to give some gift recommendations for a brother. The chatbot quickly spit out a few ideas for "thoughtful gifts," ranging from a T-shirt and a keychain with charms to a bolder suggestion: a multifunctional knife engraved with the phrase "BEST BROTHER EVER." After a 5-minute written conversation, Rufus offered more tailored suggestions - a few Barcelona soccer jerseys sold by third-party sellers. But it wasn't able to say which seller offered the lowest price. When asked during another search for a price comparison on a popular skin serum, Rufus showed the product's pre-discounted price instead of its present one. "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 its own questions, such as soliciting details about an intended gift recipient or features the buyer wants to avoid. Shop AI has trouble, however, recommending specific products or identifying the lowest-priced item in a product category. The limitations show the technology is still in its infancy and has a long way to go before it becomes as useful as the retail industry - and many shoppers - wish it could be. To truly transform the shopping experience, shopping assistants will "need to be deeply personalized" and be able - on their own - to remember a customer's order history, product preferences and purchasing habits, consulting giant McKinsey & Company said in an August report. the McKinsey report said. Amazon has noted that Rufus' answers are based on information contained in product listings, community Q&As and customer reviews, which would include the fake reviews that are used to boost or diminish sales for products on its marketplace. The large language model that powers the chatbot was also trained on the company's entire catalog and some public information on the web, Trishul Chilimbi, an Amazon vice president who oversees AI research, wrote in the electrical engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum in October. But its unclear how Amazon and other companies are weighting different training components - such as reviews - in their recommendations, or how exactly the shopping assistants come up with them, according to Nicole Greene, an analyst at management consulting firm Gartner. Perplexity AI's new shopping feature allows users to enter search queries such as "best phone case" and to receive answers derived from various sources, including Amazon and other retailers, such as Best Buy. Perplexity also invited retailers to share data about their products and said those that do would have an increased chance of having 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 pushed back on 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 off of knowing what the inputs" are from the training materials. Shevelenko said retailers and brands need to know they can't have their products recommended in Perplexity's search engine because they're "jamming key words" into their websites or using different techniques to show up better on search results "The way you show up in an answer is by having a better product and better features," he said. Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Can AI chatbots make your holiday shopping easier?

Tired of thinking about what gifts to get everyone this year? Artificial intelligence chatbots might help, but don't expect them to do all the work or always give you the right answers. Anyone scouring the internet for Cyber Monday deals is likely going to encounter more conversational iterations of the chatbots that some retailers and e-commerce sites have built to provide shoppers with enhanced customer service. Some companies have integrated models infused with newer generative AI technologies, allowing shoppers to seek advice by asking naturally phrased questions like "What's the best wireless speaker?" Retailers hope consumers use these chatbots, which are typically called shopping assistants - as virtual companions that help them discover or compare products. Prior chatbots were mostly used for task-oriented functions such as helping customers track down online orders or return ones that didn't meet expectations. , the king of online retail, has said its customers have been questioning Rufus - the generative AI- powered shopping assistant it launched this year - for information such as 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, which is available for holiday shoppers in the and some other countries, is not the only shopping assistant out there. A select number of Walmart shoppers will have access this year to a similar chatbot 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-shopping world last month by rolling out a feature on its AI-powered search engine that enables users to ask a question like "What's the best women's leather boots?" and then receive specific product results that the -based company says are not sponsored. "It has been adopted at pretty incredible scale," , an analyst and writer at retail research media company Future Commerce, said. Retailers with websites and e-commerce companies started paying more attention to chatbots when use of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence text chatbot made by the company , went mainstream in late 2022, sparking public and business interest in the generative AI technology that powers the tool. Victoria's Secret, , and the Canadian retailer Ssense are among other companies experimenting with chatbots, some of which use technology from . Even before the improved chatbots, online retailers were creating product recommendations based on a customer's prior purchases or search history. was at the forefront of having recommendations on its platform, so Rufus' ability to provide some is not particularly groundbreaking. But , the vice president of search and conversational shopping at , said the company is able to offer more helpful recommendations now by programming Rufus to ask clarifying or follow-up questions. Customers are also using Rufus to look for deals, some of which are personalized, Mehta said. To be sure, chatbots are prone to hallucinations, so Rufus and most of the tools like it can get things wrong. Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, wrote in a November blog post that his firm tested Rufus by requesting gaming TV recommendations. The chatbot's response included products that were not TVs. When asked for the least expensive options, Rufus came back with suggestions that weren't the cheapest, Kaziukenas said. An reporter recently asked Rufus to give some gift recommendations for a brother. The chatbot quickly spit out a few ideas for "thoughtful gifts," ranging from a T-shirt and a keychain with charms to a bolder suggestion: a multifunctional knife engraved with the phrase "BEST ." After a 5-minute written conversation, Rufus offered more tailored suggestions - a few soccer jerseys sold by third-party sellers. But it wasn't able to say which seller offered the lowest price. When asked during another search for a price comparison on a popular skin serum, Rufus showed the product's pre-discounted price instead of its present one. "Rufus is constantly learning," 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 its own questions, such as soliciting details about an intended gift recipient or features the buyer wants to avoid. Shop AI has trouble, however, recommending specific products or identifying the lowest-priced item in a product category. The limitations show the technology is still in its infancy and has a long way to go before it becomes as useful as the retail industry - and many shoppers - wish it could be. To truly transform the shopping experience, shopping assistants will "need to be deeply personalized" and be able - on their own - to remember a customer's order history, product preferences and purchasing habits, consulting giant said in an August report. has noted that Rufus' answers are based on information contained in product listings, community Q&As and customer reviews, which would include the fake reviews that are used to boost or diminish sales for products on its marketplace. The large language model that powers the chatbot was also trained on the company's entire catalog and some public information on the web, Trishul Chilimbi, an vice president who oversees AI research, wrote in the electrical engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum in October. But its unclear how and other companies are weighting different training components - such as reviews - in their recommendations, or how exactly the shopping assistants come up with them, according to , an analyst at management consulting firm Gartner. Perplexity AI's new shopping feature allows users to enter search queries such as "best phone case" and to receive answers derived from various sources, including and other retailers, such as . Perplexity also invited retailers to share data about their products and said those that do would have an increased chance of having their items recommended to shoppers. But Perplexity CEO , suggested in a recent interview with that he didn't know how the new shopping feature recommended products to customers. But in an interview with the AP, Chief Business Officer pushed back on 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 off of knowing what the inputs" are from the training materials. Shevelenko said retailers and brands need to know they can't have their products recommended in Perplexity's search engine because they're "jamming key words" into their websites or using different techniques to show up better on search results "The way you show up in an answer is by having a better product and better features," he said. Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. , source

Can AI Chatbots Make Your Holiday Shopping Easier?

Tired of thinking about what gifts to get everyone this year? Artificial intelligence chatbots might help, but don't expect them to do all the work or always give you the right answers. Anyone scouring the internet for Cyber Monday deals is likely going to encounter more conversational iterations of the chatbots that some retailers and e-commerce sites have built to provide shoppers with enhanced customer service. Some companies have integrated models infused with newer generative AI technologies, allowing shoppers to seek advice by asking naturally phrased questions like "What's the best wireless speaker?" Retailers hope consumers use these chatbots, which are typically called shopping assistants -- as virtual companions that help them discover or compare products. Prior chatbots were mostly used for task-oriented functions such as helping customers track down online orders or return ones that didn't meet expectations. Amazon, the king of online retail, has said its customers have been questioning Rufus -- the generative AI -- powered shopping assistant it launched this year -- for information such as whether a specific coffee maker is easy to clean, or what recommendations it has for a lawn game for a child's birthday party.