Personal Shopping Agents are the Future of E-Commerce
“Call my agent,” that old school cliché of A-listers, could be making a comeback as digital agents, powered by artificial intelligence, change the way we buy online. If you are familiar with Amazon Alexa (beyond the song requests), you understand the power of voice-activated assistants to find products, create shopping lists, fill your digital cart, and complete purchases when you are ready to buy. Now, a new wave of AI personal shopping agents is on the rise. The brands prepared to welcome them have a chance to drive higher customer satisfaction, revenue, and brand loyalty, while reducing returns.
Anticipating the Rise of Personal Agents
At first, having a personal agent may seem like a luxury or a fad, but when you consider today’s frustrating shopping experiences, the necessity for them is clear.
Think about the last time you shopped in a brick-and-mortar store. Maybe the retailer had your size in stock or the right product in the wrong color. Or maybe you were unable to find a salesperson with the product knowledge to help you. Adding to in-store frustrations are self-service checkouts and the need to track down staff to unlock products now displayed behind anti-theft devices.
As traditional retail stores feel more like showrooms with a not-so-subtle air of distrust, buyers are leaning in even more to starting and ending their search online.
While convenience rules in e-commerce, frustration is also high. Consider a simple search for a blue dress shirt. Despite checking all the right boxes in the search filters, you still must sift through hundreds of options. It is frustrating to be overloaded with choices without the knowledge or assistance to determine the best option for your needs.
This common situation rarely results in a great customer experience. As a result, hasty purchases lead to returns that are costly for the retailer and sometimes the buyer, not to mention the environmental impact. Adding to the buyer’s frustration are the multiple open windows used to compare one retailer with another, and the feeling that a better deal is out there.
While we all have anecdotes about the frustrations of buying goods, one thing is clear—product search is broken. In response to rising levels of frustration and the evolution of AI, personal agents make a lot of sense.
How Personal Shopping Agents Will Work
Personal shopping agents go beyond chatbots, with their hit-or-miss responses to customer questions, and understand intent, analyze customer data, and know the difference between, say, the blue shades of navy and indigo. Since they are driven by large language models (LLMs), they get smarter every time you go online.
Soon, when you need to buy something on the web, you’ll interact with your personal agent. You will explain to your agent what you are looking for, and the agent will act as a consultant.
For example, when you ask your personal shopping agent to find you a blue shirt, it will show you a handful of options, or perhaps just one, perfectly curated based on your preferences, size, budget, etc. The agent will then negotiate the best option for you on the web and execute the purchase.
This online selling model also easily lends itself to making reservations and creating subscriptions on your behalf. At some point, we could trust the agent to write personalized notes that are sent along with gifts.
Are Retailers Ready for Personal Agents?
The emergence of personal shopping agents will transform e-commerce and vastly improve the customer experience, yet this will only happen if retailers are prepared. Depending on the retailer’s infrastructure, supporting personal agents will require a fundamental shift in how they operate.
A retailer’s website will need to support interactions with personal agents using machine-to-machine protocols. Of course, privacy will be a premium because the agent will need to know a lot of personal information. In response, there will likely be a parallel drive to ensure all personal data remains in the hands of the shopper, perhaps one day stored in a blockchain-backed wallet.
Additionally, the retailer’s product data needs to go from being optimized for a product detail page (PDP) read by a human, to being clean, standardized, and optimized for a machine-based AI agent.
Today, many retailers are replacing out-of-the-box search tools with more advanced search and discovery tools. After all, retailers need to help customers on their buying journey toward discovering the right product for their needs—otherwise, those customers will be happy to go somewhere that does.
It is likely we will see initial attempts at deploying these personal agents by the end of this year and into early 2025. Personal shopping agents will be a huge boon to consumers, but the major winners will be the companies that are prepared to support them.
The next big question is this: When an online shopper is targeted by a retailer and responds with “call my agent,” will the retailer be able to answer the call?
Jonathan Taylor is the chief technology officer at Zoovu, an AI-powered product discovery and e-commerce experience platform. He is a technology veteran with more than 15 years of experience using tech and data to drive business growth and innovation. His background is in software engineering and computer science. Before Zoovu, Taylor worked in C-suite roles at SmartFocus, Sentillian and 3i-MIND, where he focused on personalization, real-time interaction and strategic technical architecture.