AI shopping assistants such as Amazon's Alexa for Shopping (formerly Rufus), Walmart's Sparky, ChatGPT, and Google Gemini are reshaping how consumers discover and evaluate products. Retailer-owned assistants are already lifting order values and conversion, while standalone AI platforms struggle to convert recommendations into purchases. This FAQ covers how AI shopping assistants work, what they mean for brand loyalty, and how brands earn a place in AI-generated recommendations.

What are AI shopping assistants?

AI shopping assistants are conversational tools that help consumers discover, compare, and buy products using natural language. They include retailer-owned assistants such as Amazon's Alexa for Shopping and Walmart's Sparky, plus general-purpose AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini that answer shopping queries. Adoption is already substantial. Over 300 million Amazon customers used Rufus in 2025, and roughly half of Walmart's app users have interacted with Sparky, per a March 2026 EMARKETER article. These tools deliver personalized recommendations, answer product-specific questions, and guide shoppers through the purchase journey. This positions them as a new layer between brands and consumers at the moment of decision.

How do AI shopping assistants affect ecommerce sales?

Retailer-owned AI shopping assistants are producing measurable sales lifts. Shoppers who use Walmart's Sparky have average order values 35% higher than nonusers, CEO John Furner said on the company's Q4 earnings call. Customers who used Amazon's Rufus were roughly 60% more likely to complete their purchase, according to CEO Andy Jassy. These gains are attributed to personalized recommendations, larger basket sizes, and assistance throughout the purchase journey, from product-specific questions to general advice, according to EMARKETER analysis. Standalone AI platforms have not matched these results, which is one reason OpenAI walked back plans for in-app checkouts in ChatGPT.

Do consumers trust AI shopping assistants?

Consumers trust retailer-owned assistants far more than standalone AI platforms. A quarter (25%) of US consumers trust retailers to manage the end-to-end shopping experience, compared with 7% for AI platforms like ChatGPT, according to a September 2025 Bain survey. At the same time, comfort with AI involvement in shopping is rising, with 56% of consumers saying they are comfortable having AI tools filter brand communications, according to a Gale Agency report. Nearly 1 in 3 have told ChatGPT, Gemini, or another AI assistant to favor certain brands in their results, found the same report. This suggests trust is shifting from individual brands toward the assistants that mediate choices.

How do AI shopping assistants differ from agentic commerce?

AI shopping assistants handle discovery and recommendation, while agentic commerce refers to AI completing transactions autonomously, including checkout and payment. The distinction matters because the two are scaling at different speeds. Assistants are mainstream: hundreds of millions of shoppers use Alexa for Shopping and Sparky for product discovery. Autonomous purchasing remains rare. EMARKETER expects checkouts on AI platforms to account for just 0.1% of US retail ecommerce sales in 2026, per an EMARKETER December 2025 forecast. Shoppers prefer to complete purchases on retail sites rather than inside chatbots. For brands, this means the near-term priority is influencing AI recommendations, not optimizing for AI-executed transactions.

Why do AI shopping assistants threaten brand loyalty?

AI shopping assistants insert a filter between brands and consumers, and retailers expect consequences:

• Executive concern. Some 44% of retail executives expect generative AI to weaken brand loyalty in 2026, and 50% foresee a larger impact in later years, according to Deloitte's 2026 Retail Industry Global Outlook.
• Locked-in preferences. Nearly a quarter (22%) of consumers say they will regularly set AI brand preferences within the next year, with an additional 21% planning to follow within a few years, per the Gale Agency report. Preferences that favor incumbent brands limit discovery for challengers.
• Disrupted discovery. "This is the disruption of discovery," said Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at Publicis Groupe, per a June 2026 EMARKETER article.

How can brands get their products recommended by AI shopping assistants?

AI recommendation visibility follows a two-stage model of eligibility and optimization, according to research from Profitero, Mars United Commerce, and Publicis Commerce studying Amazon's shopping agent, per EMARKETER. Products first need baseline credibility: bestseller rank in the top 15,000, ratings of 4.6 stars or higher, and substantial review volume. Once eligible, content optimization improves "share of agent recommendations" (SOAR), the percentage of times a product appears in AI-generated results. The stakes are high because an AI agent recommends an average of eight items per search, said Ethan Goodman, president of Profitero Plus. Brands also need richer data: agentic commerce requires five times more product data than the traditional digital shelf, per an Adobe study cited by Mars United Commerce.

How should retailers and brands respond to AI shopping assistants in 2026?

Move quickly to defend direct customer relationships while AI assistants are still maturing. Priorities:

• Strengthen loyalty programs. Most AI assistants cannot yet link loyalty programs to purchases, so robust rewards keep shoppers buying directly.
• Upgrade product content. Make product detail pages dynamic, with enhanced attribute fields that surface in occasion-based and lifestyle queries, and refresh them quarterly rather than treating them as static assets.
• Pick battles strategically. Optimize specific products for specific shopper missions instead of chasing every prompt.
• Exploit the trust edge. Retailers' combination of customer data, real-time product information, and shopper trust supports a better assistant experience than standalone AI platforms currently deliver.

We prepared this article with the assistance of generative AI tools and stand behind its accuracy, quality, and originality.

EMARKETER forecast data was current at publication and may have changed. EMARKETER clients have access to up-to-date forecast data. To explore EMARKETER solutions, click here.