The news: Michaels’ AI-powered shopping assistant, “Ask Mike,” is now live on the retailer’s website, offering personalized guidance based on shoppers’ conversational queries.

The details: Michaels built the feature using Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, which enabled the retailer to go from concept to “production-grade AI” in just six weeks, per the news release. Since going live in May, shoppers have engaged Ask Mike nearly 75,000 times, with queries ranging from specific product questions to more general requests such as party-planning advice.

Like other retailers, Michaels is using its AI assistant to deliver more personalized experiences to shoppers, foster product discovery, and shorten the path from inspiration to purchase. Planned enhancements—including AI-driven product overviews and contextual prompts that integrate directly into product detail pages—could increase engagement with Ask Mike, particularly as consumers grow more comfortable seeking advice from an AI shopping assistant.

Implications for retailers: Tools from Google and Amazon have significantly lowered the barrier to entry for retailers seeking their own AI assistants. These tools may initially be less sophisticated than general AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude, but they don’t need advanced functionality to produce results.

Rolling out AI assistants could help retailers keep other platforms from taking over their relationship with shoppers. Consumers are three times more trusting of retail-owned AI tools than tools from AI platforms like ChatGPT, according to Bain. And over half of US digital shoppers have either used or are interested in using retail AI chatbots, according to a May survey by Bizrate Insights and EMARKETER.