Amazon’s Prime Day event kicked off Tuesday, and analytics firm Adobe expects the e-commerce giant’s influence will trigger nearly $24 billion in spending at U.S. retailers this week.
While that marks growth from last year’s Prime Day week, use of shopping tools built with artificial intelligence are also on the up and up. Adobe’s data shows that it expects to see a 3,200 percent increase in generative AI-based traffic year on year during Amazon’s summer Prime Day event, which will run until Friday.
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The company’s prediction follows increased use of generative AI for the 2024 holiday season; last year, during the season, traffic brought about by generative AI increased by 1,300 percent compared with holiday 2023.
Adobe noted that while generative AI is rapidly gaining market share, the traffic it creates is still well behind tried-and-true sources like paid search and email.
According to the data, more than half of Americans said they use generative AI to research products, while 47 percent of consumers in the U.S. use the technology for product recommendations. Other key functions included finding deals (43 percent), gifting inspiration (35 percent) and writing shopping lists (33 percent).
A slew of companies, including Amazon itself, have invested in generative AI shopping assistant features on their own sites. The e-tail behemoth’s prominently displayed chatbot, Rufus, helps Amazon customers with product-specific questions, searches based on characteristics of a product and information distilled from reviews and product descriptions.
But retailers are far from the only way—and likely not the primary way—that shoppers are getting their generative AI fix. Earlier this year, OpenAI announced it had created a ChatGPT feature specifically for shopping inquiries. It allows consumers to set specific parameters for products they’re interested in—price, occasion, size, color and more—then helps them hunt down goods that match that criteria. Other technology companies, like Google, have also upgraded their AI-based features to include shopping tools.
That kind of movement is creating an influx of traffic that can be difficult for brands and retailers to trace, because the generative AI tools are querying the site on the consumer’s behalf. So, while a consumer may see a specific product come up in their ChatGPT shopping inquiry, if they choose not to purchase it, they may never click into a brand or retailer’s site, which marks somewhat of a departure from traditional search and e-commerce.
The trend of AI-assisted shopping is likely to continue through the end of the year; Salesforce projects that AI will influence $260 billion worth of online sales and $1.6 trillion in in-store sales for this year’s holiday season. Already, four in 10 U.S. shoppers use a large language model (LLM) during the course of their shopping journey, with 5 percent of U.S. adults starting their product discovery with such a tool.
Adobe expects that during Prime Day, U.S. retailers will offer the greatest discount on apparel items, at 24 percent; data from market research company Numerator shows that one-third of Tuesday Prime Day shoppers said they purchased an apparel item, making it the top category for the day, as of 4 p.m.
Per Numerator, despite 95 percent of Prime Day shoppers saying they felt satisfied with the deals Amazon offered, half of all consumers indicated they compared prices at other retailers, a task which AI is adept at helping with. About four in 10 shoppers also plan to shop at Target Circle Week, running simultaneously, and 44 percent of shoppers plan to shop Walmart Deals this week.
