Consumers may be warming up to artificial intelligence.
According to Algolia research released this week, about six in 10 consumers said they believe adoption of AI for e-commerce will result in better shopping experiences.
That number hops to 73 percent among millennials, though the search-as-a-service platform did not have further details on Gen Z.
Despite consumers’ purported faith in the buzzy technology, the data also shows they may harbor some reluctance around certain use cases.
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One-quarter of consumers said they trust AI trained on their preferences and purchases to pick an outfit more than they would trust a friend. That number increases to 30 percent when segmenting millennials and jumps another five percentage points when only considering Gen Zers.
Piyush Patel, chief ecosystem officer at Algolia, said 25 percent feels low to him and noted he expects to see improvement in that figure as consumers gain trust in both AI systems and the retailers and brands using them.
Patel said that number may increase once brands and retailers shift their focus toward collecting more relevant data on their consumers.
“It’s not the AI that [people] aren’t comfortable with. It’s probably the data going into the AI that none of us are comfortable with,” he said. “That 25 percent, to me, is, ‘OK, some technology is going to do better than me, but I’ll trust it more once it has more data.’”
Similarly, three in 10 surveyed consumers noted that they believe AI-trained assistants have the ability to identify trends better than them.
Patel said that in order to truly personalize the consumer experience, brands need clean, deep data around consumer behavior on their site—from what people search for, to what they click on and ultimately buy, to what they dump from their cart and more.
“One of our big pushes over the last 12 months, in order to have our customers get value out of AI, we’ve had to do a lot of teaching about the signals,” he said. “I think more and more brands are understanding that unless you get that final feedback loop of what [the customer] liked, didn’t like, fit, didn’t fit, returned, didn’t return, you’re never going to get more optimized in terms of the business and the experience you’re delivering.”
But at present, he said, consumers don’t necessarily understand what kind of data brands want and need to make their experience stronger.
To enable consumer trust, brands and retailers have to be willing to disclose how collecting consumer data will improve the experience for customers.
“I think what brands should do is, yes get your data clean, but [also], help the consumer understand why you want to collect that data point and the benefit they’re going to get out of it,” he said. “If you explain something to somebody, they [may say], ‘Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, sure, track my size, so next time I search, you don’t show me size 40 pants—I don’t want to see size 40 pants.’”
Though consumers may be a bit hesitant to let AI choose their outfits or track trends, they have shown faith in several other use cases.
Nearly half—44 percent of consumers said they could benefit from a wardrobe refresh powered by AI. And 64 percent of consumers surveyed indicated interest in using an AI-enabled personal shopper trained on their previous searches at their favorite retailer.
Patel said consumers’ expectations around personalization will further increase the prevalence and importance of loyalty programs, which allow stronger data collection for retailers and incentives for customers.
But even as brands and retailers push for stronger loyalty programs and data systems, progress toward using AI to meet consumer expectations may take time, he noted.
“I think individual brands who produce their own products and sell their own products will get there faster, sooner. Retailers will take some time, and I think the biggest thing we see is retailers will start needing to form partnerships with the brands that they sell, to somehow share in the data to be able to determine patterns,” Patel told Sourcing Journal.
