James Wilsterman, a 38-year-old tech executive in San Francisco, hates shopping. But this summer, he found the perfect suit and linen shirt for a wedding in France without breaking a sweat. His secret: ChatGPT. Instead of trawling through dozens of websites, he received a list of photos and a direct link to close the deal.
“What’s changed for me is that it’s less stressful,” Wilsterman said. He even plans to use AI to complete his year-end gift list, with a humorous twist: “If my family doesn’t like the gift, I’ll blame ChatGPT.”
Wilsterman’s story is not an isolated one. It signals a new consumer trend that will reshape the 2025 holiday shopping season: the age of AI in e-commerce.
The invasion of the virtual assistant army
Black Friday or Christmas shopping season is no longer simply about jostling at electronics stores to get the last TV, or staring at the screen to hunt for flash sales. The game has passed to algorithms.
From Target, Walmart to fashion brands like Ralph Lauren, a series of "stylists" and virtual shopping assistants in the form of chatbots have been launched. Users do not need to manually filter thousands of results for the keyword "family uniform pajamas", they just need to command and the chatbot will return the most optimal options. They are even capable of summarizing hundreds of customer reviews of an air fryer to save buyers time reading.
"This fundamentally changes the way people shop, from people having to search for products themselves to AI bringing the most suitable products, at the best prices, straight to them," said Lori Schafer, CEO of Digital Wave Technology.
The deal-hunting war is now taking place in silence, with AI behind all our spending decisions (Photo: LinkedIn).
Not to be left out, tech giants are turning large language models into sales machines. Last September, OpenAI launched an instant checkout feature that allows purchases from Etsy or Shopify brands like Skims and Spanx right in the chat window.
Google rolled out a virtual assistant that can call to check inventory at local stores, while Amazon launched Rufus - an AI that monitors price fluctuations and automatically buys when the price hits the user's budget "breakpoint".
The driving force behind this boom is not just technology, but psychology. Luca Cian, a marketing professor at the University of Virginia, says AI is helping users overcome “choice fatigue.”
“We are recalibrating the way we look at choices – learning when to hand over decisions to machines and when to take the wheel ourselves,” Mr. Cian analyzed.
According to a Harris Poll survey conducted for Mastercard, 42% of shoppers used AI tools this holiday season. Notably, more than half of Gen Z and Millennials rely on AI to find unique gifts. According to Bain & Company, between 30-45% of US consumers have used AI to research products before making a purchase.
This shift transforms shopping from an active “hunting” journey into a passive yet highly effective personalized experience.
The Secret War: Websites for... Readers Only
As consumer behavior changes, retailers are forced to change the rules of the game. Where before, the battle was SEO (search engine optimization) to get on Google's good side, now it's a race to get "mentionable" by AI models.
Brian Stempeck, CEO of Evertune.ai, revealed an interesting fact: Brands are building websites that humans never see, designed specifically to be read by AI data scrapers.
“We see brands that used to publish three or four blog posts a month now trying to publish 100 or 200,” Stempeck said. The goal is to provide enough data for ChatGPT or Gemini to get their products suggested by these chatbots when users ask questions. Fashion and footwear companies are willing to spend thousands of dollars a month on this optimization.
While AI traffic is currently modest (less than 1% of Amazon or Walmart’s total traffic in October, according to Sensor Tower), the “quality” of this traffic is extremely high. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy claims that users of the AI assistant Rufus are 60% more likely to make a purchase. eBay also notes that users from AI have a very clear intent to buy.
Brands like Brooklinen even hire influencers to talk about their products on TikTok and YouTube, just so that AI can collect information from those recordings and posts, or submit their products to competitions to increase coverage on AI training data.
New tools and features from retailers and tech companies using AI help users find gifts and make decisions for shopping lists (Illustration: NYT).
The picture isn't entirely rosy, however. The technology is still in what Michelle Fradin, head of commercial products at ChatGPT, calls its "infancy."
Olivia Meyer, a fashion industry employee in New York, was frustrated by ChatGPT's repeated suggestions of the same brands when she was shopping for winter boots. "I ended up going back to Google or TikTok," she said.
Tyler Murray from marketing firm VML also warns that user expectations are running ahead of reality, as the perfect automated shopping experience is yet to truly exist.
This holiday season marks a turning point where AI is no longer a science fiction concept but is already embedded in every spending decision. While there are still limitations in terms of accuracy or variety of suggestions, the trend is irreversible.
For consumers, the advice from experts is still sober: Take advantage of AI's speed and synthesis capabilities, but be patient in checking prices and don't forget to "take the wheel" in the final decision step. Because at the end of the day, no matter how smart AI is, the person responsible for your wallet is still you.
Source: https://dantri.com.vn/kinh-doanh/ai-dang-dinh-hinh-lai-mua-mua-sam-2025-tu-tim-do-giam-gia-den-san-qua-tang-20251128103228930.htm
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