Christmas shopping – some love it, to others it’s a chore, and this year for the first time many of us will outsource the annual task of coming up with gift ideas to artificial intelligence.
While traditional internet search, social media – especially TikTok and Instagram – and simply wandering a local high street will still be the main routes to presents for most this year, about a quarter of people in the UK are already using AI to find the right products, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
For brands appealing to younger people, the revolution is well under way: the rival advisory firm KPMG says as many as 30% of shoppers aged 25-34 are using AI to find products, compared with 1% of those aged over 65.
Asking a large language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT or Gemini what you should get your father-in-law – rather than typing “whisky” or “socks” into Google or DuckDuckGo – may seem a small change in habits. However, it marks a sea change for retailers accustomed to paying search engines to promote their listings.
LLMs allow users to ask questions in conversational language, perhaps by speaking into their computer or phone. Instead of just providing a list of links, they offer specific suggestions with the potential for big sales for items that are regularly recommended.
The chatbots produce their responses by scraping the internet and inbuilt datasets for relevant information, with some sources given more trusted status than others.
Companies large and small are scrambling to adapt to this new world where the keywords and advertising deals previously central to web marketing hold less importance than the reviewers’ opinions, accurate availability information and product details read by LLMs such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama.
The shake-up may create an opening for independent businesses to cut through online, but some big brands are concerned they will be lost in a wild west where it is unclear how to reach the consumer. Marketers must now appeal not only to shoppers directly but also to their AI bots.
“Retailers can’t buy their way into the search – they have to earn it,” says Emma Ford, the director of digital transformation for PwC UK. “The experience, expertise, authenticity and trustworthiness [of a brand online] help. Sentiment across the internet is really important.”
Several large UK retailers have told the Guardian they already have teams on the case looking at a wide variety of tactics, from making sure they appear in Reddit forums – a key source for some platforms – to responding to reviews on Google or Trustpilot, and ensuring AI models can access the correct product data.
While some say they are being cautious with resources, amid signs certain individual LLMs could disappear as rapidly as they have sprung up, the belief is that this new way of interacting online is here to stay.
Nickyl Raithatha, the chief executive of the online card and gift seller Moonpig, says AI…
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