How to prepare for having shopping agents as your customers

Agentic AI will soon represent a substantial portion of your online shopper traffic.

I recently wrote a column about how agentic AI, which analyzes massive amounts of data in near-real-time and then automatically takes action based on the results, is finding its place in retail. 

This week’s column focuses on the rapidly developing trend of agentic AI shopping bots and assistants partially or totally taking the task of searching your site and then selecting and purchasing items away from the consumer.

More than half (54%) of respondents to a recent Walmart survey agreed that using digital shopping agents or assistants saved time. Close to half (46%) of respondents said they were either somewhat unlikely or very unlikely to use a digital assistant or agent to handle an entire shopping trip for them, and in general they are more comfortable using digital assistants for lower stakes purchases like household essentials.

[READ MORE: Walmart: AI gains foothold with consumers in shopping and search]

However, more (27%) surveyed consumers prefer AI suggestions than prefer suggestions from social media influencers (24%), which Walmart says signals a turning point for AI. Overall, these results indicate the time to adapt your e-commerce strategy to agentic AI bots is now.

Here are a few ways retailers can adjust their digital commerce environments to better serve agentic AI "shoppers":

Create product assortments around interests and lifestyles

One big draw of agentic AI shopping assistants is that as with generative AI, consumers can make requests and provide instructions using everyday conversational language. For example, a customer could ask a shopping bot, “Find me all the products I would need for a weeklong vacation at a beach house.”

From there, the bot would automatically scour the web and come back with a wide assortment of products that might not typically be sold together, such as bathing suits, suntan lotion, folding chairs, beach towels, sunglasses, umbrellas, warm weather apparel, and light paperback fiction.

Retailers need to start creating special curated assortments specifically designed for bots carrying out natural language search requests. Think beyond individual product categories and consider all the disparate items that might fit a need or interest. 

And don’t be afraid to query a generative or agentic AI engine to help you build these assortments! Next-gen AI can substantially streamline the shopping process for retailers as well as customers.

Image is everything

Agentic AI shopping assistants also often provide customers with visual search capability. Customers can simply upload an image of a product they like, without even knowing its name, and have a bot search and possibly even purchase for the same item or similar items, down to SKU-level characteristics such as size and color.

Retailers need to have a strong visual asset library as part of their product information management system, and to properly catalog all their product images so they properly show up in agentic visual searches.

Visual search can serve as a significant advantage for retailers that properly align their assortment strategy. It essentially turns the world into a showroom by letting customers snap a photo of a product they like in any setting and instantly discover what similar items you offer.

In addition, visual search enables customers to shop via inspiration from the increasingly important influencer segment, using photos of celebrities wearing or using a product to quickly find that exact or a similar item.

Listening to your customers

Finally, since agentic AI enables shoppers to automatically search and purchase products that meet specific timely needs, it is more important than ever for retailers to listen to their customers as individuals, across segments and as a whole.

This means having the ability to perform in-depth, granular analysis of individual customer behavior that can also be sorted by different demographic characteristics and applied to your entire shopper base.

In addition, retailers need to stay abreast of broader consumer trends that may influence agentic searches. Investment in technologies such as the InMoment Xi omnichannel listening platform La-Z-Boy uses to listen, learn, and act on all of the data signals within its enterprise.

Leveraging the platform, La-Z-Boy can listen to and analyze signals from touchpoints including website, call center, chat, social media channels, and supply chain to help determine what’s happening with their customers.