Retailers Expand AI Shopping Assistants For Holidays
Online retailers and tech companies are rapidly rolling out AI-powered shopping assistants and features ahead of the 2025 holiday season, the AP reported Dec. 4, 2025. Major examples include Amazon’s Rufus, Walmart’s Sparky, OpenAI’s ChatGPT shopping research, Google’s AI Mode and virtual try-on, and Perplexity’s assistant. These tools offer conversational search, cross-site buying advice, virtual try-ons and agentic checkout, changing online shopping flows and developer priorities.
Key Points
- 1Deploys AI chatbots across major retailers, including Amazon Rufus, Walmart Sparky and Target’s gift finder.
- 2Enables conversational search, multi-site shopping research, virtual try-ons, and agentic checkout to simplify purchases.
- 3Requires e-commerce teams to integrate LLMs, inventory APIs, privacy controls, and UX for conversational flows.
Scoring Rationale
Wide retail and tech adoption increases impact, but limited novelty and inconsistent performance reduce immediate technical significance.
Sources
Public references used for this report.
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