Retailers Prioritize AI Shopping Assistants in Budgets

A PYMNTS Intelligence report, "Global Digital Shopping Index: The AI-Powered Shopper Has Arrived," commissioned by Visa Acceptance Solutions, found that AI shopping assistants are now the most frequently cited digital capability merchants plan to invest in over the next three years, selected by 37% of retailers. The report is based on a survey of 5,841 consumers and 1,185 merchants across the United States, Brazil and the United Arab Emirates, according to PYMNTS.

The rise in planned AI investment has coincided with reduced merchant emphasis on features that became standard in prior years: support for cross-channel shopping declined nine percentage points even as consumer demand held steady, and support for stored payment methods declined even as consumer demand rose, per PYMNTS. Mobile app investment moved in the opposite direction from rising consumer demand as well. PYMNTS frames this as merchants becoming more selective about where they commit development budgets rather than abandoning those capabilities outright. The shift tracks consumer behavior: the report found 47% of online shoppers used AI during their most recent purchase to compare products, research options or gather information, and 64% expect to use AI shopping agents within two years.

Because this is a single commissioned survey (PYMNTS Intelligence, sponsored by Visa Acceptance Solutions) rather than independently corroborated data, the precise percentages should be read as directional rather than industry consensus. That caveat aside, the practical signal for product and data teams is real: budget reallocation toward AI assistants typically means added demand for structured product metadata, retrieval-quality work and conversational-flow testing, often at the expense of incremental work on already-mature checkout and account features. The report also found consumer demand still exceeds merchant support for several established capabilities, led by price matching (61% consumer demand versus 47% merchant availability), with mobile product locators, digital coupons and loyalty programs showing similar gaps, concentrated among millennial, parent and high-income shoppers.

Whether merchants build AI shopping assistants in-house or buy from vendors, how the price-matching and mobile-locator demand gaps get addressed as budgets shift toward AI, and whether the 64% of consumers who say they expect to use AI shopping agents within two years actually convert to sustained usage.