What AI Shopping Assistants Are—and Why They Matter Now
An AI shopping assistant is a conversational software agent that helps customers discover, evaluate, and buy products online by answering questions, comparing options, and recommending items in real time based on context, intent, and available inventory. These assistants sit at the center of “agentic commerce,” where AI agents handle more of the shopping journey, from inspiration to post‑purchase support. Accenture estimates that by 2030 more than 30% of online commerce could run through AI agents, representing about USD 3.1 trillion (approx. RM14.26 trillion) in transactions, so the stakes are high. Retail AI technology is no longer an experiment: it is becoming a core layer of the AI customer experience, and retailers that treat agents as strategic infrastructure rather than add‑on chatbots are starting to gain an edge in speed, personalization, and conversion.
Amazon Turns Its Agentic Commerce Engine into a Product
Amazon Web Services is pushing agentic commerce beyond Amazon.com by licensing its AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant to outside retailers. Built on the same foundation as Alexa for Shopping, the technology that powered nearly USD 12 billion (approx. RM55.2 billion) in incremental sales last year on Amazon’s own site, the assistant lets retailers build branded, conversational experiences tuned to their inventory and rules. AWS says a retailer can deploy a tailored AI shopping assistant in about 60 days, while keeping control of customer data and product catalogs. Early adopters include Kate Spade, whose parent Tapestry launched an AI gift concierge that asks about occasion, recipient, and style before recommending products. This move turns Amazon’s retail AI technology into shared infrastructure and raises strategic questions for rivals that now must choose whether to rely on a competitor’s stack or assemble their own.
Kmart’s Joy Shows How Branded AI Experiences Can Feel Personal
On the front end, retailers are racing to give shoppers more immersive, branded AI customer experiences. Kmart’s new AI shopping assistant, Joy, is designed as a virtual shopping partner across its website and app. Joy combines conversational search with visual tools: customers can try virtual try‑ons, place furniture with a “See It in My Space” feature, and even upload photos to get tailored recommendations. Joy can also filter results by size, style, color, and budget within a single natural‑language request, and show side‑by‑side product comparisons across Kmart, Target, and marketplace brands. These capabilities run on Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, an agentic solution from Google Cloud that can coordinate agents from discovery through post‑purchase resolution. Kmart’s leadership says customers are “engaging conversationally and looking for ideas and guidance,” and sees agentic AI as a way to reduce choice overload while keeping prices low and decisions more confident.
Nosto and Shopify Bring Agentic Commerce to the Mid‑Market
While giants invest in custom AI, platforms are working to give mid‑market and smaller merchants access to similar agentic commerce tools. Nosto, which calls itself an agentic Commerce Experience Platform, has integrated its product discovery and personalization engine directly with Shopify’s AI assistant, Sidekick. Commerce teams can now adjust Nosto‑powered recommendations through conversational instructions inside Shopify, changing layouts or logic without switching tools or calling developers. Nosto plans deeper agentic workflows through its AI agent, Huginn, connected via MCP to Sidekick. Early concepts include a Doc Agent for technical guidance, a Merchandising Agent for proactive insights and automated actions, and reporting agents surfacing strategic recommendations. As Nosto’s CEO puts it, the main bottleneck is operational bandwidth and developer access; collapsing that bottleneck means more merchants can run sophisticated AI shopping assistant experiences without large in‑house engineering teams.
AI Shopping Agents Become a Competitive Differentiator
Across segments, AI shopping assistants are moving from novelty to core competitive weapon. Enterprise retailers can now plug into cloud‑scale agentic commerce stacks from providers like Amazon, Google Cloud, and Nosto, while still keeping branded control over tone, rules, and merchandising. Smaller merchants gain access through embedded tools in platforms such as Shopify Sidekick. The competitive landscape is changing in three ways: shopping journeys are becoming conversational; merchandising is turning into a dialogue between AI agents and human teams; and differentiation shifts from static catalogs to fluid, AI‑driven experiences. As more commerce flows through AI agents, retailers that treat these systems as living, data‑driven co‑workers—continually tuning prompts, guardrails, and workflows—are likely to pull ahead on conversion, loyalty, and operational efficiency, while laggards risk becoming invisible inside AI‑mediated shopping ecosystems.