Tired of thinking about what gifts to give everyone this year? Artificial intelligence chatbots could help, but don’t expect them to do all the work or always give you the right answers.
Anyone searching the internet Offers for Cyber ​​Monday likely to encounter more conversational iterations of chatbots that some retailers and e-commerce sites have built to provide customers with improved customer service.
Some companies have integrated models infused with newer ones generative AI technology, allowing customers to ask for advice by asking naturally phrased questions like “What’s the best wireless speaker?”
Marketers hope that consumers will use these chatbots – commonly called shopping assistants – as virtual companions to help them discover or compare products. Earlier chatbots were mainly used for task-oriented functions such as helping customers find online orders or return those that did not meet expectations.
Amazonthe king of online retail, said its customers questioned Rufus — a generative AI-powered shopping assistant that launched this year — for information like whether a particular coffee maker is easy to clean or what lawn-play recommendations it has for a kid’s birthday party.
And Rufus, which is available for holiday shoppers in the US and some other countries, it is not the only shopping assistant. Selected number Walmart shoppers will have access to a similar chatbot this year that the nation’s largest retailer is testing across several product categories, including toys and electronics.
Perplexity AI added something new to the world of chat AI shopping last month by introducing a feature on its Powered by artificial intelligence search engine that allows users to ask questions like “What are the best leather boots for women?” and then receive specific product results that the San Francisco-based company says are not sponsored.
“It’s been adopted to a pretty incredible extent,” said Mike Mallazzo, an analyst and writer at retail research media firm Future Commerce.
Retailers with websites and e-commerce companies have started paying more attention to chatbots when using them ChatGPTa text-based artificial intelligence chatbot created by OpenAI became popular in late 2022, fueling public and economic interest in the generative AI technology that powers this tool.
Victoria’s Secret, IKEA, Instacart and Canadian retailer Ssense are among other companies experimenting with chatbots, some of which use the technology from OpenAI.
Even before improved chatbots, online retailers created product recommendations based on a user’s previous purchases or search history. Amazon has been a leader in providing recommendations on its platform, so Rufus’ ability to provide them is not particularly groundbreaking.
But Rajiv Mehta, vice president of search and conversational shopping at Amazon, said the company can now offer more useful recommendations by programming Rufus to ask clarifying or follow-up questions. Customers also use Rufus to search for deals, some of which are personalized, Mehta said.
To be sure, chatbots are prone to hallucinations, so Rufus and most tools like it can be wrong.
Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce intelligence company Marketplace Pulse, wrote in a blog post in November that his company tested Rufus by looking for TV recommendations for games. The chatbot’s response included products other than TVs. When asked for the cheapest options, Rufus came back with suggestions that weren’t the cheapest, Kaziukenas said.
An Associated Press reporter recently asked Rufus for some recommendations for gifts for his brother. The chatbot quickly threw out several ideas for “thoughtful gifts,” ranging from a T-shirt and keychain with charms to a bolder suggestion: a utility knife engraved with the phrase “BEST BROTHER EVER.”
After a 5-minute written conversation, Rufus offered more custom suggestions – several Barcelona soccer jerseys sold by third-party sellers. However, it was not possible to say which seller offered the lowest price. When asked to compare the prices of a popular skin serum during another search, Rufus showed the price of the discounted product instead of the current one.
“Rufus is constantly learning,” Amazon’s Mehta said during the interview.
Shop AI, a chatbot by a Canadian e-commerce company Shopify launched last year, it can also help customers discover new products by asking their own questions, such as asking for details about the intended gift recipient or features the customer wants to avoid. However, Shop AI has trouble recommending specific products or identifying the lowest priced item in a product category.
The limitations show that the technology is still in its infancy and has a long way to go before it becomes as useful as the retail industry – and many customers – would like it to be.
To truly transform the shopping experience, shopping assistants “will need to be deeply personalised” and be able to – on their own – remember a customer’s order history, product preferences and shopping habits, the advisory giant McKinsey & Company in the report for August. according to the McKinsey report.
Amazon noted that Rufus’ responses are based on information contained in product listings, community Q&As, and customer reviews, which would include fake reviews which are used to increase or decrease product sales in its market.
The large language model that powers the chatbot has also been trained on the company’s entire catalog and some public information on the Web, Trishul Chilimbi, an Amazon vice president who oversees artificial intelligence research, wrote in the electrical engineering journal IEEE Spectrum in October.
But it’s not clear how Amazon and other companies have different weights training components — such as reviews — in their recommendations, or exactly how shopping assistants arrive at them, according to Nicole Greene, an analyst at the management consulting firm Gartner.
Perplexity AI’s new shopping feature allows users to enter search queries like “best phone case” and get answers derived from a variety of sources, including Amazon and other retailers, such as Best Buy. Confusion he also urged retailers to share information about their products and said those who do so will have a better chance of having their items recommended to customers.
But Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a recent interview with Fortune magazine that he doesn’t know how the new shopping feature recommends products to customers. But in an interview with AP, chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko rejected that characterization, saying Srinivas’ comment was “probably taken out of context.”
The context, he said, is that with generative AI technology, “you can’t know in advance exactly what the output is going to be just based on knowing what the inputs are” from the training material.
Shevelenko said retailers and brands should know that they can’t recommend their products in Perplexity’s search engine because they are “stuffing keywords” into their websites or using different techniques to show up better in search results.
“The way you show up in response is to have a better product and better features,” he said.
