How AI assistants could transform shopper advertising
By Ciaran Deering, Head of Online, The Grove Media
OpenAI is rolling out new functionality to allow ChatGPT users to shop directly from their search results. For now, product search results are chosen independently and do not include ads, but OpenAI’s announcement has sparked rumours of an official integration between the company and Shopify.
While there has not yet been an official announcement, the code changes enable users to browse, compare, and purchase products from Shopify sellers without leaving the chat interface. Potentially, this marks a significant step forward in ChatGPT’s utility as a shopping tool, bringing the entire shopping experience into the AI assistant.
We’re already firmly in AI-driven ecommerce territory, but this move by OpenAI could take AI’s role in ecommerce to a whole new level, fuelling industry change that would have significant implications for advertising and paid media.
How AI has changed ecommerce forever
Right now, there are several keyways in which AI assistants are already impacting the shopping experience. Most ecommerce platforms are built on traditional keyword-based search, but some now use conversational search, powered by AI and natural language processing (NLP). This enables users to engage in a back-and-forth conversation with a digital assistant.
AI assistants can now understand voice search and uploaded images to find the right product. Visual and voice search offer more intuitive and efficient ways for customers to find products, improving the experience and increasing conversion rates.
Side-by-side product comparisons can be managed by AI assistants. By analysing customer behaviour, this form of recommendation streamlines product discovery and boosts sales. Similarly, AI assistants can provide review summaries, condensing large volumes of reviews into concise overviews, enabling faster and more informed purchase decisions.
And once a purchase has been made, AI assistants are able to track orders using NLP, machine learning and predictive analytics. And assistants are transforming returns & exchanges in e-commerce by automating return requests and providing customer support.
We can expect a whole lot more change
With OpenAI’s recent move, we are likely to see the market embrace end-to-end commerce within chat. AI-powered chatbots will facilitate the entire shopping process, from product discovery to purchase and on further post-purchase support, all within a conversational interface. This move to conversational commerce takes seamless, personalised shopping to another level.
But AI-powered change doesn’t stop, by any stretch of the imagination. Autonomous personal shoppers will go beyond basic search and recommendations handling tasks like product discovery, price comparison, and even purchasing on a user’s behalf.
We will see more personal-finance-aware-shopping, with AI assistants providing real-time expense tracking, personalised spending insights, and helping with budgeting. Multimodal shopping will enable different forms of interaction – text, images, voice, video etc – further enhancing the online shopping experience.
And voice-only and screenless shopping using voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, will interact with e-commerce platforms, offering a hands-free and potentially faster shopping experience.
What all of this means for advertising and paid media
All of these AI-driven changes – but particularly conversational commerce – are set to have significant implications for media and advertising.
Top of the list of changes is likely to be an impact on the revenue that the major shopping aggregators generate from paid media. Currently, brands pay for visibility on the likes of Google Shopping, but if AI assistants start acting as ecommerce gatekeepers this could diminish the effectiveness of aggregator advertising. Similarly, there could be a noticeable impact on branded search if AI assistants facilitate more ‘intent’ based queries.
Not surprisingly, the big beneficiaries of this shift to AI-driven ecommerce will be the full stack ecommerce players. Amazon already owns the entire journey and is a leading proponent of AI with Alexa, personalisation, style feed and so on.
Performance will increasingly lead advertising creative. Ecommerce shopping advertising rests on the foundation of product feeds, which supply images, descriptions, price etc to ads. AI will increasingly pick up on signals outside of those sitting in traditional feeds, such as reviews. As a result, as will need to evolve to include more useful and relevant metadata.
But AI-driven ecommerce could also see the emergence of new paid channels and formats. Amazon and Google already use sponsored products in AI chats, so sponsored responses are likely to continue to evolve and grow.
What advertisers can do now to embrace AI-driven ecommerce
Firstly, experiment as much as possible with AI driven advertising features in shopping campaigns in the likes ofPerformance Max and Meta Advantage+. These tools use real-time signals and large language models to match products with buyer intent, enabling better personalisation and automated creative testing at scale.
Experiment with AI creative generation tools, testing different emotional tones or use-case angles. Try overlays in lifestyle images, short-form video variations, and UGC-style creative which increase your likelihood of being prioritised by AI agents
Optimise feeds for conversational discovery. Update product titles, descriptions, and metadata with natural, descriptive language that aligns with how users speak or ask questions conversationally.
If you’re not already, get listed in assistant-activated marketplaces, such as Shopify and Klarna. Make sure your products are available through platforms already integrating with AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity (an AI powered search engine), or Google SGE (Search Generative Experience).
Review and clean product catalogues ensuring accurate specs, lifestyle context, and sustainability information. Ensure your catalogue data is accurate and enriched with helpful context such as lifestyle imagery, reviews, and sustainability credentials.
Consider a contingency media budget for emerging platforms so you can test AI-native new environments, such as ads within ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google SGE.
Create shoppable content that bridges inspiration and purchase—think product demos, reviews, how-to guides, and lifestyle videos that embed shopping functionality (e.g., QR codes, “buy now” overlays). AI assistants are increasingly surfacing such content in responses to natural language queries.
And, finally, monitor AI Search and Chat Interfaces in Google, Amazon and Meta. Closely track how platforms like Google SGE, Amazon Rufus, and Meta AI evolve. Changes in how AI summarizes or recommends products may impact your visibility more than traditional SEO or PPC adjustments.
Article originally appeared on New Digital Age, link below
https://newdigitalage.co/retail/how-ai-assistants-could-change-transform-shopper-advertising
Image courtesy of Shutter Speed @ Unsplash
