The store window moved into your phone years ago — now it’s moving into a chat box. AI agents like Gemini and ChatGPT are steering so many shoppers toward retail sites that they’re set to influence $8B in spending this year, per Juniper Research. Retailers are thrilled with the traffic boom, but checkout on somebody else’s turf is another matter entirely.

• Adobe Analytics found 41% of US shoppers used generative AI in June, and those visits spent 41% more — while Ulta BeautyULTA
  clocked ~2x the conversion rate.
• Amid the gold rush, WalmartWMT
  and WayfairW
  are overhauling their sites — a new arms race to rank higher in chatbot results.

Full court press: Retailers argue they know their shoppers better than any general-purpose chatbot, and OpenAI’s retreat backs that up. The company shut down ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout in March to focus purely on product discovery. Some retailers are filling that gap themselves, building AI shopping assistants like Amazon’sAMZN

Rufus and Ralph Lauren’sRL

Ask Ralph to keep customers from leaving and capture valuable checkout data. With the technology becoming increasingly important to holiday shopping, that in-house race is arriving right on time.