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Feature BY Lisa Lacy | October 08, 2025

Meet the AI Shopping Agents That Are Rewriting Retail Marketing

As the world waited with bated breath for Apple to release details about its 17th iPhone, the New York Times posed an intriguing question: What comes after the smartphone?Spoiler alert: The answer varies, but it could be smart glasses or a smart watch or maybe an ambient computer in another form.At the center of this shift are AI agents, the next generation of virtual assistants, which some of the best and brightest minds in tech believe will know us better than we know ourselves. Eventually.They’re already starting to emerge from the retailers and tech companies we already know with a focus on shopping. And the potential is far greater, which signals big shifts for consumers, brands and retailers. First, the players in this space will have to overcome fairly massive skepticism. But, once they do, and experts think they will, they will become the target of all future brand messaging.Here’s what you need to know about them now:What is an AI shopping agent?Amazon users can ask Rufus questions about products and services (image via Amazon)AI shopping agents are virtual assistants that help consumers find, compare and purchase products or services.According to a report from software company Salesforce, agents can also add items to carts and assist with checkout, although it’s still very early days for this functionality.Depending who you ask, examples include Amazon’s Rufus and Walmart’s Sparky, as well as generative AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.What’s the latest with shopping agents?A July 2025 study from market research firm YouGov found 43% of respondents had heard of AI shopping agents, but only 14% had used one. Among those who have tried them out, 44% said they asked product questions, while 41% used them to find products and 34% sought help with pricing.But there are signs of consumer interest: 22% said they’re willing to give AI shopping assistants a shot—mostly for finding the best deals (67%), comparing similar products (56%) and getting product information (55%).What problems do shopping agents solve?In traditional e-commerce, consumers type in queries and are served product results and ads. But on a site like Amazon, which has 600 million listings by some estimates, results can go on and on. This infinite shelf space is a double-edged sword. Yes, it enables shoppers to hunt for the exact right item at any given moment. But they have to do a lot of scrolling and research first. And this is amplified with each additional site included in the shopping journey.The main pitch for shopping agents is this: They do the research for you—and return a handful of carefully curated options.That’s according to Melissa Bridgeford, CEO of Wizard Commerce, a startup building an AI shopping agent slated to launch in then first quarter of 2026, who called the experience “kind of like the anti-search.”Here, the agent does the heavy lifting in the discovery phase, researching factors like prices, shipping speed and reviews, and it can do so a lot faster than human shoppers. “It can aggregate so much more information from a wider variety of sources than we might be able to aggregate ourselves,” added Kiri Masters, an analyst and podcaster focused on retail media. Plus, fraudulent and counterfeit goods have become an increasing problem for online marketplaces. Amazon disclosed it removed 15 million counterfeit products in 2024 alone—and that’s just one example. Shopping agents can at least theoretically cut through this noise and help consumers make more confident purchases.“Consumers fear getting things wrong. A bad fit, a waste of money, fake reviews, all that stuff,” said Jason Alan Snyder, chief AI officer at advertising giant IPG and co-founder of AI data startup SuperTruth. “[An agent] promises certainty across references, reviews, product data, content and your past preferences.” What is driving this shift?At the International Consumer Electronics Show in 2016, appliance brand Whirlpool teamed up with Amazon to announce a smart washing machine that could reorder laundry supplies when they were running low. It reportedly came with a price tag of $1,399, or about $1,900 today, according to an inflation calculator from the U.S. Department of Labor.Cost may have been a contributing factor as to why smart appliances like this did not take off in 2016. But it’s also true Americans were simply not yet ready to hand over purchasing decisions to inanimate objects. They’re closer now. Ordering groceries, food delivery or even car rides with strangers are much more common following the pandemic—and related consumer behavior changes. Five years after the pandemic, e-commerce is still growing. According to a recent report, U.S. e-commerce sales hit $1.19 trillion in 2024, which means they have more than doubled since 2019.Shopping agents are also getting a boost thanks to the quick adoption of generative AI. A 2024 Harvard study found more than 39% of Americans between 18 and 64 had used gen AI in the two years following ChatGPT’s launch. By comparison, just 20% had used the internet two years after its debut and it took the same number of people in the U.S. a full three years to give PCs a shot.“The adoption rate on [conversational interfaces] is so steep,” Bridgeford said. “And that really creates tailwinds around the adoption of the entire agent experience.”What challenges exist with shopping agents?According to Salesforce, shopping agents provide personalized responses and recommendations, which yield a better experience, as well as increased conversion rates and higher average order value. Yet YouGov found 56% of Americans have no interest in using them—and 41% don’t trust them. Like the early days of e-commerce, Masters noted consumers are still wary of handing over their payment information to agents.Another big and growing problem is fraud. “These AI tools in general allow fraudsters to do everything better, faster, cheaper than they already do. So, identity theft, return fraud–all the permutations of fraud that we have available–can scale much faster,” Masters said. But YouGov remains optimistic. Per the report, the key to driving adoption is proving agents add value, like finding the best price and offering trustworthy information about the products in question.How will shopping agents evolve?As time goes on, agents will get to know you and your shopping habits better and will become more proactive.“It’s the agent that knows you better than you know yourself, that remembers things for you, that’s able to suggest things,” Bridgeford said. “It knows the brands you like. It knows the price points you feel comfortable with. It knows the size of your household, so when you’re in small New York apartments, it’s not suggesting some massive coffeemaker.”And, of course, shopping is only the beginning. Booking flights, hotels and restaurants is a natural extension. So is recommending credit cards, loans and investments or even helping you choose the lab tests, supplements and wearables most relevant to your biomarker data, Snyder said. “What’s really cool with agents is they can negotiate,” he said. “So you can have your shopping agent bargain with a seller’s agent. Everything becomes like a Moroccan marketplace.”Think: negotiating better credit terms on your behalf—or even weeding through potential matches on dating apps. “You could have matches based on circadian rhythm compatibility,” Snyder said. “That sounds crazy, but that’s a morning person or that’s a night owl.”What should marketers know about shopping assistants?That negotiation component has profound implications for brands and marketers.When agents become the intermediary between consumers and brands/retailers, advertising as we know it won’t work anymore. For Snyder, that means eventually agents will only allow brands to reach you if they pay a fair price for your attention and data.“It’s future-proofing yourself against manipulation,” he said. “Right now, ads and algorithms are constantly pushing products at you, but an agent would act for you and would filter out all that manipulative content.”Ultimately, brands will have to adjust messaging to appeal to agents as their recommendations will become the new sponsored search results. “Brands need to optimize for machine readability and agent trust,” Snyder added. “That means structured data provenance, ethical sourcing, health compatibility, ethical compatibility, all of those things.”This shift to agents has huge implications for online marketing more broadly, too.“My big existential question for retailers is if human eyeballs are not going to your website or app anymore because an agent is doing it for them, what happens to retail media? What happens to onsite sponsored product ads?” Masters asked. “You’re not going to see those ads. So that whole onsite retail media business model is threatened and, to some degree, what's called offsite retail media is threatened as well.”Her advice to retailers is to really think about what distinguishes them from their competitors—and to invest in loyalty programs as a “moat.”For Snyder, it will be the end of the marketing funnel, but consumer experience remains. That means brands and marketers will be wise to focus on brand communities, content ecosystems, and live events.Lisa Lacy is a freelance writer based in Atlanta. She was formerly ADWEEK's commerce editor, focusing on retail and the growing reach of Amazon. She has covered marketing and technology for more than a decade for publications like TechCrunch, CMO.com, VentureBeat, The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones Newswires, ClickZ and Search Engine Watch.(Photo by guoya/iStock)

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Feature BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | September 17, 2025

If AI Starts Replacing Entry-Level Jobs, How Will Future Leaders Get Started?

As AI expands across business operations, will the jobs of young workers be among the first to go? If that happens, how will the future leaders of tomorrow enter the talent pipeline? Those are questions that have many HR leaders worried. Headlines warn that AI will damage, or already has damaged, the first rung on the corporate ladder, where young workers start their careers and occupy an important and useful position in corporate hierarchy. Though the full effects of AI on the labor market remain to be seen, some employers are already rethinking their workforce strategies.With AI revolutionizing the most fundamental parts of work, employers must decide whether to regard AI as a substitute for early-career workers or as a tool to accelerate their growth. “If you are a head of HR and you are not jumping up and down and saying, ‘Hey, this is going to impact our culture and our business and our people, and me and my team need to be a part of it,’ then you’re not doing your job,” said Dan Kaplan, managing director of the chief HR officer practice at executive search firm ZRG.Kaplan, who has more than a decade of experience advising CHROs, believes most HR leaders do understand the moment. But he says not enough attention is being paid to the early-career stage, since managerial succession is built on solid entry-level talent.How Much Is AI to Blame?The working world in 2025 is looking grim to many early-career workers, especially for those with college degrees. It’s been a year of layoffs, hiring freezes, and ominous predictions about the obsolescence of entry-level roles under the weight of AI. Salesforce eliminated 4,000 customer-support roles this year, and CEO Mark Benioff told podcaster Logan Bartlett that with AI, he simply doesn’t need as many people. Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei told Axios in May that AI could wipe out half of entry-level jobs. Yet so far, there’s little hard evidence that AI is displacing young workers en masse. “A lot of this is just related to the fact that the labor market has shifted back to a low-hiring, low-firing labor market,” said Joseph Briggs, senior economist at Goldman Sachs, on the firm’s Exchanges podcast. While it’s true that, across many sectors, college graduates are having trouble finding work, “the relationship that the anecdotes have to AI is often a little bit overstated,” he added.Briggs did note some evidence of impact in tech industries, where unemployment among young workers is slightly higher than in other sectors. A working paper from researchers at Stanford University also suggests that widespread adoption of generative AI contributed to a 13% decline in the relative employment of early-career workers in sectors like tech and customer support.Whether AI alone will trigger widespread unemployment among young people remains unclear. Still, companies in key industries are bringing in fewer entry-level hires in 2025. And with large-scale retirements looming, the question becomes: How are they filling the leadership pipeline?Avanade Leans Into Early-Career TalentAt the IT professional-services company Avanade, Paul Phillips isn’t cutting entry-level hires—he’s reaching further upstream. The company targets college sophomores and juniors for internships, training them early so that graduates arrive ready-made for full-time roles.In professional services, it’s imperative that talent is qualified as early as possible, so that their work can be chargeable to clients. Phillips, who is the company’s global head of HR, talent acquisition, and onboarding, likes to know that when he makes a hire, it’s clear right away where that person will fit in the organization. Since expanding the internship program two years ago, Avanade converts roughly 80% of its interns into full-time employees.For those young workers, “the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn is going to be key,” Phillips said. “We have a number of academies that we’ve spun up across Avanade where we bring in talent from non-traditional backgrounds and non-tech backgrounds, or we bring people working in sectors that we do see becoming commoditized in the near term and retrain them on the new set of skills.”In other sectors, where companies might have an older workforce, the retirement of baby boomers has created a knowledge drain. For process industry companies, which includes everything from metals and mining to paper and packaging, retirements are an acute problem and recruiting the next generation is a challenge. In such cases, AI can be a talent attractor, with employers positioning themselves as places where workers can use the latest tools and tech with less toil. In fact, a study by Boston Consulting Group and MIT found that when employees see the value of AI, they feel “more competent in their roles, more autonomous in their actions, and more connected to their work, colleagues, partners, and customers.”AI’s Short-Term Gain and Long-Term ImplicationsBusiness Insider reported that professional-services giant PwC is scaling back on hiring entry-level talent by nearly one-third over the next few years, citing “the rapid pace of technological change.” More broadly, BI has reported in May that AI could reshape consulting at every level of the business.If companies do rely too heavily on AI instead of young talent, “it is going to be short-term gain and massive long-term implications,” ZRG’s Kaplan warned. “If we find ourselves losing out at the entry level, it’s going to have a compounding effect, and it’s going to ultimately affect leadership pipelines.”Some employers are betting big on the opposite approach. “We’re helping a ton of clients think through AI investment and bring AI experts across their portfolio,” Kaplan said. Law, consulting, and private equity firms are doubling down on entry-level hiring. They see today’s graduates as a rare asset: digitally native, agile, and curious about technology. “Private equity tends to really see trends. They see trends and they understand.”Some leaders in the tech industry share this philosophy. Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman called replacing junior workers with AI “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard,” arguing that this segment is the “least expensive” and “the most leaned into your AI tools.”Publicis, the global ad and PR company, launched a program to help jump-start these junior workers by building foundational skills. Called Ignite, the two-and-a-half-day kickoff program for early-career hires focuses on communication, time management, and business acumen. “We used to wait, but that’s when Ignite came to fruition. The goal is to get them to greater impact quicker,” said Nikki Slowinski, the Publicis group’s EVP of talent experience and development, at a From Day One conference.Without young workers, corporate culture will suffer. “You want that youthful excitement that typically comes from having new college grads and young professionals starting their career,” Kaplan said. “They socialize, they go out, they’re the ones who show up to the office baseball game and the office run in Central Park. If you don’t have that, it will erode your culture.”Augmentation, Not Replacement Trent Cotton, head of talent acquisition insights at iCIMS, told From Day One that while he can’t directly link fewer entry-level hires to AI, the trend does reflect a broader workforce-planning shift. Employers are asking where new hires are essential, and where AI can augment existing teams.Because AI is boosting individual productivity, some companies are consolidating roles and rethinking headcount. They’re asking whether they really need as many full-time employees, focusing instead on where those roles add the most value.Cotton believes the future is in augmentation, not replacement. AI is going to supercharge the young worker, he says. It normally takes 90 days to ramp up a new employee, but with AI, an employer can help an entry-level worker apply their education and start contributing right away. “I mean, AI can help them almost from day one.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Featured photo by FG Trade Latin/iStock by Getty Images)

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What Our Attendees are Saying

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“The panels were phenomenal. The breakout sessions were incredibly insightful. I got the opportunity to speak with countless HR leaders who are dedicated to improving people’s lives. I walked away feeling excited about my own future in the business world, knowing that many of today’s people leaders are striving for a more diverse, engaged, and inclusive workforce.”

– Jordan Baker, Emplify
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“Thank you, From Day One, for such an important conversation on diversity and inclusion, employee engagement and social impact.”

– Desiree Booker, ColorVizion Lab
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“Timely and much needed convo about the importance of removing the stigma and providing accessible mental health resources for all employees.”

– Kim Vu, Remitly
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“Great discussion about leadership, accountability, transparency and equity. Thanks for having me, From Day One.”

– Florangela Davila, KNKX 88.5 FM
Cory Hewett(Attendee) profile picture

“De-stigmatizing mental health illnesses, engaging stakeholders, arriving at mutually defined definitions for equity, and preventing burnout—these are important topics that I’m delighted are being discussed at the From Day One conference.”

– Cory Hewett, Gimme Vending Inc.
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“Thank you for bringing speakers and influencers into one space so we can all continue our work scaling up the impact we make in our organizations and in the world!”

– Trisha Stezzi, Significance LLC
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“From Day One provided a full day of phenomenal learning opportunities and best practices in creating & nurturing corporate values while building purposeful relationships with employees, clients, & communities.”

– Vivian Greentree, Fiserv
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“We always enjoy and are impressed by your events, and this was no exception.”

– Chip Maxwell, Emplify
Katy Romero(Attendee) profile picture

“We really enjoyed the event yesterday— such an engaged group of attendees and the content was excellent. I'm feeling great about our decision to partner with FD1 this year.”

– Katy Romero, One Medical
Kayleen Perkins(Attendee) profile picture

“The From Day One Conference in Seattle was filled with people who want to make a positive impact in their company, and build an inclusive culture around diversity and inclusion. Thank you to all the panelists and speakers for sharing their expertise and insights. I'm looking forward to next year's event!”

– Kayleen Perkins, Seattle Children's
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“I had the pleasure of attending From Day One. My favorite session, Getting Bias Out of Our Systems, was such a powerful conversation between local thought leaders.”

– Michaela Ayers, Nourish Events
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“Inspiring speakers and powerful conversations. Loved meeting so many talented people driving change in their organizations. Thank you From Day One! I look forward to next year’s event!”

– Sarah J. Rodehorst, ePerkz
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“I had the distinct pleasure of attending From Day One Seattle. The Getting Bias Out of Our Systems discussion was inspirational and eye-opening.”

– Angela Prater, Confluence Health
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“From Day One did an amazing job of providing an exceptional experience for both the attendees and vendors. I mean, we had whale sharks and giant manta rays gracefully swimming by on the other side of the hall from our booth!”

– Joel Stupka, SkillCycle
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“Last week I had the honor of moderating a panel on healthy work environments at the From Day One conference in Atlanta. I was so inspired by what these experts had to say about the timely and important topics of mental health in the workplace and the value of nurturing a culture of psychological safety.”

– Alexis Hauk, Emory University