Back-to-School Season Meets the AI Shopping Agent
BY Lisa Lacy August 25, 2026The back-to-school shopping list is getting an AI assistant.With a projected $43.3 billion in K-12 back-to-school spending up for grabs this year, retailers are watching closely as AI agents begin to influence how shoppers discover and ultimately buy products.From finding the right supplies to comparing products, AI shopping agents are taking on more of the work during this season’s back-to-school marketing campaigns. Jason Alan Snyder, chief AI officer at AI startup SuperTruth, called back-to-school a “particularly good use case” for AI shopping because “the list is fixed, the time window is fixed and the task is not about taste—it’s about coordination.”The Rise of AI Shopping AgentsAccording to Adobe’s research, 86% of consumers use AI while shopping, which marks a huge behavior change from just two years ago.“It’s really indicative of everything that consumers are dealing with and then all of a sudden, the AI assistant being able to be a personal shopper for them,” said Vivek Pandya, director of insights at Adobe.A recent Adobe report highlighted AI’s increasing value in commerce. As of July 2026, traffic to U.S. retail sites from AI sources was up 62% year over year. What’s more, AI visitors converted at a 60% higher rate and had a 14% higher engagement rate than other shoppers. Consumers using AI tools also spent 59% more time on retailers’ sites, were 33% less likely to bounce and added items to their carts at a 28% higher rate.The potential is not lost on retailers. Retail analyst Bruce Winder, who recently attended a Prime and grocery analyst event in Seattle, shared back-to-school use cases from Amazon, which include: sharing photos of supply lists so Alexa for Shopping can identify items and add them to shoppers’ carts. Consumers can also set budgets and price alerts and enable auto-buy functionality when an item drops to a specified threshold.And consumers appear willing to give retailer AI a try. According to Amazon, Alexa for Shopping, which was formerly known as Rufus, “helped over 300 million customers in 2025.” But it’s not easy to make apples-to-apples comparisons.In a February 2026 earnings call, David Guggina, president and CEO of Walmart U.S., said roughly half of Walmart’s app users have used its AI assistant, Sparky. However, the retailer bundles app usage figures within its broader customer base: In a March 2026 regulatory filing, the retailer said, “Each week, we serve approximately 280 million customers who visit more than 10,900 stores in 19 countries and through our numerous eCommerce websites and mobile applications.”Nevertheless, analysts agree shoppers are more likely to start with third-party AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, which have 900 million weekly users, 1 billion monthly users and a reported 20 million users in 2025, respectively.“The smarter retailer move isn’t to force shoppers into some kind of branded AI tool,” said Snyder of SuperTruth. “It’s to make sure that their product data, pricing and inventory shows up inside of general AI tools people already use.”AI as a Back-to-School Shopping AssistantResearch from the National Retail Federation (NRF) found 61% of back-to-school shoppers in 2026 are using these tools to find “the best prices and discounts and ask for recommendations and ideas.”Pandya agreed. “We’re finding that it is helpful for research comparison shopping, getting a sense of what’s available, like broader details around what they are looking for, product-wise,” he said. This price checking functionality is significant, as the NRF said 78% of shoppers expect to see higher prices on back-to-school items this season.“As affordability remains a significant concern for many shoppers, they are using AI agents to compare prices, promotions, specifications and other attributes to lower overall costs,” Winder said. “They may also ask AI agents to recommend specific life hacks to save money as well for the back-to-school season.”Abby Lovett, founder of AI agency CTP Visibility Advisors, noted most parents don’t want to skimp on the back-to-school experience for their kids, but the total cost of supplies is “jaw-dropping.” The NRF forecast families with kids in elementary through high school will spend an average of $863.86 in 2026.“Most kids have a thing they really look forward to, e.g., a new hoodie or new kicks,” she said. “Using AI to comparison shop on prices, colorways and sizes has made me and many other parents an absolute hero.”Back-to-School Season Creeps Into SummerCost concerns reflect another behavior change from recent years: The influence of Amazon’s Prime event and other summertime sales, which resulted in $26.4 billion in online spend in June 2026. That’s starting to rival Cyber Week numbers.“We’ve just seen so much early back-to-school shopping being mapped into the Prime event,” Pandya said. “You have consumers understanding the context of the deals happening, understanding that multiple players are likely vying for their dollar and then they’re using the AI agent to help strategize around that.”Does this mean we’ll be ready for AI agents to do back-to-school shopping for us in 2027? Not quite. While there were some attempts to support this functionality in 2025, Pandya says there has been some pullback.“The consumer [feels] more comfortable in having that back and forth with the agent and then having a lot of control on what actually gets spent once they get to the site,” he added. “Or having a conversation and then maybe you step away and you come back through paid search or you come back through social and then with the intel that you had from your AI exchange, you’re purchasing with more confidence.”Where AI Shopping Falls ShortBut AI shopping does have some limitations, even when it comes to back-to-school deals. “AI is much better at narrowing things than creating taste,” Snyder said. “It’s much stronger when you know what you want and you need help finding the price or the availability and it really, really sucks at surfacing things that you love.”For Snyder, the current shift is less about AI shopping going mainstream and more about consumers getting used to AI as a starting point.“Shopping is one more place that people use AI to reduce effort, so the question is more where in the journey is AI actually helping people,” he said. So while the technical capability for AI agents to shop for us may exist, consumer demand does not. At least for certain products. “Glue sticks, printer ink, that stuff, I can’t imagine somebody wouldn’t gladly hand that to an agent,” Snyder said. “But buying is also how we express care in a lot of cases or our identity. Picking your kid’s first day of school backpack isn’t the same thing.”There is a silver lining for retailers. As routine buying gets automated, the human-facing parts of retail—like the backpack—are where brands can differentiate themselves.“The divide isn’t between AI shopping and human shopping. It’s between purchases where convenience is the whole value and where the act of choosing has emotional weight,” Snyder said.As a result, he encouraged retailers to think about where their offerings have the greatest emotional impact and what introducing AI will do “because that’s the part that’s worth the most money.”Preparing for the AI ShopperThere is a more tangible opportunity in the meantime. Brands and retailers need to make sure their offerings, including details like pricing and availability, can be found by the AI platforms consumers are using.The recent Adobe report found this is one area many sites fall short—and recommended brands focus on machine readability, or making their websites and product information easy for AI systems to understand and interpret.As Pandya put it, that means “how can they work to organize the structure across their site so that they can benefit from even being read by the machine because the LLM agent has to serve an answer back to the user very quickly, so it all needs to be structured and highlighted in a way where it can do that.”Optimizing for AI search should also include cultivating reviews on sites like Google and Amazon, as well as monitoring conversations on platforms like Reddit and YouTube.“All that is being absorbed by these agents in order to give an answer back to the user that feels very well vetted and trustworthy,” Pandya said. “That’s the opportunity for the brand to show up across all those fronts and ensure strong machine readability, so that they get visibility.”Moving forward, Pandya anticipates AI platforms will explore how to better serve their own users, which could include pre-populating shopping prompts. “That’s what we’ll be keeping an eye out for,” he said.Lisa Lacy is a writer based in Atlanta. 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 Nikita Burdenkov/iStock)
Meet the AI Shopping Agents That Are Rewriting Retail Marketing
BY Lisa Lacy October 08, 2025As 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?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, 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)