11 11 25 ABC Technology Reporter Mike Dobuski talks about the use of AI for shopping

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The holiday shopping season practically here and days of lining
up at the big box retailers on Black Friday really
feel like a thing of the past. Not only our
more consumers shopping online, but AI assisted search tools maybe
coming into play. Joining us on the KWA Common Spirit
Health Hotline for our Tech Tuesday Chat is ABC News
Tech reporter Mike Debuski. Mike, appreciate your time as always. Okay,

(00:22):
paint a picture. What does shopping look like nowadays? If
we're talking more and more use of AI.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yeah, that's right. So there's some new numbers out that
we can look to to help us understand what this
holiday shopping season is going to look like from a
tech perspective. These numbers come from Adobe Analytics, which found
that in the month of October, so last month, eighty
eight point seven billion dollars was spent online by Americans,
and a good chunk of that came on Amazon PRIMEE Day,

(00:50):
which was October seventh and eighth. Americans spent about nine
point one billion dollars during those days. Both of those
numbers that we mentioned are increases over last year, so
people are spending more money this year, it seems, and
as you mentioned, AI is playing a bigger and bigger role.
Adobe says that in October, traffic from AI platforms, so

(01:10):
from the Chat GPTs and Google geminis of the world
two retail sites was up twelve hundred percent, and once
a person got to a retailer, they were sixteen percent
more likely to buy something. This is something that Adobe
found was true in September as well. So it seems
like more people are using these AI tools to get

(01:32):
to retail websites and increasingly to buy things once they
get there.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
So how are they using it, Mike, are we seeing
people maybe like searching what's the best gift for a
mother for Mother's Day or whatever it is? And then
AI is generating links to websites exactly exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
So you go to Chat GPT for instance, and you
try to, you know, do what many people do on
these websites, which is ID eight kind of bounce a
couple ideas off of the AI to get a better
sense of, in this case, what you should buy for
your friends and family members ahead of the holiday shopping season.
Once they do that, these services have increasingly been integrating
payment and checkout methods as well, so instead of just

(02:11):
providing you links to Walmart or Amazon dot Com. You
can actually go through the full buying process on chat
GPT without ever leaving the app. Increasingly, they've been partnering
up with companies like Walmart. That happened within the last
few weeks. Also, Shopify will now let you check out
all through chat GPT, and of course their competitors have

(02:31):
similar products as well. That is a really interesting thing
to keep an eye on as we get into the
really busy time of the year for holiday shopping. Just
how many people are going to be doing their shopping
with the help of AI, but not even you know,
moving away from that platform, staying on that platform and
doing the whole buying process through a generative artificial intelligence tool.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
It is really fascinating. I am curious though, Mike, if
any research has been done maybe on the flip side,
like let's say a small business taking advantage of AI,
maybe trying to figure out nearing down what their consumers
are looking for.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
Yeah, and certainly that's a big piece of this. One
of the things that these AI tools are really good
at is helping you kind of get your ideas together
to help inform thinking, not necessarily to provide you with
the correct answer all of the time. They still do
struggle with that, but in terms of just kind of
getting through the ideas phase, getting through the in this case,
trying to figure out where your consumers are, what they

(03:26):
might like in terms of advertising or ad placement in
that type of thing. These things are pretty good at that,
and they can draw from a pretty deep well of
research depending on what tool you're using. So yeah, there's
this piece of it as well. However, it's also worth
mentioning that the AI market in general is looking increasingly unstable.

(03:46):
There was a McKinsey survey from last week that found
that while ninety percent of companies they surveyed are actually
regularly using AI, nearly two thirds are not deploying it
at scale. That means that nearly three after the launch
of chat Ept, most companies are still in the wait
and see phase of this technology, and moreover, less than

(04:08):
forty percent of them report any impact on earnings when
they use AI. It was not so long ago that
MIT did a study that found ninety five percent of
AI pilot programs at companies failed to increase profits or
save on costs.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
Well, for those who are scrambling to get those Christmas gifts.
You got forty three days, eighteen hours, thirty five minutes
and thirty three seconds.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
Quite shouting yeah for anything like that.

Speaker 1 (04:32):
ABC News Tech reporter Mike Debuski.

Speaker 2 (04:34):
Thanks Mike, of course, take care