November 11, 2025 • 7 mins
ABC's Mike Dobuski goes through the Pro's and Con's of using A.I. to shop and also how it can help with your job
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It was funny before we went into the news, I
was talking about how you know our show is one
hundred percent live every morning, no AI, no algorithm, just
five guys who live here in Central Ohio, myself, Campy,
Scott Jennings, Johnny Hill, Matt McCoy and bringing you the
news and information every morning. Again, no algorithm, no AI,
(00:24):
am radio, low technology. We're just trying to, you know,
tell you what's going on, have a little fun along
the way.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
And friendly customer service and adds us.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
And done with a smile every morning.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
But as AI, you know, forever and ever will be
a part of our life. It's it is here to stay,
and it's creeping into our daily lives. I want to
talk more about this with Mike Debuski, ABC News Technology reporter,
And I don't know exactly how this works. I'm sure
you're going to explain it to us, Mike. As the
holiday shopping season kind of starts to ramp up, people
are using AI to do their online shopping. How does
(00:58):
this work?
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Yeah, so this is really interesting. So Adobe Analytics came
out with some new data about the shopping environment yesterday
and they were looking at the month of October. This
report went over some of the numbers that you would
normally expect from a survey like this. They found that
eighty eight point seven billion dollars were spent in the
United States online in the month of October. Good chunk
(01:21):
of that came during Amazon Prime Day the seventh and
the eighth of October. Consumers spent a total of nine
point one billion dollars during those two days, and both
of those figures are up close to ten percent over
last year. How are The really interesting piece of this
report that stuck out to me was the role of
generative artificial intelligence. Adobe says that in October, traffic from
(01:43):
AI platforms two retail sites was up twelve hundred percent.
That is to say, people were going to chatch ept
or Google Gemini using it to get some ideas about
things to buy, whether it be a replacement lawnmower or
maybe an early holiday shopping gift for your friends and family.
(02:03):
They go to these websites, they try to get their
ideas together, and the service gives them back a link
to a retailer that they can then click on. The
other interesting bit of this report was that once you
click on that link and you're coming from an AI platform,
you're sixteen percent more likely to buy something, and Adobe
found that that was true in September as well. So
(02:26):
it does seem like this is part of a growing trend. Guys.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Interesting, So I, for example, if I wanted to plug
into AI, you know something about my wife, Hey, here's
the types of things that she likes. Can you spit
out some ideas and then it'll spit out some ideas
with links to places to buy them. Is that about
how that would work? That's pretty much the idea.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, And in trying these systems, you know, your mileage
will vary. As we talk about every time we talk
about generative AI, it does have a tendency to make
things up and get things wrong. So you know, with
gift giving, a lot of this will fall back on
the origin person. You can't kind of use this as
an excuse now to say, hey, you don't like your gift,
Well play opening eye and I will give you an example.
(03:07):
A few years ago, I tried this kind of during
the early days of chat GPT to find a gift
for a friend of mine and I typed in, you know, hey,
I have a friend's birthday coming up. He's a big
fan of Star Wars, he's a big fan of Godzilla movies.
What you know your ideas for a gift for him?
And he's like, well, you might want to try getting
a Star Wars or Godzilla themed gifts. Oh really, your
(03:30):
mileage will vary. It's not always the most helpful thing.
But it is true that more people are turning to
these systems in order to get some ideas.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
So what is it about the sixteen percent? You mentioned
that the folks that do use chat, GPT or some
other AI platform for an idea for a gift and
then they click through. What is it about that that
it makes them sixteen percent more likely to buy it?
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Very well might be that the suggestions that these AI
systems give to people are better, right that once you
see this gift and once you you know, kind of
click through and see what the pricing is or whatever
it happens to be, you know, you realize that that
was a good recommendation, then you go purchase it. That's
kind of the idea, it seems like behind this piece
of data, but you know it is going to be
(04:14):
something that's really interesting to track and might not be
that relevant for much longer because we've seen Open AI
at the very least start to integrate with a number
of payment platforms that are out there, most recently Walmart
and Shopify. You can go to chant GPT basically do
your questioning, do your you know, figuring out of what
gifts to buy, and then do the whole checkout process
(04:37):
without ever leaving the app, meaning you're not clicking through
to a website anymore. You're staying within the AI system
and you know, doing your whole shopping process.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
That was my next question because I thought I read
something about that that soon you'll never have to leave
the AI platform to do your shopping and won't take
you a target or wherever you'll do it through that. Now,
that opens up a whole new can of worms about
the privacy and safety and keeping your information secure. I
don't know if I'm really comfortable plugging my credit card
(05:08):
into Chat GPT.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yeah, Chat GPT certainly wants you to. But this is
something that we've seen played out across the Silicon Valley space.
Right These platforms want you to stay on them so
that they can either take a cut of every purchase
that you make or advertise against what you're looking at
that is kind of the be all and end all
of the Internet right now. It's a reason why we
(05:31):
see Google start to integrate AI. Overviews at the top
of Google Search is prioritized higher than traditional search. Right
that's designed to not get you to click through to
another link, but stay on the Google platform. This does
come at a pretty existential moment for these AI companies
as they try to figure out how to monetize. As
we talked about in previous segments, these are really expensive
(05:53):
technologies to run and to build. Open AI and Meta
and Microsoft and all the companies that are working on
these AI systems aren't making money on them, right They
are cost cost losses here. And according to McKinsey, which
put out a survey last week excuse me, ninety percent
of the companies that they surveyed are regularly using AI,
(06:17):
but two thirds are not deploying it at scale, speaking
to sort of the broader uncertainty within the larger market
towards adopting these platforms. What's more or less than forty
percent report any impact on their earnings when they integrate AI.
And let's not forget MIT recently found that ninety five
percent of AI programs at these companies failed to increase
(06:39):
profits or save on costs. So I think you're seeing
this intense effort to get people to spend more time
on these platforms, to maybe monetize with some of these
purchasing options, because they're going to need to figure out
a revenue stream once the bills start coming. Do guys,
aren't there?
Speaker 1 (06:56):
But aren't there subscription level AI services where it allegedly
if you pay a monthly fee for whatever, you get
better results versus the free version.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Yeah, you get more features and maybe access to smarter models,
but look at just the numbers, guys. Open ai, which
is the maker of Chat gpt, made about twenty billion
dollars on subscriptions last year. They lost twelve billion dollars
last quarter alone. These are deeply unprofitable enterprises. Really just
speaking to how expensive it is to spin up these
(07:28):
large language models, to build the quant the data centers
that are required to run these models, and we just
haven't solved that yet. Chat GPT came out three years
ago and companies are still a little trepidacious about integrating
it into their larger businesses. Open ai really wants that
to change before they have to start paying back these
(07:49):
one hundred billion dollar deals that they've struck with the
likes of Nvidia, Oracle, and others.
It was funny before we went into the news, I
was talking about how you know our show is one
hundred percent live every morning, no AI, no algorithm, just
five guys who live here in Central Ohio, myself, Campy,
Scott Jennings, Johnny Hill, Matt McCoy and bringing you the
news and information every morning. Again, no algorithm, no AI,
(00:24):
am radio, low technology. We're just trying to, you know,
tell you what's going on, have a little fun along
the way.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
And friendly customer service and adds us.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
And done with a smile every morning.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
But as AI, you know, forever and ever will be
a part of our life. It's it is here to stay,
and it's creeping into our daily lives. I want to
talk more about this with Mike Debuski, ABC News Technology reporter,
And I don't know exactly how this works. I'm sure
you're going to explain it to us, Mike. As the
holiday shopping season kind of starts to ramp up, people
are using AI to do their online shopping. How does
(00:58):
this work?
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Yeah, so this is really interesting. So Adobe Analytics came
out with some new data about the shopping environment yesterday
and they were looking at the month of October. This
report went over some of the numbers that you would
normally expect from a survey like this. They found that
eighty eight point seven billion dollars were spent in the
United States online in the month of October. Good chunk
(01:21):
of that came during Amazon Prime Day the seventh and
the eighth of October. Consumers spent a total of nine
point one billion dollars during those two days, and both
of those figures are up close to ten percent over
last year. How are The really interesting piece of this
report that stuck out to me was the role of
generative artificial intelligence. Adobe says that in October, traffic from
(01:43):
AI platforms two retail sites was up twelve hundred percent.
That is to say, people were going to chatch ept
or Google Gemini using it to get some ideas about
things to buy, whether it be a replacement lawnmower or
maybe an early holiday shopping gift for your friends and family.
(02:03):
They go to these websites, they try to get their
ideas together, and the service gives them back a link
to a retailer that they can then click on. The
other interesting bit of this report was that once you
click on that link and you're coming from an AI platform,
you're sixteen percent more likely to buy something, and Adobe
found that that was true in September as well. So
(02:26):
it does seem like this is part of a growing trend. Guys.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Interesting, So I, for example, if I wanted to plug
into AI, you know something about my wife, Hey, here's
the types of things that she likes. Can you spit
out some ideas and then it'll spit out some ideas
with links to places to buy them. Is that about
how that would work? That's pretty much the idea.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, And in trying these systems, you know, your mileage
will vary. As we talk about every time we talk
about generative AI, it does have a tendency to make
things up and get things wrong. So you know, with
gift giving, a lot of this will fall back on
the origin person. You can't kind of use this as
an excuse now to say, hey, you don't like your gift,
Well play opening eye and I will give you an example.
(03:07):
A few years ago, I tried this kind of during
the early days of chat GPT to find a gift
for a friend of mine and I typed in, you know, hey,
I have a friend's birthday coming up. He's a big
fan of Star Wars, he's a big fan of Godzilla movies.
What you know your ideas for a gift for him?
And he's like, well, you might want to try getting
a Star Wars or Godzilla themed gifts. Oh really, your
(03:30):
mileage will vary. It's not always the most helpful thing.
But it is true that more people are turning to
these systems in order to get some ideas.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
So what is it about the sixteen percent? You mentioned
that the folks that do use chat, GPT or some
other AI platform for an idea for a gift and
then they click through. What is it about that that
it makes them sixteen percent more likely to buy it?
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Very well might be that the suggestions that these AI
systems give to people are better, right that once you
see this gift and once you you know, kind of
click through and see what the pricing is or whatever
it happens to be, you know, you realize that that
was a good recommendation, then you go purchase it. That's
kind of the idea, it seems like behind this piece
of data, but you know it is going to be
(04:14):
something that's really interesting to track and might not be
that relevant for much longer because we've seen Open AI
at the very least start to integrate with a number
of payment platforms that are out there, most recently Walmart
and Shopify. You can go to chant GPT basically do
your questioning, do your you know, figuring out of what
gifts to buy, and then do the whole checkout process
(04:37):
without ever leaving the app, meaning you're not clicking through
to a website anymore. You're staying within the AI system
and you know, doing your whole shopping process.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
That was my next question because I thought I read
something about that that soon you'll never have to leave
the AI platform to do your shopping and won't take
you a target or wherever you'll do it through that. Now,
that opens up a whole new can of worms about
the privacy and safety and keeping your information secure. I
don't know if I'm really comfortable plugging my credit card
(05:08):
into Chat GPT.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yeah, Chat GPT certainly wants you to. But this is
something that we've seen played out across the Silicon Valley space.
Right These platforms want you to stay on them so
that they can either take a cut of every purchase
that you make or advertise against what you're looking at
that is kind of the be all and end all
of the Internet right now. It's a reason why we
(05:31):
see Google start to integrate AI. Overviews at the top
of Google Search is prioritized higher than traditional search. Right
that's designed to not get you to click through to
another link, but stay on the Google platform. This does
come at a pretty existential moment for these AI companies
as they try to figure out how to monetize. As
we talked about in previous segments, these are really expensive
(05:53):
technologies to run and to build. Open AI and Meta
and Microsoft and all the companies that are working on
these AI systems aren't making money on them, right They
are cost cost losses here. And according to McKinsey, which
put out a survey last week excuse me, ninety percent
of the companies that they surveyed are regularly using AI,
(06:17):
but two thirds are not deploying it at scale, speaking
to sort of the broader uncertainty within the larger market
towards adopting these platforms. What's more or less than forty
percent report any impact on their earnings when they integrate AI.
And let's not forget MIT recently found that ninety five
percent of AI programs at these companies failed to increase
(06:39):
profits or save on costs. So I think you're seeing
this intense effort to get people to spend more time
on these platforms, to maybe monetize with some of these
purchasing options, because they're going to need to figure out
a revenue stream once the bills start coming. Do guys,
aren't there?
Speaker 1 (06:56):
But aren't there subscription level AI services where it allegedly
if you pay a monthly fee for whatever, you get
better results versus the free version.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Yeah, you get more features and maybe access to smarter models,
but look at just the numbers, guys. Open ai, which
is the maker of Chat gpt, made about twenty billion
dollars on subscriptions last year. They lost twelve billion dollars
last quarter alone. These are deeply unprofitable enterprises. Really just
speaking to how expensive it is to spin up these
(07:28):
large language models, to build the quant the data centers
that are required to run these models, and we just
haven't solved that yet. Chat GPT came out three years
ago and companies are still a little trepidacious about integrating
it into their larger businesses. Open ai really wants that
to change before they have to start paying back these
(07:49):
one hundred billion dollar deals that they've struck with the
likes of Nvidia, Oracle, and others.
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