Dive Brief:
- Only 10% of consumers currently begin their product discovery with AI, according to AlixPartners, which surveyed over 9,000 U.S. consumers about their shopping habits.
- AI adoption varies by generation and income, with 14% of Gen Z and millennials starting product search with the technology.
- Interest in shopping with AI is strong with higher-income consumers. Nearly 70% of consumers earning $150,000 or more consider it important, compared to 53% of those who earn less than $45,000, per the report.
Dive Insight:
AI is an ascendent, if not yet commonplace, discovery channel for consumers, according the AlixPartners’ 2026 Consumer Sentiment Index.
AI adoption varies by generation and income, but is still low across the board. The majority of consumers also said they aren’t ready to hand the actual purchase over to an AI agent.
Despite this, the report predicts a forthcoming uptick in adoption, particularly for commoditized goods. In fashion specifically, brand and relationship will still matter at the top of the market. But AlixPartners foresees a future where queries for replenishment basics — like “black leggings, TTS, under $30” — will be offloaded more readily to AI agents.
This will have bisecting consequences. Those at the top end of the retail spectrum will remain brand-led with the biggest concern being AI-powered copycats, while the bottom of the market will become “spec-and-price driven,” according to the report. Brands that fall in the middle must find a way to navigate both forces.
A similar bisection will likely be seen in consumer adoption, the report predicts. Upper-income shoppers are more likely to see AI as a concierge, useful for styling and curated product recommendations. For everyone else, AI will take the role of a price-comparison and decision-making tool. This aligns with other research indicating that is how consumers today are using these tools.
For most companies, this means that having the right product metadata will be crucial: “The machine doesn't read your beautiful imagery or your persuasive copy — it reads structured data: attributes, availability, price,” according to the report. “If your product data is thin or messy, the agent either can't surface you or describes you badly, and you go invisible in the fastest-growing channel there is.”
Even if today most consumers are turning to these tools for comparison and recommendation tasks, the better AI agents become at suggesting products, the more likely that consumers will begin to trust those agents for other pieces of the buying process. The risk is that brands could eventually become sidelined from the customer relationship.
Many larger retailers, such as Target, Best Buy, Macy’s and The Home Depot, are insulating themselves from this by launching their own internal AI assistants.
