How AI can help with your last-minute holiday shopping

If you’re still working on your holiday shopping—or looking for a treat for yourself—you might consider using artificial intelligence tools to help you find the perfect purchase.

Retailers, search engines, and other tech companies have developed AI tools that can help you find items you might not have considered, see how clothing or household items might look, and find more information on products you’re considering. It’s becoming an increasingly prevalent practice, with a recent report from Adobe indicating that about two in five consumers plan to use the technology to help with their holiday shopping.

Here are a few of the options.

Digital Shopping Assistants

Major retailers including Amazon and Walmart have begun rolling out AI-powered shopping assistants on their websites or apps that can answer questions about merchandise, recommend products for specific situations, and help compare particular products. (Walmart’s AI is presently in a limited beta).

Amazon’s AI also offers summaries of common complaints and praise from customer reviews, which means less time sifting through to find issues with possible gifts. The company’s assistant, called Rufus, can also answer questions about individual products, like whether they require batteries or whether they might be good for a particular person. And Amazon’s AI-powered shopping guides can make it easier to comparison shop and may pop up as you browse for common types of items.

Even if you aren’t directly interacting with AI, it’s likely you’ll see its work as you shop. Retail platforms including Amazon and Shopify have debuted AI assistants for sellers to help them draft product descriptions and other copy, and numerous marketing platforms offer AI to help merchants create email and social media content to promote products and deals.

Making a List

You don’t have to rely on a single retailer for help finding gifts. A number of companies offer AI tools specifically designed for generating possibilities for presents, like GiftList’s Genie. Genie has a familiar chatbot-style interface, and seems to pop up gift suggestions in just a few seconds. Another option is Smart Gift AI, which offers a chat interface along with some sample prompts to get you started.

If you’re looking for corporate gifts to send to clients or business associates, there’s AI for that, too. Gifting platform Giftpack offers AI tools to help you pick out and customize those company gifts. 

Search Engines

Several search engines have rolled out AI powered shopping features. Google will give AI results on some shopping searches, and Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, will pop up “product cards” with results for shopping-related queries and AI suggestions in its normal search results. Depending on your subscription plan, you may be able to buy items directly through Perplexity.

You can also use general purpose AI tools like ChatGPT to ask for gift recommendations or brainstorm potential ideas for gifts, holiday parties, recipes, or anything else. As always, you may want to double-check any answers you get before basing your shopping plans around them: A recent CNet report indicated that ChatGPT recommended a reviewer visit a local toy store that seemed to have been entirely hallucinated. 

And numerous search engines, including Google and Bing, along with other apps like Pinterest, let you visually search for items you see online or in real life, thanks to the power of computer vision. That can be helpful if you see a product somewhere but aren’t sure where to buy it or exactly what to search for online. And Amazon has its own visual search tool to help you find items for sale there.

Virtual Try-On

Retailers from Walmart to Cartier have debuted various tools to let you virtually try on clothing, jewelry, and eyewear or see how furniture and other items would look laid out in your home. 

These tools are probably primarily meant for shopping for yourself, but they can still be helpful in filling out a Christmas list for someone to buy for you, or if you’re shopping for a friend or relative with similar taste to yourself.

The advantage of these kinds of apps is getting to see how items look without having to visit a physical store or order merchandise only to return it, which can be a big time saver with stores and shipping outlets busy around the holidays. 

AI-Generated Cards

Sure, AI art, poetry, and prose can look hokey, but so can many of the cards for sale at your local drugstore. And one advantage of AI is the ability to generate custom images to reflect a family memory or inside joke, even if you have limited artistic skills yourself.

You can create AI art with any number of AI chatbots and visual tools to add to a holiday card you plan to print or send digitally, or use an AI-powered card generator from any number of greeting card and e-card companies. And if you don’t like the first pictures you generate, simply tweak your AI prompt to try again. 

AI Santa

Yes, Virginia, there is at least one AI-powered Santa Claus this Christmas. A website created by AI video company Tavus offers a free five-minute video chat with a surprisingly lifelike virtual Santa Claus who can help discuss your Christmas wants and whether you’ve been naughty or nice.

For better or worse, the virtual Kris Kringle is clear that he’s not the real thing—when asked, he claims to be an AI replica created by Santa. Since digital Santa is basically a product demo,  there’s also documentation of how you can create your own Santa, or another digital person, with Tavus technology, which could itself be an interesting holiday gift or entertainment at your company Christmas party.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91248663/how-to-outsource-all-your-last-minute-gift-ideas-to-ai?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss