A Turning Point for Holiday Shopping
This holiday season, generative AI became a personal shopping advisor for millions of Americans. U.S. consumers turned to ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) to plan gifts, research products, and hunt for deals – helping drive U.S. online spending to a record $11.8 billion on Black Friday (up 9.1% from last year) [reuters.com]. Industry experts are already calling 2025 the first true “AI holiday season,” as AI chatbots moved from a novelty to front and center in how people shop [axios.com]. Major retailers and tech platforms rolled out new AI-powered shopping assistants just in time for the holidays, betting that smarter virtual helpers would give consumers an easier gift-buying experience (and give themselves a bigger share of online spending) [apnews.com].
U.S. Consumers Embrace AI Assistants
Surveys show that many shoppers eagerly embraced AI help this year. A Harris Poll found that more than 4 in 10 consumers have already used AI tools to assist with shopping, including 61% of Gen Z and 57% of millennials [mastercard.com]. Among those using AI, the most common activities were brainstorming gift ideas (72% of AI users) and comparing prices (57%), followed by getting product recommendations (49%) [retaildive.com]. Notably, Gen Z shoppers overwhelmingly picked ChatGPT as their go-to assistant – 93% of Gen Z respondents who planned to use AI for holiday shopping said they expected to use ChatGPT [retaildive.com]. It’s no surprise, then, that OpenAI upgraded ChatGPT with a special shopping research mode that can generate personalized buyer’s guides using data from product pages, reviews and prices [apnews.com]. In effect, many American shoppers treated ChatGPT and similar bots as virtual personal shoppers, asking them everything from “What should I get for a 10-year-old who loves science?” to “Is this TV a good deal?” – and getting instant, tailored advice.
Retailers Deploy Their Own LLMs
Brands and retailers have raced to deploy their own AI shopping assistants to meet consumers in this new channel. Walmart’s AI helper, “Sparky,” now offers occasion-based gift recommendations and even synthesizes product reviews for customers [apnews.com]. Target introduced an AI Gift Finder in its mobile app exclusively for the holidays, which responds to prompts about a recipient’s age and hobbies with curated gift ideas [apnews.com]. Amazon also expanded its AI toolkit. Its “Rufus” shopping assistant (launched last year) can remember personal details a user shares – like how many kids you have – and leverages your browsing and purchase history to personalize suggestions [apnews.com]. Amazon even rolled out a “Help Me Decide” feature that analyzes a shopper’s behavior and recommends “the right product” with one tap, complete with an AI-generated explanation of why it fits [axios.com]. Even search and social platforms are joining in: Google infused its shopping search with generative AI, letting users pose natural-language questions and get results pulled from a 50-billion item catalog (including side-by-side price and feature comparisons) [apnews.com]. Meanwhile, Meta began testing an AI assistant in Instagram and Facebook ads to match users with products in real time [axios.com].
Despite this frenzy of innovation, analysts note that not every shopper was ready to chat with a bot at checkout just yet. Gartner’s retail analysts observed that AI’s impact on holiday sales was still “relatively limited” in 2025, since many consumers stuck with familiar habits and some retailer chatbots are still finding their footing [apnews.com]. However, the overall direction is clear. By coordinating the biggest retail tech rollout in decades, the industry has started to make holiday shopping feel less like typing into a search bar and more like having a conversation [axios.com]. Holiday 2025 was essentially a massive experiment in AI-assisted commerce – one that’s likely to shape how Americans find gifts and deals moving forward.
The New Strategy: Appearing in the AI Search Era
From a strategic perspective, this shift toward AI-guided shopping is forcing brands to rethink how they reach customers. Consumers who use chat-based assistants aren’t browsing dozens of search results or options anymore; they’re getting a few highly curated suggestions. In other words, the AI rarely shows an endless aisle of products – instead it summarizes and picks winners [seshes.ai]. If a brand’s product isn’t among those top AI-recommended options (and a competitor’s is), that brand effectively becomes invisible at the moment of the consumer’s decision [seshes.ai]. This is exactly the gap that oakpool.ai helps brands address. In this context, oakpool.ai ensures that brands show up in those AI-driven search results and chatbot recommendations, rather than being filtered out by the algorithms. More broadly, oakpool.ai provides the infrastructure, intelligence and automation that brands need to stay visible and competitive as shopping behavior shifts into the AI search era.
oakpool.ai – Powering Brands in the AI Search Era
oakpool.ai is the software and services sister company of oakpool. We design and build infrastructure, intelligence, automation, and services that enable brands to show up powerfully in the AI Search era. Our free GEO (AI Search Optimization) tool is the first of its kind and the only free solution on the market.
