AI-Referred Shoppers Spend More as AI Traffic Set to Double

AI-referred traffic to U.S. retail sites will more than double this holiday season, rising 130% year over year, according to Adobe's annual online shopping forecast released Monday. The forecast measures traffic through shoppers' link engagement.

The shoppers behind that traffic are now worth more, not less, to retailers. Consumers using AI engage with brands' offers at a higher rate than non-AI traffic and generate 43% more revenue per visit, Adobe found in a complementary survey of 5,000 U.S. consumers. That figure marks a complete inversion of what Adobe found 18 months earlier, when non-AI traffic was worth 128% more than AI-referred visits.

Confidence tracks the revenue shift. More than three-quarters of shoppers using AI assistants told Adobe they feel more confident in their purchases. Over two-thirds said they are less likely to return an item they bought with an AI assistant's help.

The behavioral signals add up to a simple conclusion: consumers are comfortable using AI-powered tools to find deals and compare products, and they show early signs of trusting the technology to short-circuit their buying process. That forces customer experience and marketing leaders to rethink who, exactly, they are addressing.

AI tools sit atop every channel brands have built to reach their customers. "It also behaves as a discovery channel through AI search and a referral channel through the AI chatbots themselves," Rebecca Wettemann, CEO and principal analyst with Valoir, told sister publication CX Dive in an email. "Brands need to think about whether AI can find, accurately explain and differentiate their products."

Early evidence suggests current-generation tools already perform that sifting well. Consumers arriving at retail sites because of AI assistance added items to their carts at a 32% higher rate than those not referred by AI, Adobe found.

This holiday season may add a new wrinkle through the debut of "next-gen" AI tools such as personal AI agents. Meta's Muse personal AI agent app reached a reported 2.8 million downloads in the first 12 days of availability, outpacing ChatGPT's early mobile launch according to TechCrunch. Apple's revamped Siri AI, announced in September, may upend consumer AI use as it rolls out — though it only works on Apple's newer hardware and software.

For brands, the strategic stakes extend beyond any single holiday season. Given rapid consumer adoption of AI shopping tools and the proliferation of those capabilities in devices people already use — from third-party applications and web browsers to smartphones — brands need "to start designing for a world in which there are effectively two customers: the human and the human's agent," Bill Staikos, founder of Be Customer Led, told CX Dive in an email.

"For business leaders generally, customer loyalty is fundamentally turned on its head when your customer isn't the entity making every decision," Staikos said. "This is going to be a hard problem to solve."