AI-Powered Shopping Gains Traction for 2026 Back-to-School Season, Amazon and Google Hold First-Mover Advantage

Alexander Lee, a Brooklyn, New York-based accountant who shares two children in first grade and kindergarten with his elementary school teacher wife, used to spend hours comparing prices and reading reviews, trekking between multiple retailers to pick up more than 30 school and sports supplies during past back-to-school seasons. This year, he handed most of that shopping work off to artificial intelligence.

Lee used AI tools including ChatGPT and Claude to filter for cost-effective products that fit his budget, eliminating the need to scroll through countless reviews and community content or compare prices across platforms. The AI also adjusted his shopping list based on promotion rules at different retailers and recommended the optimal time to make purchases, helping him cut his total procurement costs by 20% to 30%.

Lee’s experience is far from unique. Latest survey data from the National Retail Federation shows 61% of back-to-school shoppers this year used generative AI and related smart shopping tools to find the best prices and discounts and get purchasing advice.

Kristina Coughlin, senior vice president at marketing agency Trevant and general manager of its creator marketing division, revealed nearly 70% of shoppers this year delegated tasks like finding deals, comparing products and compiling reviews to AI. While consumers previously only used AI to search for product information, they have begun handing over parts of the shopping decision-making process to the technology this year.

Aniket Deosthali, co-founder and CEO of commerce agency Envive, disclosed that consumers who use AI to assist with shopping spend 30% to 40% more per order than average users, and the scale of AI-assisted shopping users is growing exponentially. A large number of retail-related companies are now ramping up investment in AI shopping-related features to boost their exposure in AI search scenarios. Deosthali previously led the development and launch of Walmart’s generative AI shopping experience.

Google parent Alphabet, drawing on its user intent understanding capabilities accumulated through its search business and its Gemini large language model, can handle more complex, long-form shopping requests. Users no longer need to split their shopping needs into separate searches; they can directly provide the AI with information such as their children’s ages, school supply lists and budgets to receive tailored procurement plans and recommended purchase timelines.

Related financial report data shows Gemini has improved the relevance of Google’s related ads by 20%, allowing users to find products that meet their needs faster. Google launched its open-source Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) in January 2026, with retailers including Target and Walmart already joining the platform. In May of the same year, Google rolled out a universal shopping cart that allows consumers to add items from different retailers and check out through a single channel.

OpenAI launched a similar instant checkout feature months before Google, but pulled the feature in March 2026 to move it to an application section for optimization. Analysts at research firm Gartner revealed OpenAI had previously underestimated the difficulty of building out the transaction workflow.

Gemini’s monthly active users surpassed 1 billion in August 2026, making it the fastest-growing product under Google. OpenAI’s ChatGPT hit 1 billion monthly active users in June of the same year.

Amazon, for its part, has launched its Alexa shopping AI assistant, leveraging its massive product library and years of purchase history data from Prime members. Consumers can take a photo of their shopping list to complete orders directly, tell the assistant their total budget to get product recommendations that balance price and quality, or set price alerts that trigger automatic purchases for some high-priced items when they reach the desired price point.

The 14th annual Evercore ISI Amazon online retail survey, released on August 17, shows 57% of Alexa AI users have purchased products they were previously unaware of, with AI effectively boosting users’ product discovery probability and purchase volume on the platform.

The popularization of AI-powered shopping during this back-to-school season is an early signal that consumer shopping habits are changing alongside technological iteration. While leading AI labs including OpenAI and Anthropic are not yet publicly traded, Google parent Alphabet and Amazon are the core listed players in this segment.

This article was first published on the official website of Ebrun.