McKinsey's advice for the AI shopping age only works if you're Amazon
More than half of shoppers now use AI to shop. McKinsey's answer for brands is a to-do list only the giants can afford, and independent brands need another way onto the shortlist.
McKinsey asked 21,000 shoppers in 11 countries how they use AI to shop, for its October report "Who wins when AI does the shopping?", and the short answer is a lot. More than half used it in the last three months. In the US, the share of AI users who bought something straight through an AI went from 10% to 17% in a year, with clothes and shoes out in front. Nearly three in ten said an AI was the biggest influence on their last purchase, against fewer than one in ten for search engines.
Then comes the advice for brands, and it's a list only Amazon can tick. Get onto every AI's shortlist, across ChatGPT, Gemini, Amazon and the rest, in every market. Watch what the agents are doing round the clock. Get your product data clean enough for an agent to read. Build your own AI shopping assistant. Put a senior leader in charge with authority over marketing, merchandising, finance and legal. And while you're at it, keep your customer data away from the AI platforms you've just spent a fortune getting onto.
Amazon can do all that. It says people using its shopping assistant are 60% more likely to buy and spend 40% more. A label with eight staff and a Shopify store can't build its own assistant or keep an eye on five AI platforms in eleven countries. It hasn't got a senior leader with authority over anything either, because that person is also doing the packing.
You don't need a round-the-clock command centre to be on the shortlist. You need to be on the network the shortlist comes from.
The report also says why shoppers like this stuff. It narrows things down, it saves them time, and most say it matches their own style and taste. It works best when the agent already knows their sizes, their history and what they always want. That's the job, and it doesn't need every brand to build its own robot.
That's what VIA does for the shopper and the brand at the same time. The shopper gets one Personal Shopper that remembers their taste and sizes and works for them, not for whoever paid most. Brands list once, we fill out the product data so agents can read it properly, and the network puts their things in front of the shoppers they genuinely suit. The shopper's details stay with the shopper, which sorts out McKinsey's data worry as well.
You don't need a round-the-clock command centre to be on the shortlist. You need to be on the network the shortlist comes from. Join at app.getvia.xyz.
