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AI is quickly being adopted by retailers in a bid to give shoppers that perfect experience that brings them back to their online and offline stores, giving brand loyalty and fueling store growth with repeat custom.
UK shoppers are warming to AI. Quickly.
At a very high level, DHL's new eCommerce Trends Report for 2025 shows that over 60% of online UK shoppers want AI-driven shopping tools. This ranges from virtual try-ons and see-in-space applications to AI-powered shopping assistants and voice-enabled searching.
Looking at some recent survey data, some shoppers are keen to adopt AI to help them find items they want and cut through the noise of online retailers' plethora of items. The results of a survey by Ayden on May 19, 2025, showed that 36.1% of UK shoppers now rely on AI for online purchases, a 39% surge from last year. Over half of respondents noted that AI inspires their buying decisions by cutting through online noise, with 51% appreciating its ability to deliver relevant product suggestions.
Another survey from YouGov showed that 42% of UK shoppers believe AI enhances product discovery through relevant suggestions, with 60% of 18-24-year-olds using AI tools on platforms like ASOS to find fashion inspiration.
It's clear that people appreciate the way you can use AI to tell it what you're looking for, and refine it until it gives you the perfect answer to your requirements. Conversational LLMs and generative AI are giving people the chance to chat with a personal shopper, whose only task is to please you with the items it finds.
What does AI look like in retail today?
From beauty brands to coffee chains, AI is now woven into many aspects of the retail experience. Some of it is visible to the shopper. Some of it is not.
Fashion and beauty
As mentioned above, ASOS has deployed a personal shopper aspect to their site, where people can upload photos of clothes they like. From there, the AI then scans the product catalogue to suggest items that are similar and within a certain budget. This obviously saves users massive amounts of time scanning the site themselves, and has reportedly increased their engagement: users view 48% more products, are 75% more likely to return to the site, and have increased AOV by about 9%.
Beauty brands such as Bobbi Brown, Estée Lauder are allowing people to virtually try on beauty products to see if they like how the colour looks on them. Boots, No7 and Sephora are using AI to give personal recommendations to people for skin care and makeup to help identify perfect matches and to test out new colours.
Fragrance discovery
The Thameen London counter in Selfridges has just unveiled a permanent installation in their Oxford Street Store. Kaorium (A Japanese tech-meets-fragrance innovation) is now a part of their store, offering visitors a unique way to search for and discover a new signature scent.
Kaorium uses AI to translate language into scent. Visitors select words that resonate with them, as the system uses these cues to recommend new fragrances that align with their emotional response and sensory preferences. By removing packaging or marketing, it's believed it will allow users to engage with a fragrance on a deeper, more intuitive level.
Coffee, convenience and recommendations
Starbucks is using AI (called Deep Brew) that looks at your order history, current weather, time of day and local store inventory to suggest personalised offers. It also helps stores manage stock, which helps increase engagement (less disappointment at an item being out of stock due to the offers sent) and efficiency.
Amazon, of course, has its product suggestions based on previous purchases. While Amazon's example isn't unique, as most sites offer this now, it's still a use of AI that is well known and is typically showing improvements in customer engagement.
What if Search looked more like chat?
Even more recently, a shopping platform called Daydream has launched in the US. It’s been said that this platform is one of the most significant efforts to date to truly overhaul the online shopping experience, rather than just bolting on an AI chatbot. Daydream’s experience centres around the chat window, where you tell the platform what it is you’re looking for, rather than the traditional menu systems to get to a category to browse.
The platform has the ability to refine the results with a “Say more” button, where you can request further similar results or provide more details to narrow down what you want.
First-time visitors complete a style profile including their sizes in different products, brand preferences and preferred price range. The homepage features a “daily fashion edit” of products tailored to the user’s tastes, and as the site learns their preferences, it will increasingly personalise the products they’re shown, including when they search.
The platform itself isn’t a retailer; it is predominantly a search engine, as once a shopper finds what they want, they’re routed to the retailer's site to complete the purchase, with Daydream taking a commission on the sale. They already have more than 200 retail and brand partners, with a catalogue of nearly 2 million products spanning more than 8,000 brands.
Other sectors are seeing similar shifts
It’s not just retail making use of AI. Netflix uses AI to provide suggestions of similar shows and movies to items already watched. They’ve also partnered with OpenAI to trial letting people get suggestions of what to watch based on how they feel, or what they fancy watching. Prompts such as ‘I want something funny and upbeat' will be used for the platform to find shows and films that meet that criteria, a change from people having to search categories or know what it is they want to watch.
Klarna uses an OpenAI-powered chat assistance to handle around more than two-thirds of the customer service chats. Many of these chats are resolved in under 2 minutes, vs the 11 minutes it takes humans.
This is providing customer satisfaction as less time is taken to resolve simple problems and frees up agents to deal with the more complex problems that need a human to help with.
AI behind the scenes still affects shopper confidence
AI is not only helping customers find products. It is also helping teams manage pricing, stock levels and promotions more intelligently.
Debenhams, for example, has introduced AI tools to support more dynamic pricing and improve promotional strategy. The goal is to increase traffic to the site and re-establish some of the trust that has been lost over time. Many shoppers now go straight to brand websites, bypassing traditional department stores altogether. But Debenhams is hoping to change that.
By reducing time spent on repetitive manual tasks, AI is giving teams more space to focus on the parts of retail that still need a human touch. Customer growth. Experience. Loyalty.
Whether shoppers realise it or not, AI is already shaping their experience. The technology is here. What matters now is how retailers use it. Not every tool needs to feel futuristic. It just needs to help. And if it feels personal, intuitive and useful, shoppers will come back. Probably more than once.
Want to explore how AI could transform your eCommerce experience in 2025?
