What AI Can (and Can’t) Do for Your Shopping

If you’re still doing your shopping the old-fashioned way — that is, all by yourself — it might interest you to know that 43% of U.S. online shoppers say they’ve used an AI assistant for product research in the past 90 days, according to a 2026 study by Product.ai, a commerce verification company.

But most weren’t willing to take AI’s word for it: Of those shoppers who used an AI assistant, 86% checked its recommendation against another source before buying, the study found.

So is AI a useful shopping assistant and coupon finder? That depends on how you use it.

“It’s great at helping you figure out what to buy,” says Clay Cary, senior trends analyst at CouponFollow. “It’s not great at helping you maximize savings.”

Here’s what you should know before you make Claude or Gemini your personal shopper.

“You can enter a really specific prompt about a person you’re trying to buy for and their interests,” says Trae Bodge, a retail expert at TrueTrae.com who is based in New Jersey. “AI is great for that.”

If you’re shopping for yourself, AI can help you compare features and evaluate products for a specific situation.

For example, you might ask: “What shoes would work well for someone who takes a HIIT class three times a week, has flat feet and needs extra ankle stability?”

A merchant site generally won’t offer filters for a query that specific, says Alexander Ketter, managing director of Coupons.com. But AI can consider those details and suggest options, or at least point you in the right direction.

Just keep in mind that AI tools are limited by what they can access online. Their knowledge may be outdated or incomplete, especially when it comes to newer products.

There are a few issues at play. First, some big coupon sites have blocked AI crawlers, Ketter says, which means AI tools can’t fetch their coupon codes.

Second, even when an AI tool can search the internet, it may use cached or partial information rather than a retailer’s latest product page. So for coupon codes or deals that expire quickly, you may be out of luck.

“The chance that the LLM has scraped the page that you’re looking for in the last 24 hours is not great,” Cary says. “It’s not going to be as up-to-date as actually clicking on the website.”

AI tools can also be hit-or-miss when it comes to product recommendations. In one 2025 study involving Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, the three AI tools differed on which products they recommended when presented with an identical selection.

“Obviously you would expect them to prefer cheaper products, higher-rated products and products with more ratings,” says Yash Kanoria, John A. Howard Professor of Business at Columbia University and one of the authors of the study.

What’s surprising is that there are other things the AI models care about, “like position of the product in the display, which you may not expect,” Kanoria says. And model preferences on important things like price — versus arbitrary things like position — “change abruptly from one model to the next.”

Because some websites block AI access, the tools can’t see all the information that’s available. And sometimes they simply don’t include everything.

“Sometimes it overlooks certain brands for no particular reason,” Kanoria says. “Which brand it’s ignoring or which products it’s ignoring can change from one model to the next.”

AI can be a useful first step or supplement to your shopping research. And it may add insight in spots you didn’t expect, as it did for Cary when he was looking for an air purifier for his kitchen.

“Apparently, when you’re cooking something on the stove, you need a carbon filter, and I didn’t know that,” he says. Thankfully, his AI tool brought the issue to his attention, and he made his purchase decision accordingly.

You also don’t have to stick to the main AI tools. Bodge thinks retailer-specific AIs can provide better experiences. She points to Alexa for Shopping, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant.

“The Alexa AI is very good, in my opinion,” she says. “Because it lives in Amazon and is combing Amazon itself, you can get product descriptions, product comparisons and you can ask very specific questions.”

Compare Alexa’s answers with Target’s new AI search tool, which shoppers can access by clicking the icon in the search bar, to see how their answers compare.

“It almost feels like the chatbots are each a different friend,” Bodge says. You go to one friend because they have amazing taste, she says, while you hit up another because they’re super budget savvy.