Consumers are turning to AI to find deals, but won’t allow it to delegate purchase decisions, an ACI Worldwide survey found.
Consumers may trust AI assistants to find them the best deals, but they don’t yet trust the technology enough to hand over purchasing. Consumers still want to be involved in the purchase decisions.
“I don't think anybody wants to give up that volition,” Marie Driscoll, president of the Retail Marketing Society, told sister publication CX Dive.
However, consumers do value AI’s ability to gather and then surface an assortment of merchandise from which they can choose.
“Think of the opportunity less as ‘AI is doing my shopping’ and more as ‘AI is helping me narrow down options,’ with the final call still firmly in the consumer's hands,” Isabelle Zdatny, head of thought leadership at Qualtrics XM Institute, told CX Dive in an email.
Privacy and trust are top concerns for consumers using AI tools. More than half — 53% — of global consumers worry that AI-enabled support poses privacy risks, according to research from Qualtrics XM Institute. And, only 2 in 5 consumers believe that organizations use their information responsibly, Zdatny said.
“It used to be that we gave lots of trust to brands, but frankly, if you look at Edelman's Trust Barometer, we don't trust anybody anymore,” Driscoll said. “Loyalty is a function of the quality of the output that an associate provides, a retailer provides, a website provides or an AI agent provides.”
Retailers have an opportunity to build loyalty and retention via the AI assistants they embed within their own applications.
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