AI shopping assistants are a storefront problem, not a marketing one

When Outlook Business asked me about AI shopping traffic last year, my honest answer was: it is probably 1% or less of the purchase funnel right now, and within a year it could be 10 to 15%. At that scale it is a significant amount of money, and the only question that matters is whether the customer can actually complete the purchase.

What an assistant needs

An AI assistant does not scroll. It reads. So the things that used to be housekeeping become the product:

• Product facts that are complete and true: price, availability, sizes and colours, delivery, returns.
• Product pages that state those facts in words, not in a banner image.
• A checkout an assistant can get through without a puzzle, a pop-up or a surprise.
• Policies written for a reader that will quote them back to your customer.

What it changes

The storefront stops being a page and becomes a clean set of facts with a human-friendly view on top. That is not a marketing project. It is a product decision that marketing benefits from.

We have been doing the unglamorous version of this for a while: making sure every product has its facts in order, that the checkout is clean, that the policies are readable. The assistant era just raises the stakes on work that was always worth doing.