As consumers embrace AI for shopping, conversational discovery is expanding ecommerce while challenging assumptions about personalization and the product page’s role.

The most notable use of AI in commerce is during the discovery and product selection phase, said Stephen Howard-Sarin, Criteo’s managing director of retail media for the Americas, at EMARKETER’s Commerce Media Summit.

• Top AI use cases among shoppers are product comparison (47%) and discovery (39%), according to Criteo’s 2026 Commerce and AI Trend report.

"That just means ecommerce will grow,” he said. “You'll be able to get to that point of decision faster, and with a higher intent to convert."

Tracking the chatbot to product page pipeline

The shift toward conversational commerce is changing how consumers search and shop. Rather than optimizing for traditional keyword matching, retailers must now accommodate natural language inputs that mirror human speech.

• 44% of shoppers are comfortable using images to initiate shopping journeys, while 26% are comfortable using voice search, according to the Criteo report.

"People's expectations that these conversational systems can just keep up with normal human language….are kind of true,” said Howard-Sarin. “They’re good at it, and that's what people are now expecting."

The behavioral data supports this shift. In a study of Criteo’s US clients, AI-referred visits had conversion rates 1.5x higher than other referral channels.

“When the user makes the hop from a conversational commerce moment with a chatbot to product research on a retailer side, they convert a lot better, and that's a very powerful future signal,” he said.

As consumers bypass homepages and land directly on product pages through AI-assisted discovery, the role of those pages is changing, Howard-Sarin said.

“We have to stop referring to PDPs as the 'product detail page' and start referring to it as a 'product discovery page,'” he said, “because that becomes a significant entry point.”

Pushing back on personalization

While AI enables unprecedented personalization, not all shoppers are comfortable with overly narrow recommendations.

• Some 56% of shoppers want recommendations that go beyond exact matches to what they searched for, according to the Criteo study.

To maintain the discovery that shopping involves, brands can use their own chatbots to merchandise and present new ideas to shoppers that aren’t exactly what they asked for, said Howard-Sarin. This creates opportunities for brands to suggest complementary options or introduce newer products within conversational flows.

“That sort of taste making and curation will also become valuable,” he said. Retailers can still offer “that serendipity factor that people want” when shopping.

Chopping checkout friction

There is a tradeoff between DTC sites and retailer sites: While retailers are “better at basket building,” said Howard-Sarin, they can’t compete with DTC on ease and speed of purchase.

“I think most retailers who operate ecommerce, if they're honest with themselves, know that they're out executed on landing pages by direct to consumer brands,” he said.

For now, retailers are still likely to remain the final transaction destination rather than losing checkout activity to chatbots themselves.

• 55% of consumers are cautious about sharing payment-related information with AI assistants, according to the Criteo report.

While increasing basket size is part of their business model, retailers must encourage this without creating checkout friction in the AI shopping era, said Howard-Sarin.

“People may just be coming in hot on that [product] page, and you better be able to close that translation fast,” he said.

Watch the full session.

This article was prepared with the assistance of generative AI tools to support content organization, summarization, and drafting. All AI-generated contributions have been reviewed, fact-checked, and verified for accuracy and originality by EMARKETER editors. Any recommendations reflect EMARKETER’s research and human judgment.

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