Today’s podcast is with Vivek Pandya, Director, Adobe Digital Insights at Adobe. I recently caught up with Vivek at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas to talk about some new research that Adobe just published called AI to Cart, which highlights the impact that Generative AI-powered chat interfaces are having on consumers, how that is changing their search and shopping behaviours, what brands should be doing in response and his highlights from the event.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The art and the science of listening – Interview with Zig Serafin, Brad Anderson and Isabelle Zdatny of Qualtrics – and is number 536 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Vivek:

• New research out called AI to Cart .
• We recently detected in our data a pretty strong influence of traffic coming from generative AI assistant platforms.
• What was really startling to us was that we saw, in the UK, between a 500 to 700 % uptick since last summer.
• AI-driven traffic spends more time on a website than non-AI source traffic.
• During the holiday season last year, people really used it as a kind of assistant co-pilot, wingman etc.
• We also found that users were increasingly using these platforms to ask urgent questions i.e. where can I find, try, get this item in less than 48 hours, say.
• Financial services, retail and travel are industries that have seen the most traffic.
• In travel, people are not just using AI assistants to help find cheap flights but are also asking the agents questions like: what do I need to pack for my trip and give me a checklist?
• We see upticks across all age cohorts. Obviously, millennials and Gen Z are driving it, but we’re seeing demand from all age groups.
• In terms of the main referrers, it’s the usual suspects……ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot etc
• AI-driven search is not converting at the same rate as non-AI search right now, but it is improving and is quickly closing the gap.
• Where we are with Gen AI Assistant platforms, it’s still very much laptop and desktop-based.
• 91% of people surveyed trust the financial recommendations that are coming out of some of these engines.
• We’re talking about data regarding the UK market, but the research was a multi-country study.
• Other geographies are moving very similarly and in the same direction.
• However, magnitudes can differ e.g. the US has experienced more like a 1,200 to 1,700 percent increase in traffic growth.
• I sat next to a senior marketeer from a big, venerable brand, and I asked him, “What are you doing in this space?” And he said, “Frankly, we don’t know. We’re talking to our agency all the time about figuring out what’s going on here because it’s just this new thing, which is just different.”
• You have to own the conversation around your capabilities as a brand.
• Because the prompts are very specific e.g. I’m not just putting I want blue jeans. I’m saying I want blue jeans that are under $200 that I can get in 72 hours.
• There’s much more specificity.
• So it becomes really incumbent on the brand retailer to ensure that they’re showcasing their differentiation and all of their different capabilities that an AI assistant could crawl up and detect and showcase that as the most prime result back to the user.
• The other piece of it is, have you made those influencer affiliate connections, and are you owning the social conversation around whatever you are selling as that will make it sort of inevitable for an AI assistant to pick me up and drop me in.
• So some of the fundamentals around SEO still apply, but it’s very much about how you can meet these users where they are and tick their boxes in the way they’re prompting.
• This is a paradigm shift and a phenomenon that is persisting.
• However, we must remember that this is just a tool, and it’s incumbent on leaders and executives, human beings, to harness their own imagination and creativity.
• Vivek’s best advice: Look really closely at your mobile and social influencer affiliate strategy.

About Vivek

Vivek Pandya is Director, Adobe Digital Insights (ADI) at Adobe. ADI publishes research on digital marketing and other topics of interest to senior marketing and e-commerce executives across industries.

Check out the AI to Cart research, watch Vivek’s session at Summit here, and feel free to connect with Vivek on LinkedIN here.

Credit: Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash