Getting the best deals on Black Friday used to require camping out for hours outside a Best Buy or Walmart and then stampeding into a store at the crack of dawn. Now, the savviest bargain hunters are turning to ChatGPT and other AI tools to get the job done.
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Jim Malervy, 46, who lives in Philadelphia, is for the second year in a row using ChatGPT and other AI tools for his Christmas shopping. Last year, an AI-powered pricing app ultimately helped the marketing executive get a $50 discount on an iPad for his older daughter.
This year, he’s on the hunt to get his younger daughter a Margot Robbie rollerblading Barbie doll from the popular movie. He plans to use a range of apps including Paypal’s Honey, which scours sites for the best prices. His deal target: A 30% discount.
Leaving the stress of stores behind, he said AI helps take the FOMO out of Black Friday shopping. “Sometimes you get anxiety,” said Malervy, who runs the site AI GPT Journal. “You want to make sure you’re getting the right price.”
Malervy is among the 44% of likely Black Friday shoppers who say they plan to use AI this year, according to a survey of 2,000 consumers by research group Attest. More AI companies, including OpenAI and Perplexity AI, have recently expanded their search and shopping features to get consumers to use their tools during the holiday season.
Retailers are bracing for the most shoppers on record over the Thanksgiving weekend. Chains like Kohl’s Corp. and Best Buy Co., historically big Black Friday destinations, on Tuesday reported dour sales outlooks, warning that shoppers are holding out for big sales events.
Glimpse of the Future
American shoppers are entering the holiday shopping season with a host of stressors, from inflation to fallout to a polarizing presidential election to multiple ongoing wars. They’re not only being choosy about how to spend their money, but they’re looking for ways to ease the burdens of buying presents at reasonable prices.
That’s prompted some consumers to put their holiday shopping into the (digital) hands of the bots. Retailers like Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc. are also leaning into AI to make shopping — and deal finding — easier.
“I do think this is a glimpse of the future,” John David Rainey, Walmart’s chief financial officer, said in an interview. He said the retailer is working on AI tools to improve product searches.
Frédéric Bourgeois-LeBlanc, a 32-year old from Montreal, said he used to go to Best Buy to snag the newest gadgets. But shopping has gotten too stressful and now requires too much research to find the best product at the best price, Bourgeois-LeBlanc, who works in public relations, said.
In lieu of scouring review sites and watching online tutorials, he said he’s turned to Weever.AI, a recently launched site that allows shoppers to ask questions and get back product recommendations. This Black Friday, Bourgeois-LeBlanc is pining for gaming headphones for his Xbox. He said AI makes it easier for “someone like me who is not used to really doing significant research.”
At Weever, the company is bracing its systems for an onslaught of users. “We know we’re going to have a surge,” said Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Frédéric Marcoux. Perplexity AI, which recently released a shopping bot, also said it was seeing increased volume of searches around “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday.”
The AI tools can also put a new spin on the old tradition of designing an all-day shopping plan. Instead of spending hours finding store hours and deals, ChatGPT can spit out an itinerary for even the most extreme Black Friday shoppers.
On a recent quest for a Black Friday itinerary, ChatGPT suggested a 12-hour romp through New York City that began with a 6:30 a.m. start at iconic flagship Macy’s Inc. in Herald Square. It included “luxury shopping” on Fifth Avenue, “trendy finds” in Soho and stops at Best Buy, the B&H electronics emporium and the Strand bookstore, as well as lunch at Chelsea Market. The itinerary came with a reminder to “stay hydrated and wear comfortable shoes” because the “walking and crowds can be intense.”
To be sure, generative AI like ChatGPT tends to require some fine-tuning. The AI’s answers aren’t fixed and it relies on probability to decide what answers to give. In some cases, it gives inaccurate or outdated information.
Prompted with the question, “Where should I go Black Friday shopping in NYC?” ChatGPT suggested lunch at the food hall at the Plaza Hotel, which has been closed for years.
When pushed to suggest other options, the bot recommended fast food joint Shake Shack for lunch and hot spot Carbone for dinner, which unsurprisingly has no reservations on that day, or for the next month. ChatGPT warns users that it can make mistakes and “encourages users to fact check any important information,” an OpenAI spokesperson said. Paid versions of the service have real-time search capabilities, and therefore may produce different — and more accurate — results.
Unlocking Deals
In many cases, shoppers say the best deals are no longer at brick-and-mortar stores or easily identified at retailer’s own websites. In the modern era of dynamic pricing and rapidly changing deals, shoppers have had to up their game.
“Sometimes you’ll look them up and it’ll be like the deals from 2020,” said Lisi, 17, a student and online influencer who goes by Lisi Shops on Youtube and TikTok and asked Bloomberg to withhold her last name. “It’s like, no, I want the deals from this year.”
Lisi said she’s been studying AI in school and began warming up to the idea of using ChatGPT for finding deals after spending hours searching for them online.
Sana Akibu, a digital merchandising manager in Gaithersburg, Maryland, said she now starts every shopping search on ChatGPT.
Earlier this year, she saw a deal for a bracelet on Instagram but then wasn’t able to find it again. “I swore I’d seen their deals before. So then I was like, you know what, let me ask ChatGPT just to see what happens,” Akibu said.
She input promo codes for the brand and the date to make sure it was a recent deal. “That unlocked a whole new shopping experience,” she said. She plans to at least use the bot for Black Friday holiday shopping for her family, and likely more.
— With assistance from Jade Khatib, Jaewon Kang and Shirin Ghaffary.