AI's Impact on Retail and Consumer Behavior

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Right, we do want to talk a little bit more about artificial intelligence and how it could influence the retail sector in the coming year. Our next guest says, AI driven traffic to retail sites this holiday season surged by five hundred and twenty percent over last year. So what does it mean. Let's ask Kimberly Shanks. She is CEO of nov It's a firm that uses AI to help connect brands with retail customers.

Kim, great to have you here with Vonnie and myself.

Tell us a little bit more about your company and what exactly the role of AI to connect customers.

What actually happens? Is it chatbots? Is it something more?

Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, So, Novie's technology.

We're actually helping retailers and brands increase their sales by ensuring their products are found and trusted and then ultimately recommended by AI models.

So thank chat GBT, Gemini and Claude and so we do this.

We work with you know, leading retailers including Macy's Sephora, target Alta thousands of CpG brands and they rely on us to optimize their product data for AI driven discovery by consumers.

So when you say that, it's basically a consumer who does something and their data is processed and recorded and they're saying, oh, you bought that pair of pants, maybe you would like this pair of pants.

Is that?

Is it as simple as something like that or is it more sophisticated.

It's a little bit different in terms of consumers now flocking to chat, shipt or Gemini and asking questions to actually do their shopping. So they're outsourcing a lot of their research, discount hunting, you know, personalized gift curation to the AI agent who's then gooing and finding products and recommending it to them based on just questions and prompts.

So who are your competitors and how do you stand out from them?

It's interesting.

So there's a couple of different up and coming competitors in the tech space who are helping brands and retailers stand out in AI shopping. But we also have a lot of the older, more traditional data companies because we are a data company and we feed data with through our partnerships with our retailer partners. So think about Syndigo or Salsify or even Nilsen IQ some of those older data partnership players.

And how then do you get the edge over them.

Yes, So a lot of what we're doing in these partnerships, and we'll be able to announce some of them really soon, is feeding trustworthy personalized information to the models themselves, which is what we have seen at NOV to increase your potential as a brand to show up in AI shopping. So we found that you know, products that have verified trust signals are a selected two hundred and fifty nine percent more often than random chance to think like certifications, reviews, badges,

So one of the things I always think about, Kim is like, how much of what is spent on AI to kind of attract consumers retailers or folks to retailers. So, in other words, that AI driven traffic to retail sites, how much of it is productive that results in actually a consumer buying something?

Yeah, that's actually a very interesting question. So we're seeing the traffic start to increase. There's actually we saw from Adobe Analytics, like we just said, five hundred and twenty percent over last year from AI.

But what we're not sure about yet is conversion.

And this is just because CHATCHABT, Gemini, none of them are publishing the conversion results, but we at NOV What we did see is that chatgbt's shopping research answers sent consumers directly to the brand's website eighty six percent of the time, which means that the remainder of traffic, you know, only about fourteen percent was sent to the large retailers

Interesting.

Okay, So would you say, based on the data that you see, because you see so much data that the consumer's.

Doing well, that retail's doing.

Well, like how much you can obviously break it down, probably a lot, So give us a little bit of insight as we get ready to wrap up this holiday shopping season.

Well, so what we're actually seeing is, you know, consumers are using AI as their category manager. So think of it as we all used to trust the big box retailers for their ability to manage each shopping category, do the curation for us, and that's why you walked into a target, right. They scoured the earth for the best, most compelling products and we trusted them.

To do that.

But now, and what we say saw play out this holiday season, the consumer has shifted their trust to AI to do the research and curation for them. So we're seeing strong numbers and users using chat to bet and shopping, but it's just not quite played out yet and we'll see that in twenty twenty six.

Is where that conversion is going to happen.

If it's going to happen direct on the brand websites are still in retail.

Kimbridy, just a word on yourselves. How difficult is it to raise money? What are the key words that investors are looking for these days? And you know the key ideas.

Yes, AI is definitely the hot topic. If you are not involved in AI, doing something future with your company that's progressing AI.

So for example, we're an agentic commerce.

That is what is hot for investors these days, and that's what is raising money and getting the majority of the capital in Soli Valley.

Well, the very best of luck. It sounds like a fantastic endeavor, and I know you have a lot of experience, so I think if anybody can continue to do it, you certainly can. That is Kimberly Shank, CEO of nov