Narvar's 2026 Holiday Shopping Report, released this week, found that 65% of U.S. consumers plan to use AI for at least one part of their holiday shopping this year. Only 8% of retailers describe themselves as very confident using AI to improve the shopping experience. The survey covered 100 retail decision-makers and 1,348 consumers, and the gap between what shoppers expect and what retailers are ready to deliver is the real story.
What The Report Found
Narvar broke down exactly how shoppers plan to use AI this season, and the pattern is consistent across the whole path to purchase. 43% said they're using AI for gift discovery, asking a chatbot what to buy instead of scrolling a category page. 33% said they use AI to compare products and summarize reviews before checking out. 29% are using AI to budget and plan holiday spend. 15% are already using AI to manage what happens after checkout, tracking packages and handling returns.
Nearly 8 in 10 shoppers, 78%, said they would use AI-powered tools if doing so made the shopping experience feel more personalized. That's a majority of the market telling retailers exactly what they want.
Retailers are not there yet. Only 14% expect greater use of AI shopping assistants to be the biggest behavioral shift this season. Most are still putting their attention on shipping costs, discount timing, and operational execution, the same playbook retailers have run for years. Narvar's data shows a market where demand moved first and supply hasn't caught up.
The same report also found January returns climbed nearly twice as fast as holiday sales last year, a sign shoppers are buying faster and more cautiously at the same time. AI-assisted comparison shopping likely plays a part in that. A shopper who lets an assistant vet three options before buying still second-guesses the purchase once it arrives, which puts even more weight on product pages being accurate the first time.
What This Means For Marketers And Business Owners
If nearly two thirds of shoppers are asking an AI assistant to find, compare, or vet products before they ever reach your site, your product pages and ad copy need to answer questions an AI would actually ask on a customer's behalf. That means clear, specific value statements near the top of a page instead of vague brand language, real pricing instead of "call for a quote," and product descriptions written to be quoted directly, not just skimmed by a human.
This also changes what a strong ad campaign looks like heading into Q4. A shopper who used AI to shortlist three options before ever clicking an ad is arriving with more intent and less patience for a generic landing page. The businesses that win this season will be the ones whose offer is legible to both a person and an AI assistant summarizing it on their behalf.
This is why platforms such as KenjiAI (kenjiai.com) exist for exactly this kind of shift, helping small businesses build ad campaigns and landing pages that convert real intent instead of just attracting clicks.
What To Watch Next
Test your own product pages the way a shopper's AI assistant would. Open ChatGPT or Gemini, describe what you sell, and see what the assistant surfaces back. If the summary is vague or wrong, a real customer is getting that same vague or wrong answer right now.
Before Black Friday planning locks in, audit your top five product or service pages for one thing: can someone understand your actual offer and price in the first two sentences, without scrolling. Narvar's own data says 78% of shoppers want that kind of clarity enough to reward it with AI-assisted purchases. Retailers who fix this in the next few weeks get a real head start heading into the busiest shopping stretch of the year, while most competitors are still optimizing shipping banners instead of the offer itself.
Small teams have an actual edge here over large retailers. A five-page site is far faster to rewrite for AI-readable clarity than a catalog with thousands of SKUs sitting behind a legacy CMS. The businesses that treat the next few weeks as a content sprint, not just an ad-spend sprint, will show up cleaner in every AI assistant a shopper opens this November.
Published by the Media Traffics | KenjiAI team. kenjiai.com
