Question

How has the use of artificial intelligence by retailers changed from last year, and what impact is this expected to have on traffic to U.S. retail sites?

Answer 1

Do you mean a specific report or news story? If so, please paste the link or tell me which study/article — I can summarize the exact year‑over‑year change and the traffic projection.

If you don’t have a particular source, here’s a concise, evidence‑based summary of the typical changes and expected effects seen across the retail industry:

- How AI use has changed year‑over‑year
- Adoption has moved from pilots to production: far more retailers are deploying AI in customer‑facing and back‑office systems rather than just experimenting.
- Broader use cases: beyond basic personalization, retailers now commonly use AI for search and recommendation engines, conversational assistants/chatbots, dynamic pricing and promotions, inventory and demand forecasting, fraud detection, and creative/marketing automation.
- More advanced tech: increased use of large language models and multimodal AI (for product descriptions, chat, image search) versus last year’s simpler rule‑based or narrowly trained models.
- Organizational changes: more investment in data infrastructure, hiring of AI/ML specialists, and partnerships with AI vendors.

- Expected impact on traffic to U.S. retail sites
- Mechanisms: better personalization, improved search/recommendations, and AI‑driven marketing campaigns tend to increase discoverability, engagement, and repeat visits; chatbots and faster fulfillment can reduce abandonment and raise conversion.
- Magnitude: estimates vary by retailer and use case. Industry reports and vendor surveys typically project modest to meaningful uplifts in site traffic and engagement — commonly single‑digit percentage point increases in overall site visits and larger gains in qualified traffic and conversion (for some retailers mid‑single digits to low‑double digits in traffic/engagement improvements are reported). The exact figure depends on baseline maturity, scale of deployment, and how integrated the AI is into marketing and search.

If you want the precise year‑over‑year numbers and the specific traffic projection cited in a particular article or report, share that source and I’ll extract the exact figures.