Virtual shopping assistants: an in-depth overview for retail businesses

October 6, 2026
Aleksandr Ahramovich

by Aleksandr Ahramovich , 

Head of AI/ML Center of Excellence

Virtual shopping assistants are advanced conversational AI tools that provide 24/7 personalized advice to shoppers. By resolving service queries instantly, these assistants help retailers maximize customer conversion and long-term retention.

With recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly the emergence of generative AI, the operational scope of virtual assistants in retail and ecommerce has rapidly expanded, enabling more convenient and realistic user interactions across the entire customer journey.

Virtual shopping assistants

Top use cases for virtual shopping assistants

Modern conversational AI solutions can easily handle complex interactions, capturing user intent and understanding the tone of a user’s message to provide relevant responses, facilitating conversational commerce. This makes them useful in a variety of pre- and post-purchase scenarios.

Personalized product recommendations

AI-powered virtual assistants use large language models (LLMs) and ML-based recommendation engines to mimic the expert guidance of an in-store salesperson. This bridge between digital and physical retail creates a more immersive and personalized shopping experience. To achieve this, personal shopping assistants can ask follow-up questions to better understand customer needs, combine this information with product data and the customer’s browsing history or past purchases, and recommend products that the shopper will most likely purchase.

Cross-selling & upselling

When a customer adds an item to their cart, the AI-powered shopping assistant can suggest complementary products or premium upgrades, anticipating customer needs in real-time to increase the average order value. For example, if the customer was recently interested in travel accessories and has just added standard Bluetooth headphones to their cart, the assistant can suggest a more expensive noise-canceling model and highlight that it offers a better listening experience while traveling.

Abandoned shopping cart recovery

With 70% of online carts being abandoned, AI assistants offer a critical solution. They help recover lost sales by proactively engaging users with targeted discounts or alternative shipping options the moment an item is left behind. For this, the assistant first estimates potential abandonment reasons and anticipates the most effective incentives based on the customer’s current cart and past behavior and interactions. Then, it can reach out to the customer at the right moment to address potential objections, motivating them to complete the transaction, or suggest cheaper deals for items with comparable features.

Customer support & query resolution

Increasing digital transaction volumes, coupled with a need for personalized 24/7 support availability and increasing labor costs, are putting a strain on retail companies’ customer support operations. That’s why many retail businesses are now complementing their customer support staff with AI chatbots and virtual assistants to handle service cases around the clock and efficiently resolve customer queries. These solutions are now increasingly applied to provide information on specific products or physical store working hours, facilitate order tracking, and assist with user password resets, shopping list management, product returns and exchanges, and other operations.

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Trends on virtual shopping assistants in retail & ecommerce

Current statistics on virtual shopping assistants demonstrate that AI-powered solutions are being actively adopted by modern retail companies, with more and more customers turning to AI assistants at every stage of their purchase journey, from product discovery to checkout and beyond.

Market trends

The virtual shopping assistant market is estimated to be valued at $1.47 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $10.87 billion by 2033, growing at a CAGR of 33.1%

Coherent Market Insights

Retail and ecommerce represent the leading sector in the global conversational AI market, which includes virtual assistants and AI chatbots, with a share of 21%

Fortune Business Insights

Agentic commerce is expected to drive up to $1 trillion in the US B2C retail revenue by 2030

McKinsey

Usage scenarios & payoffs

48% of Millennials and almost 60% of Gen Z consumers surveyed in 2025 reported using AI shopping assistants or ChatGPT to facilitate their online purchases

Statista

52% of consumers use virtual assistants that automate re-ordering or meal planning at least once a week

Capgemini

31% of US consumers are willing to allow AI to narrow product choices for household supplies purchases, and 28% are willing to do so for personal electronics purchases

Gartner

At least 70% of consumers are forecasted to begin their customer service interactions using conversational AI solutions by 2028

Gartner

Scheme title: American customers' use of AI in secondhand shopping in 2026
Data source: Statista

Consumer perspective

When buying online, 77% of consumers worldwide want retailers to provide virtual try-on capabilities, and 76% desire AI-powered online shopping assistants

Statista

More than 60% of consumers recognize the value of AI in providing product recommendations

Statista

A total of 62.7% of respondents in the United States are at least somewhat comfortable with the use of AI for grocery shopping suggestions

Statista

AI referrals convert at 31% higher rates than other traffic sources, with consumers landing on retail sites from generative AI assistants being 33% less likely to leave immediately

Adobe

37% of AI-assisted shoppers purchase more goods per order, and 39% try new brands they would not have thought of

Locus

Real-world examples of virtual shopping assistants

Retailers and ecommerce companies can choose from a variety of virtual shopping assistants on the market today and use them to handle diverse tasks, from providing personalized product recommendations to shoppers to streamlining order management.

AI shopping assistant by Itransition

A US-based online household goods store teamed up with Itransition to build a virtual shopping consultant providing users with personalized product recommendations. The GenAI-powered solution can adjust suggestions based on real-time product availability and assist with checkout operations. After its implementation, the company achieved a 50% reduction in overall manpower effort for resolving customer queries.

Amazon Alexa Voice Shopping

Alexa Voice Shopping is a feature that enables users to make purchases on the Amazon ecommerce platform using voice commands through Alexa-enabled devices, such as Amazon Echo. Shoppers can ask Alexa to search for specific products, provide personalized suggestions, add items to their shopping list and cart, check out, and track their orders.

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Salesforce Agentforce

Agentforce is an agentic AI platform built into Salesforce that enables retailers to set up and deploy autonomous AI agents across a variety of business functions. Within their broad scope, these tools can also serve as virtual shopping assistants, helping customers explore new products, check order history, reorder the same items, and monitor order status.

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Walmart’s Sparky

Sparky is a GenAI-powered virtual assistant recently integrated into the Walmart mobile app and designed to enhance the online shopping experience. Walmart’s AI assistant can provide personalized recommendations, summarize product reviews, and compare purchasing options to help users make more informed decisions, as well as facilitating procedures such as reordering or service booking.

Walmart mobile app interface with an integrated AI shopping assistant, Sparky

Image title: Sparky’s user interface
Image source: Walmart

Benefits of adopting virtual shopping assistants

Virtual shopping assistants help retail and ecommerce companies stay competitive in the modern market, meet rising customer expectations, and handle increasing operational costs, while enhancing customer satisfaction with 24/7 availability of real-time support.

24/7 support

Customers can get help from virtual assistants even outside business hours.

Personalized suggestions

Virtual assistants provide advice tailored to customers' past purchases and browsing behavior.

Faster issue resolution

Virtual assistants eliminate wait times, providing instant answers to customers’ queries.

Improved customer engagement

Dynamic conversations with virtual assistants make the shopping journey more interactive and enticing.

Improved operational efficiency

Through the automation of routine tasks like returns management or cart recovery, virtual assistants help mitigate customer service workload and cut operational costs.

Increased conversion rate & revenues

Virtual assistants encourage purchases and help reduce cart abandonment via personalization, boosting sales and average order value.

Seamless VoC data collection

Businesses can extract actionable insights from each interaction between AI assistants and users to refine their strategies for assortment, replenishment, and other key retail aspects.

Superior service scalability

Unlike human agents, virtual assistants can handle multiple customer queries at once, especially during peak seasons.

Reduced product returns

Guided by a virtual shopping assistant, customers make more informed decisions, buying products that truly meet their expectations.

Challenges & tips for implementing virtual shopping assistants

Virtual shopping assistants, while beneficial in many ways, can be challenging to implement, so retailers should know how to mitigate potential implementation hurdles in advance, achieving smooth solution adoption and operation.

Issue

Recommendations
Risk of inaccuracies
Virtual shopping assistants are valuable tools as long as they provide users with accurate and relevant information. If an assistant recommends out-of-stock items or irrelevant products, customer trust and conversion rates will decline.
  • To prevent AI hallucinations or inaccuracies, train the AI assistant on relevant scenarios and select a large set of suitable test cases to verify that the solution performs as expected and meets all business requirements.
  • Connect the AI assistant with your corporate systems via APIs, middleware, or other integration options. This way, the solution will combine contextual customer data (such as their purchase history and browsing patterns) with other information from the integrated systems (for instance, real-time stock levels from your inventory management system) to provide more relevant assistance.
  • After deployment, assess the solution against selected performance metrics and execute regular retraining iterations to adjust the AI model with new data sets and expand this database with real-life information. You can also implement a feedback loop mechanism enabling users to report inaccurate or unclear responses to optimize the model accordingly.
Cumbersome interactions
While inaccurate responses certainly annoy users, there are many other factors that can ruin the user experience and lead to abandonment, including excessively long conversation flows.
  • Limit the number of questions the virtual assistant can ask during each sales stage, focusing on the most relevant ones, and control the volume of information provided to avoid overwhelming the customer with unnecessary details.
  • Implement a human handoff mechanism to reroute a query to a human agent when the virtual assistant is unable to handle it, preventing users from getting stuck in a loop of unhelpful responses.
Data privacy & security concerns
AI systems’ need to process large volumes of data, including personal information, can raise concerns among both the public and regulatory agencies about how such data is collected and handled, as well as drawing the attention of hackers and fraudsters.
  • Make sure to create data privacy, security, and regulatory compliance strategies during the design and planning stages of your AI assistant implementation project.
  • To secure sensitive data, implement multi-factor authentication (MFA), continuous user activity monitoring, and end-to-end encryption into your AI assistant to prevent data breaches and ensure regulatory compliance with GDPR, PCI DSS, and CCPA.

Full-cycle AI services from Itransition

Itransition provides an extensive range of AI services and solutions to help retailers engage their audience and scale their business operations.

AI development

AI development

Our specialists build chatbots, virtual assistants, AI agents, and many other artificial intelligence solutions that combine top performance with strict regulatory compliance, taking care of front-end and back-end development, software integration, QA and testing, and post-launch support.

AI consulting

We provide expert advisory across each step of the artificial intelligence implementation lifecycle, assisting your company with project planning and supervision, software design, and user adoption to maximize the value of your AI solution.

About Itransition

Delivering AI development and consulting services for 5+ years

25+ years of experience in software development and consulting

Internal AI/ML Center of Excellence

Microsoft Solutions Partner in Data & AI

AI Platform on Microsoft Azure specialization

AWS Advanced Consulting Partner status holder

Awards and recognitions from Deloitte, Gartner, Forrester, and Everest Group

Quality and information security management systems compliant with ISO 9001 and ISO 27001

Combining personalization & scalability with virtual assistants

Combining personalization & scalability with virtual assistants

With the exponential rise of ecommerce, retailers seek innovative ways to enhance shopping experiences, implementing solutions from augmented reality and mixed reality-driven websites to chatbots and conversational AI systems. While rule-based chatbots frequently fail to mimic human-like behavior, AI-powered virtual shopping assistants are posed to bridge this gap. Capable of understanding user intent and dialog context, they offer realistic interactions and instant support around the clock to thousands of customers.

For companies looking to advance their retail strategy by implementing a conversational AI solution, Itransition offers its strategic guidance and proven delivery capabilities.

Enhance the shopping experience with Itransition’s AI solutions

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