Perplexity’s AI Personal Shopper Puts You First
▼ Summary
– Perplexity has launched a free AI-powered shopping feature for US users, similar to offerings from OpenAI and Google, just in time for the holiday season.
– The AI assistant allows users to search for products by typing queries and refining results with follow-up questions, displaying recommendations as cards with specs and reviews.
– Perplexity’s chatbot can remember past interactions to inform future recommendations, such as suggesting boots based on a previous request for a ferry commute jacket.
– The feature includes an “Instant Buy” partnership with PayPal, enabling direct purchases and helping merchants maintain customer relationships as they would on their own sites.
– Perplexity claims its AI assistants understand user intent and preferences, contrasting with search bars that “fail at exploration” and editorial sites that prioritize affiliate revenue over matching users to ideal products.
Perplexity is enhancing its AI shopping capabilities just in time for the holiday rush, introducing a complimentary AI-driven shopping tool currently accessible to users across the United States. This feature operates much like ChatGPT’s shopping research function, allowing individuals to enter their product queries and fine-tune suggestions through additional questions. Recommended items appear as interactive cards displaying detailed specifications and customer feedback, and purchases can be completed directly within Perplexity via merchants that accept PayPal.
The AI assistant demonstrates a notable ability to retain context from previous interactions. For instance, if you previously sought a jacket suitable for a ferry commute across San Francisco Bay, the chatbot will use that information to shape its recommendations when you later inquire about boots. This personalized approach is already live on desktop and web platforms, with mobile availability on iOS and Android expected to roll out in the near future.
Through its “Instant Buy” collaboration with PayPal, Perplexity enables merchants to maintain direct engagement with shoppers and cultivate lasting customer relationships, mirroring the experience found on their own e-commerce sites. This strategy appears designed to counter what some industry observers term “the DoorDash problem,” where third-party platforms can disrupt retailer-customer connections.
In its official announcement, Perplexity critiques traditional search interfaces for their limitations in product discovery and questions editorial sites that may value affiliate commissions over genuinely matching consumers with ideal products. The company argues that contemporary online shopping often emphasizes transaction speed at the expense of the actual shopping experience. In contrast, Perplexity positions its AI assistants, sometimes called agents in the industry, as intelligent tools that comprehend user objectives, recall individual preferences, and function as natural extensions of how people would typically approach shopping tasks independently.
(Source: The Verge)
