In an Age of AI Shopping Assistants, Conventional Wisdom Prevails: ‘Buyer Beware’

在人工智能购物助手时代，传统智慧依然占上风：“买家需谨慎”

China Shaping the Future 塑造未来的中国

by Zhao Xuemei 作者：赵雪梅

[In Perspective] [观点视角]

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Amazon 亚马逊

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Artificial intelligence is steadily creeping into every aspect of our daily lives, including how we shop, Amazon, Alibaba’s Taobao, TikTok and other online retail sites all offer their own AI shopping assistants, and early numbers suggest the agents are pretty adept at peddling goods.人工智能正稳步渗透到我们日常生活的方方面面，包括我们的购物方式。亚马逊、阿里巴巴的淘宝、抖音以及其他线上零售平台都推出了各自的人工智能购物助手，初步数据显示，这些助手在推销商品方面相当得心应手。

According to Amazon’s own data, shoppers who click a “sponsored prompt” inside Alexa for Shopping end up buying something 48 percent more often and spend 21 percent more on average than those who do not. Roughly half of Walmart’s app users have interacted with its AI assistant Sparky, and according to JD.com, its AI customer-service agent Jingxiaozhi 5.0 offered advice 160 million times during the 2025 Singles Day shopping festival alone, reducing the need for human follow-up by over 28 percent.根据亚马逊自身的数据，在Alexa购物功能中点击“赞助提示”的购物者最终购买商品的频率比未点击的人高48%，平均消费也比未点击的人多21%。沃尔玛约有一半的应用用户与其人工智能助手Sparky有过互动，而京东的数据显示，其人工智能客服助手京小智5.0仅在2025年双十一购物节期间就提供了1.6亿次咨询服务，减少了28%以上的人工跟进需求。

So, these assistants clearly help brands sell more products. But do they really help consumers make more informed choices?那么，这些智能助手显然能帮助品牌卖出更多产品。但它们真的能帮助消费者做出更明智的选择吗？

Credit: Imaginechina图片来源：想象中国

Caption: AI is quickly deployed across China, by users of all ages.说明：人工智能在中国迅速普及，各年龄段用户均有使用。

To answer that question, follow the money. AI assistants require substantial computing power to run, and that power comes at a cost. Who pays for it? Consumers? Brands? The platforms themselves?要回答这个问题，就得追踪资金流向。AI 助手运行需要强大的计算能力，而这种能力是有成本的。谁来为此买单？是消费者、品牌，还是平台自身？

In most cases, it is the brands. That is a rational business model for the platforms because consumers are highly unlikely to be willing to pay extra for an AI shopping assistant. Thus, brands pay to have their products to be featured, giving the platform advertising income, while every product sold generates an additional commission.在大多数情况下，问题出在品牌身上。对平台来说，这是一种合理的商业模式，因为消费者几乎不太愿意为人工智能购物助手额外付费。因此，品牌付费让自家产品获得推荐位，这为平台带来了广告收入，而每售出一件商品，平台还能获得额外的佣金。

As a result, click-through and conversion rates have become the two most important measures of an AI shopping assistant’s performance. What’s more, influence can also help brands sell more indirectly. A new marketing discipline known as “generative engine optimization” has emerged to help brands appear in AI-generated recommendations.因此，点击率和转化率已成为衡量AI购物助手性能的两个最重要指标。此外，影响力还能帮助品牌实现间接的增量销售。一种名为“生成式引擎优化”的全新营销学科应运而生，助力品牌出现在AI生成的推荐内容中。

When an AI assistant recommends only four to six products per query, failing to make that shortlist is close to being invisible. In China, industry reports value this nascent market at more than 4 billion yuan (US$600 million).当人工智能助手每次查询仅推荐四到六款产品时，若未能入选这份精简清单，就几乎等于无人问津。在中国，行业报告显示这个新兴市场的规模超过40亿元人民币（合6亿美元）。

What do consumers gain in the process? Traditionally, online shoppers have relied on search boxes or recommendation feeds. Such advice is typically one-way and non-interactional. Whether you find something you like depends entirely on platform algorithms. Search requires keywords, usually no more than 10 words, and shoppers often have to try several variations before getting useful results.消费者在这一过程中能获得什么？传统上，线上购物者依赖搜索框或推荐信息流。这类建议通常是单向且无互动性的。你能否找到心仪的商品完全取决于平台算法。搜索需要输入关键词，通常不超过10个字符，而购物者往往需要尝试多种变体才能获得有用的结果。

An AI shopping assistant, on the other hand, offers a fundamentally different entry point – a conversation. Consumers can describe what they want in long, detailed sentences, giving the platform a far clearer picture of their needs and then allowing it to search vast product catalogs for the closest possible matches.而人工智能购物助手则提供了一种截然不同的入口——对话交互。消费者可以用冗长、详细的句子描述自己的需求，这能让平台更清晰地了解其诉求，进而在海量商品目录中搜索最匹配的结果。

This raises an obvious question: Are products recommended truly the best choices or is there an advertising bias built in? For independent AI platforms, the picture looks different. OpenAI describes product results in ChatGPT Shopping as “organic and unsponsored,” ranked by relevance rather than ad spending, while Perplexity says advertisers cannot buy their way into its recommendations. OpenAI began testing clearly labeled advertising in ChatGPT earlier this year – a reminder that such independence is a business choice, not a permanent guarantee.这就引出了一个显而易见的问题：被推荐的产品真的是最佳选择，还是其中暗藏了广告偏向？对于独立的人工智能平台而言，情况则有所不同。OpenAI 将 ChatGPT 购物功能中的产品搜索结果描述为“自然且无赞助”，其排序依据是相关性而非广告投入；而 Perplexity 则表示，广告商无法通过付费获得其推荐列表中的位置。今年早些时候，OpenAI 开始在 ChatGPT 中测试带有明确标识的广告功能——这也提醒我们，这种独立性只是一种商业选择，而非永久的保障。

AI assistants built into e-commerce platforms do carry sponsored recommendations, making many consumers leery about trusting AI assistants with purchase decisions. A survey released by the Shanghai Consumer Council in June, based on 4,308 responses collected through the council’s WeChat account, found that while 85 percent of respondents said they had tried AI-powered product selection features, only 16 percent said they believed the recommendations accurately matched their needs.电商平台内置的人工智能助手会推送付费推荐，这让许多消费者不敢将购买决策交给人工智能助手。上海市消费者权益保护委员会于6月发布的一项基于其微信公众号收集的4308份反馈的调查显示，尽管85%的受访者表示曾尝试过人工智能驱动的商品挑选功能，但仅有16%的受访者认为这些推荐能准确匹配自身需求。

Notably, a survey of more than 10,000 consumers by China’s National Business Daily ahead of this year’s mid-year shopping festival found that over 70 percent of respondents believe AI’s greatest value lies in optimizing supply chains and making goods cheaper, while only 16 percent wanted AI to handle shopping tasks like price comparison and product selection. In the same survey, 48 percent said AI’s role should be to save time and effort, not to take away the fun of shopping or eliminate the consumer’s final say.值得注意的是，《中国经营报》在今年年中购物节前夕对超1万名消费者开展的一项调查显示，超70%的受访者认为人工智能最大的价值在于优化供应链、降低商品价格，而仅有16%的受访者希望人工智能来完成比价、选品等购物任务。在同一项调查中，48%的受访者表示人工智能的作用应是节省时间和精力，而非剥夺购物的乐趣或剥夺消费者的最终决定权。

Consumers need a new kind of skill – call it AI literacy. Consumers should always ask who is paying. If an assistant or shopping tool discloses a commission or sponsorship, that information should factor into how the recommendation is judged. And any prices quoted by an AI assistant are best treated as unverified until checked against a retailer’s own page.消费者需要一种新的技能——可以称之为AI素养。消费者应当始终弄清楚是谁在付费。如果一款助手或购物工具披露了佣金或赞助信息，消费者在判断其推荐时就应将这一信息纳入考量。而且，在对照零售商自有页面核实之前，最好将AI助手给出的所有报价都视为未经证实的信息。

One way to make AI shopping assistants more trustworthy is to build verification directly into them. Shanghai-based Dewu, for instance, uses an AI-powered authentication system to verify products before sale, and its overall rate of returned goods of around 5 percent stands far below the 35 percent typical of livestream e-commerce. When every AI judgment is traceable, consumers respond with trust.让AI购物助手更值得信赖的一种方法是将验证功能直接内置其中。例如，总部位于上海的得物就采用了AI驱动的认证系统，在商品销售前进行核验，其整体退货率约为5%，远低于直播电商35%的平均水平。当每一次AI判断都可追溯时，消费者便会给予信任。

In China, a large number of shoppers continue to turn to social media – Xiaohongshu (RedNote), for example – to read other consumers’ first-hand experiences before making a decision. That habit may be another pointer to the future. If social media data can be effectively combined with AI shopping assistants, reviews and recommendations from real people might increase consumer trust. Until then, the wise consumer is the one who keeps asking an AI assistant a very human question: whose interests are you really working for?在中国，大量消费者在做决策前仍会转向小红书等社交媒体平台，查看其他消费者的第一手体验。这一习惯或许预示着未来的发展趋势。若能将社交媒体数据与人工智能购物助手有效结合，真实用户的评价和推荐或许能提升消费者的信任度。在此之前，明智的消费者会一直向人工智能助手提出一个极具人情味的问题：你真正为谁的利益服务？

(The author is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Information Science, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.)（作者为上海社会科学院信息研究所助理研究员。）

Editor: Liu Qi 编辑：刘琦