Artificial intelligence has stopped being something people try and started being something they shop with. In our research into how UK consumers now buy online, 95% said they have used AI tools and 73% use them regularly. That is no longer early adoption. It is the mainstream, and it has reached the point of purchase.
For anyone building digital products or running an online brand, the more useful question is not whether shoppers use AI, but where in the journey they use it and who they trust to guide them. The answers point to a shift that most retail websites are not yet built for.
AI has reached the buying decision, not just discovery
It is easy to assume AI sits at the top of the funnel, helping people research before they buy in the usual way. The data says otherwise. Almost three quarters of shoppers, 73%, have used AI to help them shop, and 53% have gone on to buy something an AI recommended. That is the difference between a tool that informs a decision and a tool that makes one.
At the same time, traditional on-site search is quietly failing. 85% of shoppers told us they leave a website when its search cannot find what they are looking for. They do not persevere and they rarely come back. Increasingly they open a general AI assistant instead, with 28% turning to ChatGPT. Every one of those moments is a customer stepping outside the brand's own environment to get help the brand could have given them.
The real contest is over trust
Once AI is guiding the decision, the important question becomes who the shopper trusts to do the guiding. This is where the findings get interesting, because the habit and the preference point in different directions.
People reach for ChatGPT because it is familiar. But when we asked who they would actually trust to recommend products, 42% preferred a brand's own AI assistant, against 34% who preferred ChatGPT. Six in ten, 60%, said they trust a brand-owned AI more than a general-purpose one. The instinct to use the big platform is strong, but the trust sits closer to the brand.
Transparency is the reason. 59% named it as the single biggest factor in whether they trust an AI to shop on their behalf. Shoppers want to understand why something is being recommended, whose interests the recommendation serves and what is happening with their data. A general assistant that pulls from the open web cannot always answer those questions. A brand that owns its own assistant can.
Why this matters for brands, and for the data they hold
There is a commercial edge to all of this that is easy to miss. Every time a shopper leaves a brand's site to ask ChatGPT about a product, the brand loses more than a visit. It loses the intent data behind the question, the context of the conversation and the chance to make the next recommendation. That information does not come back. It accrues to the platform instead.
Brand-owned AI changes the arithmetic. When the assistant lives on the brand's own site, the conversation, the intent and the resulting first-party data stay with the brand. In a market where third-party signals are disappearing and first-party data is becoming the most valuable asset a business holds, that is not a small distinction. It is the difference between building an owned relationship and renting access to your own customers through someone else's model.
For digital and tech teams, the implication is practical. The shopping journey is being rebuilt around conversation, and the interface that hosts that conversation decides who keeps the value it creates.
The picture varies by sector
The headline pattern holds across categories, but the intensity differs. In fashion, where choice is overwhelming and sizing and style are personal, shoppers lean heavily on AI to narrow options and are quick to abandon a site that cannot help. In health and supplements, trust and transparency carry even more weight, because the stakes of a recommendation are higher and buyers want to understand the reasoning. In beauty and skincare, discovery and personalisation dominate, with shoppers using AI to find products suited to them specifically rather than to the average customer.
The common thread is that a generic experience underperforms in every category. The brands that do well are the ones that make the AI feel like it belongs to them and works for the shopper, not the ones that bolt on a chatbot and hope.
What to take from this
Three things stand out for anyone working in digital commerce. AI is already inside the buying decision, so treating it as a research tool underestimates where the journey has moved. On-site search is a leak, and when it fails it sends customers to platforms that will happily keep them. And trust, built on transparency, is the deciding factor in who gets to guide the purchase, which is an advantage brands can own rather than one they have to concede.
The shift is happening whether or not the tools are ready for it. The businesses that decide now where AI sits in their experience, and who owns the relationship it creates, will be the ones holding the data and the customer a year from now.
Morvo is a Manchester based AI business building brand-owned AI personal shoppers for ecommerce, so brands keep the conversation, the trust and the first-party data on their own site.
You can read the full research, including the sector breakdowns and the complete findings, here: https://morvo.co.uk/uk-online-shopping-report
