Perplexity is relaunching its AI-powered shopping experience for free for all users ahead of Black Friday, with memory improvements, personalization and product cards, the company said in a press release Wednesday.
The revamped shopping experience is more conversational. The AI tool will help people narrow down the type of product they are looking for. It will also call upon past chats to personalize product recommendations. Perplexity said new intelligent product cards will showcase the best options, which is better than the "endless grid of items" that cannot "inspire joy."
The revamped shopping experience is more conversational.
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Perplexity will leverage its PayPal partnership from earlier this year to help with checkout.
Since consumers are increasingly conversing with AI chatbots when shopping online, AI companies are releasing more comprehensive shopping experiences to keep users coming back. This includes adding more information, images and checkout functions. And with AI-powered web browsers, like Perplexity Comet or ChatGPT Atlas, agentic features let the AI browse the net and fill shopping carts on behalf of the user. Gemini from Google has recently added a feature that automatically buys a product if it hits a desired price point.
AI-powered checkout is not without its problems. There is a concern that brands are tuning their content to be easily digestible by AI. Although AI platforms try to pull from authoritative sources, some review sites are actively blocking AI crawlers. The result is that the AI can be based more on marketing content than on unbiased critical reviews. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)