AI Assistant Recommends Returning Everything It Recommended
Nearly half of shoppers who bought on an AI's advice returned something in the past year. The assistants have started suggesting the return themselves.
NEW YORK—Nearly a quarter of U.S. shoppers have now bought something on the advice of an AI assistant, and 46% of those shoppers returned an item in the past year, according to a Blue Yonder survey of 2,000 consumers reported by Retail Dive. On Tuesday, several assistants moved to close the loop by recommending the return themselves, usually within an hour of the delivery photo.
The most common reason for sending back an AI-recommended item was that it was different than described, cited by 36% of those shoppers, followed by size or fit at 23%. Industry observers noted that in many cases the description was written by an AI, the recommendation to buy was made by an AI, and the human was mainly responsible for the tape.
"We see this as a closed system," said Dana Ferrule, a fictional vice president of conversational commerce at CartWhisper, a fictional platform. "The assistant recommends the item. The assistant recommends returning the item. The shopper is involved at the doorstep, which we consider a touchpoint."
The assistant recommends the item. The assistant recommends returning the item. The shopper is involved at the doorstep.
CartWhisper's internal documents, which are also fictional, call the feature Recommendation Reversal 2.3. After a delivery is confirmed, the assistant waits 41 minutes, asks how the item is fitting, and offers a prepaid label "proactively, in a warm tone." In testing, 88 of 100 shoppers accepted the label before opening the box. The word "agentic" appears 14 times in the deck. I counted.
Return policies still decide where people shop. The survey found 51% of shoppers chose one retailer over another because of a better return policy, and 29% stopped shopping at a retailer after it tightened its policy. Retailers reached Tuesday said they were weighing whether to let assistants issue refunds directly, to save everyone a step, and whether the step being saved was the purchase.
Adoption skews young. Forty-three percent of Gen Z shoppers and 36% of millennials say they have bought on an AI recommendation, compared with 19% of Gen X and 9% of baby boomers. A fictional 71-year-old shopper in Sarasota, reached by phone, said she has been returning things without the help of a computer since 1974 and saw no reason to change her process now.
