AI Is Changing the Way We Shop. Is Your Retail or Wholesale Giftware Business Ready to Be Found?

A couple of years ago, most conversations about AI in retail seemed to concentrate on what businesses could do with the technology themselves. Personalised recommendations, automated customer service, stock forecasting and faster content production were usually somewhere on the list. All of that is still developing, but I think the more interesting marketing question has moved on.

AI is beginning to influence what happens before somebody reaches your website, searches a retailer's product catalogue or walks into a shop. Consumers are using AI tools to research purchases, compare options, find deals and narrow down what they might buy. The next stage, which is already developing quickly, is AI doing more of that work on the customer's behalf.

For giftware businesses, that creates a fairly fundamental question. If somebody asks an AI assistant to help them find a present rather than searching directly for your product, how does your brand or product make it into the conversation?

That is where I think this becomes much more than another technology story.

Product discovery is changing

An IBM and National Retail Federation study published at the beginning of 2026 surveyed 18,000 consumers globally. It found that 41% were already using AI assistants to research products, 33% to look for reviews and 31% to find deals. IBM's wider argument is that commerce is gradually moving beyond AI-assisted research towards AI agents that can influence, filter and eventually make buying decisions.

We should keep those figures in context. It is a global study and it certainly doesn't mean traditional search, retail websites or physical shops are disappearing. But there is enough happening to start thinking seriously about the marketing implications.

One of the biggest changes is in the way people can describe what they want. A conventional online shopping journey often starts with a product. Somebody searches for a candle, a mug, a birthday card or a piece of jewellery and starts narrowing down the choices.

AI is much better suited to a different type of request: "I need a present under £30 for my sister who has just moved house, likes cooking and doesn't want anything too obvious."

The customer hasn't chosen a category. They have described the person, the occasion, the budget and the problem they want to solve.

Leading global management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG) describes this as a move towards shopping "missions", with consumers increasingly looking for something that satisfies a combination of context, preferences and constraints rather than simply browsing individual product categories.

Giftware is particularly exposed to that change because gifting has always worked like this. People will know who they are buying for long before they know what they want to buy.

Being found depends on being understood

Imagine two products. The first is described online as a "green ceramic mug, 350ml". The second has all of the same practical information, but the retailer or supplier also makes it clear what collection it belongs to, the style and design story behind it, the occasions it might suit and the other products it works alongside.

A person can interpret a photograph and fill in quite a lot of those gaps themselves. An AI system trying to recommend something also needs enough reliable information to understand what it is looking at. This is where I would resist the temptation to immediately turn AI discovery into another specialist marketing acronym.

There is already plenty of discussion about GEO, AEO and optimising content for generative search. Some of that will become important. I wouldn't start there. I'd start by asking how good the information already available about the business actually is.

Are your shop details correct? Do your main products have useful descriptions? Are prices and availability consistent? Are your ranges clearly organised? Can somebody understand the difference between two similar products without already knowing the collection? Does Google know where your shops are? Does your website agree with your other listings?

These are basic marketing jobs, but AI is giving them a new significance.

Research published by Searchable this summer tested more than 72,000 questions about UK high-street retailers across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. It reported that 64% of the businesses tested had at least one false fact returned about them, including errors relating to locations and contact information. Searchable operates in the AI visibility market, so I wouldn't treat its research as a definitive measure of the entire UK high street, but the examples highlight a very real problem.

If a potential customer asks where your nearest shop is and receives the wrong postcode, there is nothing theoretical about the marketing impact.

For wholesalers, this goes much further than your own website

This is where I think the conversation becomes particularly relevant to established giftware wholesalers.

You may never sell directly to the person asking an AI assistant for that housewarming present. Your retailer will. The quality of the product information you give that retailer therefore affects how well your products can be marketed once they have left your business.

We already see this when suppliers provide a retailer with a beautifully designed catalogue but poor digital assets. Someone then has to find the photography, rewrite the descriptions, check dimensions, chase missing information and work out how the collection should appear online.

AI doesn't remove that problem. If anything, it exposes it. Accurate product titles, descriptions, photography, pricing information, dimensions, materials, barcodes and other relevant attributes give retailers better raw material to work with. For businesses carrying large numbers of SKUs, this is also where a properly managed PIM, or Product Information Management system, becomes increasingly valuable.

I think this now belongs in the conversation about retail readiness. We have been making the case elsewhere that retail buyers are evaluating much more than the product when they consider a supplier. They want to understand how easy the range will be to list, merchandise, sell and replenish.

Add digital discovery to that. If your retailer's ecommerce team can put a new collection live quickly because the information and assets are ready, you are making life easier for the customer you actually sell to. If their search technology or an external AI assistant can then understand the products properly, that supplier preparation carries all the way through to the consumer.

That is a much more useful way of thinking about AI than asking the marketing team to produce twice as many social posts with ChatGPT.

Your brand may matter more as comparison gets easier

There is an apparent contradiction in all of this that I find interesting. If AI makes products easier to compare, you might assume brands become less important. I think the opposite could easily happen for the strongest ones.

BCG distinguishes between "destination retailers", which customers actively seek out, and retailers that depend more heavily on being surfaced during evaluation through platforms and AI tools. Its argument is that businesses with stronger direct customer relationships are in a better position to protect loyalty and their connection with the consumer.

There is a useful marketing principle buried in there for giftware businesses too. You want to be findable when somebody doesn't know you. You also want enough people to look for you by name. That means I wouldn't respond to AI search by filling a website with hundreds of generic articles targeting every imaginable version of "gift for mum". If the internet fills with increasingly similar AI-written content, producing more of it isn't much of a point of difference.

Brand building still matters. PR matters. Retail relationships matter. Useful email marketing matters. Good social content matters when it gives somebody a reason to remember who produced it. There are thousands of mugs, candles, greetings cards and small gifts available to the consumer. The job of marketing has never simply been to prove that yours exists.

The high street still has an important advantage

There is another reason I wouldn't frame this as the beginning of the end for physical retail. Sometimes people go shopping because they don't know what they want.

A good independent gift shop, department store or garden centre can do something particularly valuable in that situation. It can put products together in unexpected ways, introduce somebody to a new brand and give them the pleasure of discovering something they weren't searching for.

McKinsey's 2026 work on AI and physical retail suggests that stores remain important even as more research and comparison takes place before somebody visits them. Its research is US-based, so the consumer findings shouldn't simply be treated as UK figures, but the distinction it draws between convenience-led and discovery-led shopping is highly relevant.

McKinsey argues that physical stores can increasingly provide product validation, immediate availability, service and differentiated experiences after some of the initial research has happened digitally.

For gift retail, I think discovery is an important part of that opportunity. The marketing job is to make the digital and physical experiences support each other. If somebody asks an AI tool for somewhere nearby to buy a particular kind of gift, your shop needs to be findable and accurately represented. Once they arrive, the range, merchandising, people and experience need to give them reasons to stay.

This is also why local information shouldn't be treated as an admin job that somebody checks once every two years. Opening hours, locations, product information, reviews, imagery and the wider digital footprint of a retailer increasingly contribute to the journey into the physical shop.

AI agents make trust more important too

There is another development worth watching, although I wouldn't suggest most giftware businesses need to redesign their strategy around it yet.

AI tools are moving beyond recommending products towards what is usually called agentic commerce, where an AI assistant can take more actions on the customer's behalf.

There are good reasons to be interested and equally good reasons to be cautious. Reuters reported this week that major banks including NatWest and Bank of America have raised concerns around fraud, scams, customer data and accountability as AI agents become more involved in online transactions. The same report noted that John Lewis had seen searches arriving through AI agents rise from 0.3% to 2.5% in a year.

For most giftware businesses, payment regulation isn't the immediate marketing issue. Trust is. If AI is answering customer questions on your behalf, the answers need to be reliable. If you use automation in customer service, people need a sensible route to a human when it can't resolve something. If AI helps produce product copy or marketing information, somebody still needs to know that what goes live is correct.

Saving time is useful. Creating uncertainty for the customer isn't.

What I would do now

I wouldn't advise an established giftware business to throw its marketing plan away and start again because AI shopping is developing quickly. I would use this moment to check some of the foundations that will matter regardless of exactly how the technology develops.

• Search for your own business properly. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI tools the questions a potential customer or retailer might ask. Don't only search the company name. Try products, occasions, locations and categories and see when you appear, what is said about you and where the obvious gaps are.
• Review the product information you already have. Look at your website, retailer feeds, product catalogue, trade portal and other digital channels. Check for inconsistencies and thin descriptions. If information lives across several disconnected spreadsheets and systems, understand where the reliable version actually sits.
• Look at products through the customer's problem rather than your internal category structure. People buy gifts for occasions, recipients and moments in their lives. The way you describe and market ranges should help people make those connections.
• Make your retailers better equipped to sell the range. Give them strong photography, usable descriptions and accurate product information in a format their teams can actually work with. This was important before AI and it is becoming more important now.
• Keep investing in reasons for people to remember you. Visibility through search and AI matters, but so does direct demand. Build the brand, your retail relationships and the channels where you have a direct connection with customers.
• Start measuring what is actually happening. Look at AI referral traffic where it can be identified, listen to the questions customers and retailers are asking and keep reviewing how people reach you. This market is moving too quickly to rely on assumptions made even a couple of years ago.

I suspect there will be plenty of new AI tools sold to the retail and gift industries over the next few years. Some will be genuinely useful. Others will solve problems most businesses didn't know they had until somebody tried to sell them the software.

The more immediate marketing challenge is considerably more familiar.

Understand how your customer is changing. Make your business easy to find and easy to understand. Give retailers what they need to sell your products properly. Build a brand people have a reason to remember. Then use the technology where it genuinely makes those things work better.

AI may be changing how somebody finds the gift. We still have to give them a reason to choose it.