---
title: "When the shopping assistant chooses (research idea)"
description: "Purchase intention, purchase decisions and consumer choice appear on 178 recent papers, mostly in management and economics, but only 14 of them carry a generative-AI, conversational-AI or recommendation keyword. Shoppers are starting to let AI assistants search, compare and buy. Who gets recommended, and what happens to brands and prices when a model makes the choice?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/ai-shopping-assistants
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/ai-shopping-assistants.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "Purchase intention, purchase decisions and consumer choice appear on 178 recent papers, mostly in management and economics, but only 14 of them carry a generative-AI, conversational-AI or recommendation keyword."
date: "2026-10-23"
updated: "2026-10-23"
status: "seed"
tags: ["management", "marketing", "ai"]
keywords: ["purchase intention", "conversational AI", "online shopping"]
---

# When the shopping assistant chooses

Purchase intention, purchase decisions and consumer choice appear on 178 recent papers, mostly in management and economics, but only 14 of them carry a generative-AI, conversational-AI or recommendation keyword. Shoppers are starting to let AI assistants search, compare and buy. Who gets recommended, and what happens to brands and prices when a model makes the choice?

## What prompted this

Since October 2025, 178 papers carry a purchase-intention, purchase-decision, consumer-choice or online-shopping keyword (88 in management journals, 48 in economics, 24 in operations research): "purchase intention" on 48, "purchase decision" on 38, "consumer choice" on 37, "online shopping" on 19. Only 14 of them also carry a generative-AI, ChatGPT, language-model, AI-assistant, conversational or recommendation keyword, while "conversational AI" appears on 20 papers in the archive.

## Questions

- When an assistant picks products, how concentrated are its choices across brands compared with human shoppers, and do the choices favour the assistant's owner or advertisers?
- Do consumers who delegate to assistants pay less, buy more, or buy different things?
- How do sellers optimize for assistants rather than for human eyes, and does that change product descriptions and prices?

## Data that could help

Logs of assistant-mediated shopping sessions, experiments comparing assistant and human choices for the same shopping tasks, and retailer price and description data over time.

## Next step

Ask several shopping assistants to buy the same 100 everyday products and compare brand concentration and prices with what human panels chose.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| purchase intention | 13 | #81 | 9, 5, 8, 7, 13, 14, 7, 13, 8, 11, 12, 6, 12, 14, 14, 4, 11, 6, 14, 16, 13, 17, 14, 8, 10, 7, 18, 9, 7, 7, 18, 15, 18, 19, 10, 12, 10 | 406 |
| conversational AI | 0 | – | 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 2, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 2, 2, 1, 0, 3, 6, 2, 1, 0, 4, 2, 0 | 32 |
| online shopping | 2 | #1303 | 1, 1, 3, 2, 4, 0, 2, 1, 0, 2, 5, 1, 1, 2, 5, 2, 4, 0, 2, 2, 0, 4, 2, 1, 3, 5, 3, 2, 2, 2, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2 | 76 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). When the shopping assistant chooses. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/ai-shopping-assistants

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-ai-shopping-assistants,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {When the shopping assistant chooses},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/ai-shopping-assistants}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).