Holiday shopping is about to provide a pretty good stress test for what happens when AI becomes part of the buying decision.

A new Harris Poll commissioned by Forter found that 67% of Americans plan to use AI for holiday shopping this year.

Among 18-to-34-year-olds, it’s 83%!

Those numbers are eye-catching, although this is vendor-sponsored research, so I wouldn’t carve anything into stone.

And how about this: 43% of Americans say an AI recommendation has already led them to discover or purchase from a retailer they’d never shopped with before.

Among 18-to-34-year-olds, it rises to 68%!

Think about what this is doing to product discovery.

For years, brands have fought to rank in Google, win shelf space, build social audiences and get onto recommendation lists.

Now another gatekeeper is entering the path to purchase, and it can consider hundreds of products before presenting a buyer with a handful.

Forter’s transaction data suggests this behaviour has lept beyond surveys: agentic orders across its network reportedly quadrupled since August.

For product brands, this creates a new kind of merchandising job.

Your product info has to be understandable enough for an AI to figure out precisely who it’s for, what problem it solves, how it differs, what it costs and if it’s available right now.

Human desirability remains the goal. But increasingly, a machine could decide whether the human ever sees you.

The brands I’d worry about are the truly great products whose websites make all of that surprisingly difficult to figure out.

AI can’t recommend what it can’t understand.

If you’d like help creating and marketing products people feel compelled to buy, the product marketing consultants at Graphos Product can help.