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Omnisend Survey: Shoppers Warming to Gen AI Tools, Though Concerns Remain

U.S. consumers are warming up to generative AI and are increasingly leaning on AI-powered tools to enhance the online shopping experience. Despite the uptick in adoption, however, 85% of shoppers still have concerns about privacy, AI hallucinations and overuse of AI.

In a July 2025 survey of 1,224 U.S. shoppers, Omnisend found that 59% of consumers were using tools like ChatGPT for online shopping and that just 32% of respondents felt reluctant to let the technology help facilitate transactions compared to 66% who felt the same in February.

According to Marty Bauer, ecommerce expert at Omnisend, this shift can be attributed to the fact that people have become more familiar with the technology over time—and that the tools themselves are improving.

“It’s eerie how good they are,” says Marty Bauer. “They’re personal, no longer robotic, so people are getting more comfortable.”

Primarily, shoppers use gen AI for product research (57% of respondents), with 25% saying it’s more helpful than a Google search. Other popular uses include personalized recommendations (45%) and finding deals (40%).

As more shoppers use AI to research products, discoverability is rapidly changing. Bauer encourages marketers to make the most of this trend by optimizing content for AI-driven search, capturing feedback, and ensuring customer reviews are public and indexable so that AI can find them and use them as fuel.

“Skate to where the puck is—[gen AI] is where search is coming from,” Bauer advises. “If someone makes a purchase, make sure you’re requesting feedback in follow-up emails. That’s social proof on the website, but the secret sauce is that they’re public, surfaced by both search and gen AI.”

Since AI adoption shows no signs of slowing down, Bauer recommends that brands track AI-surfaced referrals as a KPI, measuring how many leads come from the tools and where teams can optimize.

While marketers should incorporate optimizing for generative AI into their strategies, there are a few considerations to be aware of:

  • AI fatigue. While 26% of respondents expressed concerns about the overuse of AI in ecommerce, Bauer says the technology isn’t going away anytime soon. Shoppers have collectively become less reluctant to use AI for online shopping over the last six months, and Bauer expects that trend to continue as we move further into the future.
  • Privacy concerns. When it comes to using AI, consumers are most worried about privacy and data security (43% of respondents). To assuage these concerns, Bauer says marketers should always give users the ability to opt out of using AI, which establishes and reinforces trust. If AI is going to add items to a cart, for example, give the user the option to decline or approve the action. At the same time, he recommends brands disclose when they’re using AI; if website visitors are greeted by a chatbot, simply let them know that it’s powered by AI (and make it easy for them to switch to a human if they prefer). Bauer also warns against using customer data to train AI models. “You absolutely cannot be doing stuff like that,” he warns.

In addition to these concerns, respondents were also wary of AI misinterpreting their preferences (37%) and serving up irrelevant recommendations (35%).

While Bauer expects AI to be involved in more and more of the customer journey as time goes on, humans will still play a vital role in sales, and B2B sales in particular. “Human interaction is always going to be important in that last mile.”