Shoppers plan to spend more, turn to AI for holiday gifts

Shoppers are still planning to spend this holiday season even as they move across stores, ecommerce and AI tools, and Salsify’s 2026 Holiday Pulse Report found 23% expect to spend more while 18% expect to spend less. The company is calling it a “three-shelf” holiday, a shopping pattern built around physical stores, online carts and AI-powered discovery all at once.

Salsify released the report on June 24 after surveying more than 1,200 shoppers in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. More than half, 54%, said AI tools like chatbots and gift guides would improve holiday shopping, which puts a number on what many retailers have already been feeling: shoppers are not asking AI to replace the gift run, but to help them get unstuck. Dom Scarlett, Salsify’s research director, said consumers are “stretching how they shop” rather than pulling back.

That stretch is visible in the channel mix. Salsify said 73% of consumers plan to shop either in-store, online or through some blend of both, which means the old holiday playbook of a single winning lane is fading fast. A shopper might spot a toy in a mall, compare prices on a phone, then use an AI assistant to narrow the field before checking out somewhere else entirely. For brands, that makes product content as important as the promotion itself, because the same gift now has to look convincing on a shelf tag, a product page and inside a chatbot response.

The spending backdrop still looks resilient. Salsify pointed to a record-breaking $1.2 trillion year for ecommerce in 2025 as proof that digital shopping is not losing steam, even with rising gas prices, global instability and nonstop negative headlines in the background. Gallup’s October 2025 holiday poll found Americans expected to spend an average of $1,007 on gifts, with 19% planning to spend more and 23% planning to spend less. Put together, the numbers suggest caution has not killed demand, it has just made the path to purchase messier.

That fragmentation is where the season’s gift trends are likely to emerge. The brands that win will be the ones that make the same item easy to find, easy to compare and easy to trust wherever a shopper lands. In a holiday market split across aisles, screens and AI prompts, consistency is becoming the new advantage.