Macy's AI Shopping Assistant Boosts Spending Nearly 5x in Early Results

When gift buyers used Ask Macy's, Macy's new conversational shopping assistant built on Google's Gemini, they spent close to 4.75 times more than shoppers browsing without the tool. That multiplier, captured during a controlled beta test, established Ask Macy's as one of the most concrete early wins in retail AI, where measurable commerce impact has been elusive.

Macy's rolled out the tool to the general public after weeks of testing with select customers and thousands of employees. The dark launch allowed the company to tune the assistant's tone, conversational flows, and product logic before any public exposure. Macy's calibrated the system specifically for its brands, regional climates, and a conversational register suited to retail. The company positioned Ask Macy's as curated discovery, not search, which is a meaningful distinction: the assistant responds like a trained store associate rather than a keyword engine, accepting natural language prompts covering budget, occasion, style, and size.

The features that caught on fastest were "complete the look" recommendations and virtual try-on, with users most often asking the assistant to suggest products for completing an outfit and to visualize what items might look like on them. For gift buyers, those two capabilities compress a task that normally requires multiple tabs and guesswork. A push present anchored around a single jewelry piece gains context when the assistant surfaces coordinating accessories; a fashion gift becomes more considered when the buyer can see how items work together before adding anything to the cart. The bundling logic that drives average order value in physical retail, where a skilled associate walks a shopper from one item to a full outfit, scales digitally through the chat interface. Ask Macy's makes that upsell feel like a recommendation rather than a prompt.

The tool's early results arrive as Macy's works to reverse a long sales decline. The company reported net sales fell 2.4% last year, though it returned to comparable sales growth of 1.5%, and Macy's projects full-year net sales of $21.4 billion to $21.65 billion. Against that backdrop, a nearly fivefold spending lift among AI assistant users represents exactly the kind of conversion signal the company needed.

For anyone building a complete gift, the practical case for Ask Macy's is straightforward: type the recipient's style, your budget, and the occasion, and the assistant produces a starting point that a category page never could. The 4.75x number is striking, but what it actually measures is the difference between a shopper who buys one item and one who buys a look. That gap is where gift-giving lives.