u/Dangerous_Photo_9991

One thing I’ve noticed recently is that ecommerce search is starting to feel less like traditional search and more like a conversation.

Instead of typing exact product keywords, platforms are now pushing conversational AI where customers can type things like:
“show me something similar but cheaper”
or
“I need an outfit for a beach wedding under 5k”

And the system is supposed to understand intent instead of just matching keywords.

I came across Netcore Unbxd’s conversational AI recently and it genuinely made me wonder whether this is actually becoming useful in real ecommerce workflows or if we’re still mostly in the demo phase.

Because honestly, a lot of AI shopping assistants I’ve tried still feel clunky after the first interaction. Either they misunderstand intent halfway through, overcomplicate basic searches, or just feel like a chatbot layered on top of normal search.

At the same time though, traditional ecommerce search isn’t exactly great either. Most customers don’t search using perfect product keywords. People naturally search conversationally already, just in a messy way.

So in theory, conversational AI should improve product discovery, recommendations, upselling, and maybe even conversions, especially for large catalogs where browsing itself becomes overwhelming.

But I’m curious whether customers actually want conversational shopping experiences at scale.

If someone already knows exactly what they want, does conversational AI really help? Or is the real value mostly in discovery-heavy categories like fashion, beauty, furniture, gifting, etc. where people are still exploring options?

Would love to hear from people working in ecommerce/search because this feels like one of the few AI use cases that could genuinely change customer behavior if it gets good enough.

This is actually how my screen has been looking for the past few days, so thought I’d share because I went into this expecting it to be mostly hype.

I’ve seen so many tools lately calling themselves an “AI co-marketer” that I assumed it was just another version of those old campaign builders with a fancy new label.

But after using one for a bit, I kind of get why people are talking about it.

What surprised me wasn’t the copy generation part. That’s honestly the least interesting bit. It was seeing how the system breaks one simple prompt into actual campaign steps on its own.

I typed something basic like launching a seasonal campaign, and it started splitting the work across different agents — one for segmenting users, one for content suggestions, one for scheduling. Then this co-marketer layer sort of coordinated everything together instead of me manually setting up each step.

That’s what made it feel different from regular automation tools.

It’s not replacing strategy or creative thinking or anything dramatic. But it does seem to remove a lot of the repetitive campaign setup work that usually takes hours.

Still feels like human review is essential though. The targeting and timing logic can get smart fast, but brand voice is still one of those things where if the message feels even slightly off, people notice immediately. Did it genuinely save time for you or did it still end up being mostly another dashboard to babysit?

I've been looking into a lot of these newer AI-driven marketing platforms lately, and I keep wondering whether we're seeing a genuine evolution in retention/CRM or just smarter branding around automation.

What does feel different though is the idea of systems that can:

1. continuously analyze customer behavios
2. decide the next best action automatically
3. adapt journeys dynamically in real time
4. optimize toward retention and LTV instead of static campaign metrics

That feels very different from the classic "if this, then this" workflow logic most teams still run on. At the same time, I'm curious how much of this is actually happening in production versus in demos and landing pages.

For marketers working in CRM/lifecycle/retention: Do you think agentic marketing platforms are genuinely changing how teams operate, or is this mostly automation being repackaged with AI terminology?