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joe@techforge.pub
3rd June 2026
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The US department store brand and household name, Macy’s, has rolled out a AI-powered chatbot in the form of a shopping assistant for its online customers.
The company had been working on a bespoke AI agent for nearly six months, according to PAYMNTS [account wall] before changing the technological basis of the project to Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience. Speaking at the time, Chad Westfall, SVP, Technology Product Development, said that Macy’s internal development was too slow to keep up with “the pace of change and innovation in AI…we […] forwent some of our usual processes in order to go after this with all deliberate haste.”
The shopping assistant, Ask Macy’s, created 4.75 times higher revenue per visit among users during the beta testing phases, rather than a reduction in abandonment, according to Google Cloud. Now live, when shoppers search for an item or category, Ask Macy’s scans the entire back catalogue of products and then can ask supplemental questions to focus in on particular choices, increasing engagement and a customer’s time investment on the platform – lowering the rate of cart abandonment.
For example, queries for items of clothing are answered by Ask Macy’s asking about a customer’s preferences as to colour, cut, and cloth before they are shown a range of possible options. A virtual try-on feature can superimpose items onto an uploaded picture of the shopper and place the avatar in different settings such as a restaurant, workplace or outdoors. “We wanted to show [customers] haw technology can remove friction and elevate retail shopping […] to help them feel guided, understood, and confident,” Westfall said.
The joint project between Google Cloud and Macy’s internal development team began early February this year, with the initial beta version of the AI-powered chatbot going live to test shoppers and Macy’s employees just four weeks later. The production version was offered to half the site’s traffic initially, with general release a week later.
Although the target of Ask Macy’s is customers close to making a purchase – increasing total spend – the issue of cart abandonment is not directly affected. Here, retailers have a choice of tactics powered by technology, including the offering of attractive options such as split payments, time-dependent price reductions, membership schemes, discounts and discounted shipping, and virtual vouchers, among others. Statista puts the global cart abandonment rate for online retailers at 70.22%.
Macy’s 2024 business consolidation project has led to several hundred separate physical store closures alongside store expansions at more popular sites. At nearly 160 years old, Macy’s is an American institution in retail, growing from its Manhattan roots to 432 stores across the country, as of Q1 2026. The company also owns the Bloomingdale’s and luxury cosmetics company Bluemercury brands.
Although Macy’s does not publish separate figures for brick-and-mortar and online sales, the company has projected a 1.2% growth in sales (+/- 0.5%) over the rest of 2026.
(Image source: Pixabay, under licence.)
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joe@techforge.pub
joe@techforge.pub
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