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Back-to-School Season Meets the AI Shopping Agent

The back-to-school shopping list is getting an AI assistant.With a projected $43.3 billion in K-12 back-to-school spending up for grabs this year, retailers are watching closely as AI agents begin to influence how shoppers discover and ultimately buy products.From finding the right supplies to comparing products, AI shopping agents are taking on more of the work during this season’s back-to-school marketing campaigns. Jason Alan Snyder, chief AI officer at AI startup SuperTruth, called back-to-school a “particularly good use case” for AI shopping because “the list is fixed, the time window is fixed and the task is not about taste—it’s about coordination.”The Rise of AI Shopping AgentsAccording to Adobe’s research, 86% of consumers use AI while shopping, which marks a huge behavior change from just two years ago.“It’s really indicative of everything that consumers are dealing with and then all of a sudden, the AI assistant being able to be a personal shopper for them,” said Vivek Pandya, director of insights at Adobe.A recent Adobe report highlighted AI’s increasing value in commerce. As of July 2026, traffic to U.S. retail sites from AI sources was up 62% year over year. What’s more, AI visitors converted at a 60% higher rate and had a 14% higher engagement rate than other shoppers. Consumers using AI tools also spent 59% more time on retailers’ sites, were 33% less likely to bounce and added items to their carts at a 28% higher rate.The potential is not lost on retailers. Retail analyst Bruce Winder, who recently attended a Prime and grocery analyst event in Seattle, shared back-to-school use cases from Amazon, which include: sharing photos of supply lists so Alexa for Shopping can identify items and add them to shoppers’ carts. Consumers can also set budgets and price alerts and enable auto-buy functionality when an item drops to a specified threshold.And consumers appear willing to give retailer AI a try. According to Amazon, Alexa for Shopping, which was formerly known as Rufus, “helped over 300 million customers in 2025.” But it’s not easy to make apples-to-apples comparisons.In a February 2026 earnings call, David Guggina, president and CEO of Walmart U.S., said roughly half of Walmart’s app users have used its AI assistant, Sparky. However, the retailer bundles app usage figures within its broader customer base: In a March 2026 regulatory filing, the retailer said, “Each week, we serve approximately 280 million customers who visit more than 10,900 stores in 19 countries and through our numerous eCommerce websites and mobile applications.”Nevertheless, analysts agree shoppers are more likely to start with third-party AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, which have 900 million weekly users, 1 billion monthly users and a reported 20 million users in 2025, respectively.“The smarter retailer move isn’t to force shoppers into some kind of branded AI tool,” said Snyder of SuperTruth. “It’s to make sure that their product data, pricing and inventory shows up inside of general AI tools people already use.”AI as a Back-to-School Shopping AssistantResearch from the National Retail Federation (NRF) found 61% of back-to-school shoppers in 2026 are using these tools to find “the best prices and discounts and ask for recommendations and ideas.”Pandya agreed. “We’re finding that it is helpful for research comparison shopping, getting a sense of what’s available, like broader details around what they are looking for, product-wise,” he said. This price checking functionality is significant, as the NRF said 78% of shoppers expect to see higher prices on back-to-school items this season.“As affordability remains a significant concern for many shoppers, they are using AI agents to compare prices, promotions, specifications and other attributes to lower overall costs,” Winder said. “They may also ask AI agents to recommend specific life hacks to save money as well for the back-to-school season.”Abby Lovett, founder of AI agency CTP Visibility Advisors, noted most parents don’t want to skimp on the back-to-school experience for their kids, but the total cost of supplies is “jaw-dropping.” The NRF forecast families with kids in elementary through high school will spend an average of $863.86 in 2026.“Most kids have a thing they really look forward to, e.g., a new hoodie or new kicks,” she said. “Using AI to comparison shop on prices, colorways and sizes has made me and many other parents an absolute hero.”Back-to-School Season Creeps Into SummerCost concerns reflect another behavior change from recent years: The influence of Amazon’s Prime event and other summertime sales, which resulted in $26.4 billion in online spend in June 2026. That’s starting to rival Cyber Week numbers.“We’ve just seen so much early back-to-school shopping being mapped into the Prime event,” Pandya said. “You have consumers understanding the context of the deals happening, understanding that multiple players are likely vying for their dollar and then they’re using the AI agent to help strategize around that.”Does this mean we’ll be ready for AI agents to do back-to-school shopping for us in 2027? Not quite. While there were some attempts to support this functionality in 2025, Pandya says there has been some pullback.“The consumer [feels] more comfortable in having that back and forth with the agent and then having a lot of control on what actually gets spent once they get to the site,” he added. “Or having a conversation and then maybe you step away and you come back through paid search or you come back through social and then with the intel that you had from your AI exchange, you’re purchasing with more confidence.”Where AI Shopping Falls ShortBut AI shopping does have some limitations, even when it comes to back-to-school deals. “AI is much better at narrowing things than creating taste,” Snyder said. “It’s much stronger when you know what you want and you need help finding the price or the availability and it really, really sucks at surfacing things that you love.”For Snyder, the current shift is less about AI shopping going mainstream and more about consumers getting used to AI as a starting point.“Shopping is one more place that people use AI to reduce effort, so the question is more where in the journey is AI actually helping people,” he said. So while the technical capability for AI agents to shop for us may exist, consumer demand does not. At least for certain products. “Glue sticks, printer ink, that stuff, I can’t imagine somebody wouldn’t gladly hand that to an agent,” Snyder said. “But buying is also how we express care in a lot of cases or our identity. Picking your kid’s first day of school backpack isn’t the same thing.”There is a silver lining for retailers. As routine buying gets automated, the human-facing parts of retail—like the backpack—are where brands can differentiate themselves.“The divide isn’t between AI shopping and human shopping. It’s between purchases where convenience is the whole value and where the act of choosing has emotional weight,” Snyder said.As a result, he encouraged retailers to think about where their offerings have the greatest emotional impact and what introducing AI will do “because that’s the part that’s worth the most money.”Preparing for the AI ShopperThere is a more tangible opportunity in the meantime. Brands and retailers need to make sure their offerings, including details like pricing and availability, can be found by the AI platforms consumers are using.The recent Adobe report found this is one area many sites fall short—and recommended brands focus on machine readability, or making their websites and product information easy for AI systems to understand and interpret.As Pandya put it, that means “how can they work to organize the structure across their site so that they can benefit from even being read by the machine because the LLM agent has to serve an answer back to the user very quickly, so it all needs to be structured and highlighted in a way where it can do that.”Optimizing for AI search should also include cultivating reviews on sites like Google and Amazon, as well as monitoring conversations on platforms like Reddit and YouTube.“All that is being absorbed by these agents in order to give an answer back to the user that feels very well vetted and trustworthy,” Pandya said. “That’s the opportunity for the brand to show up across all those fronts and ensure strong machine readability, so that they get visibility.”Moving forward, Pandya anticipates AI platforms will explore how to better serve their own users, which could include pre-populating shopping prompts. “That’s what we’ll be keeping an eye out for,” he said.Lisa Lacy is a writer based in Atlanta. She has covered marketing and technology for more than a decade for publications like TechCrunch, CMO.com, VentureBeat, The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones Newswires, ClickZ and Search Engine Watch.(Photo by Nikita Burdenkov/iStock)