Retailers face a rapid evolution in consumer behavior: generative AI is quietly replacing traditional search bars as the primary gateway for product discovery. With shoppers increasingly turning to AI tools for instant, conversational recommendations, the traditional e-commerce playbook is being rewritten.
Here, Raj De Datta, CEO and co-founder of Bloomreach, explores how these shifting expectations are reshaping digital commerce and customer retention. He discusses the critical role of real-time data foundations, the impending consolidation of the AI vendor landscape, and how Bloomreach’s Loomi engine delivers “intelligence at the edge” to ensure brands retain ownership of their customer relationships.
Sourcing Journal: What are the biggest challenges retailers and brands face today, and how can Bloomreach help them respond?
Raj De Datta: Retail has had a particularly challenging few years, to say the least. Covid disrupted supply chains overnight, then interest rates went up, then tariffs forced even further disruption. Now, on top of all that, AI is completely shifting how customers discover, engage, and buy from a brand in the first place. This is the area we’re hearing about most from our customers right now.
On one side of that, you have to consider how customers’ shopping expectations have shifted. We ran a consumer survey with 4,000 U.S. and U.K. respondents recently, and more than 75 percent said they’d used AI to shop. That means customers are very quickly growing accustomed to the ease of conversation helping them find the products they want. Our view is that brands’ e-commerce sites need to mirror that experience. If a customer finds you through a simple conversation with Gemini, they’re going to want a similar experience on your site. Our Loomi shopping agent gives retailers the ability to offer just that.
The other side of this is how AI is changing customer loyalty. Customers are now often finding brands through AI agents, and that means brands really risk losing ownership of the customer relationship. That means more personalized, valuable engagement with their customers is more important than ever. This is where our marketing solution comes in. Loomi, our AI for customer engagement, ensures that retailers can tailor customer experiences in real-time—whether in emails, ads, on the website, and so on—so that customers feel genuine value. Every offer, message, and recommendation is personalized to their needs and preferences. That level of personalization is what gives a customer more reason to engage with the brand itself, not just the agent it found you through.
Sourcing Journal: How are changing consumer expectations shaping the future of e-commerce and customer engagement?
R.D.D.: Consumer expectations have basically been on one long upward trajectory for years now—every good experience someone has anywhere resets what they expect everywhere. If your competitor’s site remembers what someone was browsing yesterday, your customer now expects that from you too, whether or not you’re set up for it. That bar doesn’t reset by category or by brand size. It’s set by the best experience someone had that week, period.
What’s changed more recently is where that expectation is being formed. It used to be shaped almost entirely by other e-commerce sites and apps. Now it’s being shaped by how people use AI in general—how ChatGPT or Claude answers a question directly, how a recommendation engine seems to already know what they want. We saw this show up concretely in the survey we ran. If forced to choose, 41.4 percent said they’d now rather shop through an AI tool than go directly to a brand’s site, compared to 38 percent who’d pick the brand’s site—a reversal from a year earlier, when the split favored the brand’s site. Consumers are bringing that expectation of speed and relevance into every shopping interaction, on your site or off it.
That has a few real consequences for how brands need to think about e-commerce and engagement going forward. First, engagement can’t be siloed by channel anymore—someone browsing on mobile and then getting an email that’s three days behind what they actually did feels broken to them, even if it used to feel normal. Second, discovery itself is becoming less linear. People are asking AI tools to compare, research, and narrow down options before they ever reach a brand’s site, which means the moment they do land with you, that experience needs to actually deliver on the specificity they’ve already built up in their head—not send them back to generic filters and search bars.
The net effect is that customer engagement is moving from something brands do to a customer, in scheduled campaigns, to something that responds to a customer, in real time, wherever they are. That’s less about any single channel and more about whether a brand actually knows what’s happening with a customer right now and can act on it immediately—not next week’s campaign, not tomorrow’s email.
Sourcing Journal: Which market trends should retailers and brands prioritize over the next few years?
R.D.D.: AI is becoming a primary discovery channel, not just a support tool. Shoppers are increasingly researching, comparing, and narrowing down options through AI tools before they ever land on a brand’s site. That trend is going to keep compounding, and it means visibility now depends on how well an AI agent can read and trust your product catalog—attributes, availability, pricing, verifiable signals—not just how well your site ranks in traditional search. Brands that treat their product data as a static, one-time setup task are going to fall behind here.
Customer acquisition through AI platforms is going to get more expensive, the same way it did with search and social. As these platforms mature, they’ll introduce their own advertising and monetization layers, and brands will increasingly be paying an intermediary for access to their own customers. That trend should push retention up the priority list—every direct relationship a brand can hold onto becomes more valuable, not less, as acquisition through third parties gets costlier.
The AI agent market itself is heading toward consolidation. Right now, there’s a land grab—every vendor announcing more agents, more integrations, and more capabilities, largely to win attention in a hype cycle. That won’t hold. A lot of what’s being shipped today is thin wrapper technology without a real foundation of data or trust underneath it, and that tends to get exposed once tools are actually running in production at scale. Retailers should expect a shakeout here, and that changes how they should be evaluating AI vendors right now: less on the size of the feature list, more on whether there’s evidence something actually works and holds up under real conditions.
Taken together, these three trends point toward the same conclusion: the next few years reward brands that treat their data foundation and their direct customer relationships as the priority, rather than chasing every new interface or feature as it appears.
Sourcing Journal: How does Bloomreach help companies use AI and customer data to create more personalized experiences?
R.D.D.: Our AI, Loomi, is what makes personalization possible for the businesses we serve. Loomi connects AI decisioning to real-time data, so every touchpoint in the shopping journey—an email, a search result, a conversation with a shopping agent—can reflect what that person actually wants in that moment. Brands are used to personalize by segment: age, location, loyalty tier. Now it’s possible to personalize individually at scale.
We built Loomi as the intelligence layer fueling every Bloomreach product, not something added on top. The result is that businesses have a single, living system connecting data, decisioning, and activation—then feeding what it learns right back into the system to make the next customer interaction even smarter.
Sourcing Journal: What sets Bloomreach apart as retailers and brands look for growth in a competitive market?
R.D.D.: It’s something we call “intelligence at the edge” that sets us apart. What we mean is Loomi’s ability to make AI-powered decisions for the right customer at the exact moment they’re interacting with you. It evaluates each person in real time, using their full behavioral and transactional history plus in-session signals. Every decision—what to recommend, what to rank, what to suppress—is computed for that one customer at that one moment.
So, every touchpoint…a search, a product page view, someone adding to cart, opening an email, tapping an SMS, engaging with a push notification…becomes a live decision point. And ultimately, that allows retailers to move the metrics that actually matter to the business: revenue per visitor, customer lifetime value, margin, retention.
