[2603.24947] Shopping with a Platform AI Assistant: Who Adopts, When in the Journey, and What For

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2603.24947 (cs) [Submitted on 26 Mar 2026] Title:Shopping with a Platform AI Assistant: Who Adopts, When in the Journey, and What For Authors:Se Yan, Han Zhong, Zemin (Zachary)Zhong, Wenyu Zhou View a PDF of the paper titled Shopping with a Platform AI Assistant: Who Adopts, When in the Journey, and What For, by Se Yan and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:This paper provides some of the first large-scale descriptive evidence on how consumers adopt and use platform-embedded shopping AI in e-commerce. Using data on 31 million users of Ctrip, China's largest online travel platform, we study "Wendao," an LLM-based AI assistant integrated into the platform. We document three empirical regularities. First, adoption is highest among older consumers, female users, and highly engaged existing users, reversing the younger, male-dominated profile commonly documented for general-purpose AI tools. Second, AI chat appears in the same broad phase of the purchase journey as traditional search and well before order placement; among journeys containing both chat and search, the most common pattern is interleaving, with users moving back and forth between the two modalities. Third, consumers disproportionately use the assistant for exploratory, hard-to-keyword tasks: attraction queries account for 42% of observed chat requests, and chat intent varies systematically with both the timing of chat relative to search and the ca...