Amazon built Prime Day to keep shoppers inside its own marketplace. This year, AI shopping sent its best customers in from outside: a chatbot made the recommendation.

US shoppers spent a record $26.4bn across retail sites during the four-day Prime Day event, according to Adobe Analytics. The more interesting number is not the total. It is where the most valuable buyers came from. For the first time, people who arrived at a retailer from an AI assistant were the most likely to actually buy, GeekWire reported.

Shoppers referred by AI chatbots were about 40 per cent more likely to complete a purchase than those who came from search, email, or social media, Forbes noted. A year ago, the same traffic was the worst-converting channel of the lot. That reversal, inside 12 months, is the real story.

The numbers behind the shift

Adobe tracks billions of visits to US retail sites, and its Prime Day readout was lopsided. On day one, generative-AI traffic to retailers nearly doubled year on year, up 98.3 per cent. The visitors did not just show up. They behaved like buyers rather than browsers.