AI shopping is coming to your favorite brand’s website

Daydream, an AI-powered fashion search platform, today launches Powered by Daydream, embedding natural-language search into brand websites. Staud, Alice + Olivia, Couper, Cult Mia, and Hampden Clothing are live in the initial pilot, with over 25 additional brands signed on, including Anine Bing, Mansur Gavriel, Sandro, and Maje. The tool allows shoppers to describe desired items in natural language, shifting from traditional keyword search.

I’m searching for a fun, professional outfit for a panel I will moderate this fall, and I mosey over to Alice + Olivia’s website. Until now, my only real option has been to scroll through thumbnails of dresses or fiddle with standard category filters. But there’s something new on Alice + Olivia’s site: a “Shop with AI https://www.fastcompany.com/section/artificial-intelligence ” option. I give it a shot, describing how I need a dress that is chic, polished and comfortable enough to sit on stage in. The system interprets my intent and instantly serves me an array of tailored dresses. I find a little black dress that fits the bill perfectly https://www.aliceandolivia.com/CHARA-VEGAN-MINI-DRESS/CC109I41528A001.html?flow country=USA&utm source=daydream ai stylist&utm medium=daydream modal . E-commerce search hasn’t fundamentally changed since Amazon first started selling books online three decades ago. Shopping for clothes on the internet has meant typing keywords into search bars and scanning through rows of static inventory. But that’s slowly beginning to change. Daydream https://daydream.ing , an AI-powered fashion search and discovery platform https://www.fastcompany.com/91356656/online-shopping-is-about-to-ditch-the-search-bar-your-closet-will-thank-you , today launches Powered by Daydream, which allows fashion brands to bring natural-language search to their digital storefronts. Staud, Alice + Olivia, Couper, Cult Mia, and Hampden Clothing are currently live in the initial pilot, with more than 25 additional brands signed on—including Anine Bing, Mansur Gavriel, Sandro, and Maje. The launch comes as the retail industry wrestles with the broader question of where agentic commerce https://www.fastcompany.com/91533534/PREVIEW LINK DO NOT SHARE?mvt=rSL6OA3W1zvH stands today. “We’re still in the early days,” says Julie Bornstein, Founder and CEO of Daydream. Daydream, which first launched as a consumer-facing app last year, offers a chat-based shopping agent devoted exclusively to fashion. But it has encountered many real-world roadblocks—chiefly, helping shoppers unlearn decades of ingrained habits. Consumers have been so heavily conditioned to use rigid search bars that typing natural, expressive sentences into a shopping app feels unnatural at first. “People are trained to use basic keywords,” Lisa Yamner, co-founder and chief brands officer, explains. “Getting people accustomed to using natural language is a journey.” There’s also the problem of the results that AI returns. As Bornstein points out, large language models are non-deterministic, which means that running the same search twice can yield slightly different results, which can confuse shoppers into thinking the tool isn’t working properly. Bornstein says Daydream’s engineers are working hard to ensure search results are helpful to users—and she also believes that people are beginning to understand how results may vary. But in the meanwhile, Daydream wants to put its tools in the hands of more shoppers. Powered by Daydream shifts the strategy by embedding this AI directly into the digital storefronts where consumers are already browsing. To use it, the shopper clicks on a “Shop with AI” button on the site, where they can ask for what they want using language they would use with an in-store associate or personal stylist. For brands, introducing new site technology can be very labor intensive, and requires coordinating with backend engineering. Daydream has made the process so easy it can be up and running within a day. Carrie McMahon, senior product manager of e-commerce at Alice + Olivia, says that the ease of the deployment was a massive win for the tech team. “You can put this piece of code on the site and Daydream takes it from there,” she says. While Powered by Daydream is designed to improve the customer experience, brands can also learn a lot from the questions that shoppers ask. In my case, the brand can understand that I’m not just shopping for a little black dress; I’m looking for something to wear to a work event. If they get many similar requests, the brand might decide they need to beef up their selection of corporate outfits. “It’s given them a lot more data and insight into what their customers want because they now know why someone’s looking for something,” Bornstein says. Yamner points out concrete examples of what these conversational insights reveal. In one case, a brand received lots of queries about shoes, when shoes only made up 4% of their catalog. Alice + Olivia keeps getting requests about a discontinued product line. “This might prompt them to consider bringing this line back,” says Yamner. Transforming how people shop won’t happen overnight, but Daydream’s founders are very familiar with how slow it can be for consumers to adopt new technologies. Bornstein was working for Nordstrom when the company was just building out its website, manually assigning each product to a particular category. “I remember what it felt like to get people used to buying online at all,” she says. But eventually, a tipping point came, and e-commerce became the norm. She believes AI will similarly transform how consumers shop. “Tech adoption is moving so much faster than it once did,” Bornstein says. “Once they do adapt to this new behavior, they won’t be able to imagine shopping without it.”