Overview of Personalized Shopping Agent (Preview)

The retail industry is always on a quest to provide unique, personalized, and intuitive experiences to consumers. This experience isn't only about providing the right products or services to customers, but also about delivering engaging value that keeps them coming back.

The Personalized Shopping Agent in Copilot Studio (Preview) addresses that challenge by offering contextual, informative interactions that enhance the customer journey without overstepping boundaries.

With Personalized Shopping Agent (Preview), you provide a unique and personalized product-discovery experience for your consumers. The conversational AI solution lets consumers shop through an interactive chat powered by generative AI. In essence, it gives customers a way to ask for products and advice in plain language and receive helpful, context-aware responses, rather than relying on traditional keyword searches or menu navigation.

What is Personalized Shopping Agent (Preview)?

Personalized Shopping Agent (Preview) is a Microsoft-managed solution that provides a personalized consumer experience with contextual, informative interactions and recommendations. This agent is a headless solution, embeddable in your shopping websites, customer-facing apps, or in-store apps to help consumers and store associates. The agent enriches digital shopping channels—such as your website or customer-facing apps—to create an organic, engaging experience for customers.

Retail store associates can also benefit by interacting with the AI-enabled agent conversationally, receiving suggestions, and accessing guidance to help close sales with walk-in shoppers. The agent turns these interactions into assisted sales smoothly and intuitively.

With Personalized Shopping Agent (Preview), shoppers on your site or app can chat as if they’re speaking with a personal assistant or store expert. For example, a user might type, “I’m looking for a gift for a 5-year-old who loves science — any ideas?” The agent understands this request and responds with relevant product suggestions (for example, science kits or educational toys) pulled from the retailer’s catalog, along with explanations for why those items fit the request.

If the customer is unsure or asks a broad question—for example, “What do I need for a winter hiking trip?”—the agent can engage in a back-and-forth dialogue to clarify needs (for example, asking, “Which climates or locations will you be hiking in?”) and then provide recommendations tailored to the answers. This conversational product-discovery approach helps customers find the right items through a guided dialogue, much as they would when talking to a knowledgeable employee in a store.

Importantly, Personalized Shopping Agent (Preview) preserves the retailer’s brand voice and expertise throughout the interaction. The agent’s responses are guided by the retailer’s own product information, policies, and any brand guidelines configured. Hence, the tone and content can be aligned with your brand—for instance, an outdoor-gear retailer’s chatbot might have an adventurous, expert tone, while a luxury-fashion retailer’s agent might respond in a more elegant, concierge-style manner.

The agent only provides information that the retailer approves or that is drawn from the retailer’s data, ensuring consistency and trustworthiness. Personalized Shopping Agent (Preview) is “your digital store associate,” available 24/7 to assist consumers directly or store associates internally and to drive a more personalized and satisfying shopping journey.

Key features and benefits

Investing in Personalized Shopping Agent (Preview) can drive significant benefits for retailers:

• Faster deployment and quick experience: The solution is based on Microsoft Copilot Studio, a low-code platform for building AI copilots and OpenAI SLM and LLM models to provide a quick-click deployment experience. This approach lets retailers implement and start testing the solution in one or two days.

• Conversational product discovery: Explore products conversationally, like talking with a product expert or stylist.

  • Personalized product-discovery experience
  • Conversational and guided recommendations
  • Recommendations based on seasonal outfit trends
  • Rating- and review-based conversations
  • Customer-profile-based recommendations
  • Discovery based on diverse characteristics, attributes, price, and more

• Intuitive clarifications and next-level guidance: The conversation guides users through product discovery and selection, asks follow-up questions, and suggests next actions so the agent learns preferences and offers more personalized product suggestions.

• Future-proof with agent ecosystem: The solution includes an integrated ecosystem of subagents (current and planned), such as product discovery, ratings and reviews, customer profiler, and outfit builder to enrich the customer experience. Subagents communicate with each other and scale to improve customer experiences.

• Flexible and simple data ingestion: The solution provides a flexible schema where retailers can bring in product-related data—attributes, descriptions, and variants—from diverse sources using low-code/no-code tools. Automated indexing creates enriched customer experiences, and you can add data later with a few steps using out-of-the-box connectors.

Next steps

• Deploy Personalized Shopping Agent in Copilot Studio (Preview).