Macy's Ask Macy's: 4.75x Revenue Per Visit, and 40% of Top US Retailers Now Run an AI Assistant

Macy's disclosed early performance data on its new AI shopping assistant "Ask Macy's," and the revenue-per-visit number is large enough to reframe the question. During a beta covering roughly half of website traffic, customers who used Ask Macy's spent 4.75 times more per visit than customers who did not. The chatbot, powered by Google Gemini, launched publicly on March 23 after a December dark launch. Most common beta use cases: "complete the look" outfit suggestions and the virtual try-on feature.

Industry observations now indicate roughly 40 percent of the top 20 US retailers by revenue have deployed some form of AI shopping assistant, with most launches between mid-2025 and early 2026. Retailer-owned AI is moving from experiment to infrastructure, and it is doing so precisely while retailers build walls against external AI agents from ChatGPT and Perplexity.

The Ask Macy's numbers

The beta ran several weeks before the March 23 public launch and covered about half of Macy's website visitors. Among that group, customers who used Ask Macy's spent 4.75 times more per visit than customers who did not. The assistant runs on Google Gemini. Max Magni, Macy's chief customer and digital officer, told Shoptalk earlier this month the dominant use cases were "complete the look" outfit suggestions, the virtual try-on feature, and personalized product recommendations.

The interface invites customers to describe what they want "like you would a store colleague," prompting details like budget, occasion, color, and size. FY 2025 net sales fell 2.4 percent, while comparable sales returned to 1.5 percent growth. Bloomberg's March 26 coverage noted FY 2026 guidance of $21.4 billion to $21.65 billion, near-flat versus the prior year.

The broader retailer AI deployment wave

Industry observations in March indicate roughly 40 percent of the top 20 US retailers by revenue have deployed some form of AI shopping assistant. Most launches occurred between mid-2025 and early 2026 (TradingView, GuruFocus). The list is recognizable: Walmart Sparky, which US CEO John Furner said drove 35 percent higher orders on Q4 earnings (mubboo.ai April 13); Amazon Rufus with its Auto Buy agentic capability; Albertsons' 2026 AI assistant, which markets a 4-minute shopping claim; Target's AI assistant; and Tesco's AI beta rolling to 280,000 colleagues starting April 9 (Grocery Gazette). Crescendo joined the Shopify App Store with a multimodal AI shopping assistant at NRF 2026.

The pattern: retailers are building their own AI assistants rather than routing customers through ChatGPT or Perplexity.

What retailer-owned AI signals

Retailer-owned AI keeps the customer relationship, the data, and the conversion inside the retailer's platform. External AI agents from ChatGPT, Perplexity, or standalone Gemini pull the customer onto a third-party surface. That tension explains the simultaneous restriction pattern we covered on April 16: Amazon limiting agentic activity, Shopify blocking external agents at the checkout step, Walmart preventing external agents from completing purchases (The Information).

The framing is simple. Retailer-owned AI says "stay on my site and I will help you." External AI agents say "come to my chat and I will shop across sites." Both models are being built in parallel. Macy's 4.75x number suggests the retailer-owned side has strong early economics.

Mubboo's Take

A 4.75x revenue-per-visit lift is large enough that we expect every retailer without an AI assistant to have one in development by end of year. Retailer-owned AI only helps customers who already chose that retailer. It does not help shoppers who start with "what is the best robot vacuum under $500?" They do not land on Macy's first. They land on ChatGPT. Retailer-owned AI solves the conversion problem, not the discovery problem. The discovery layer is still wide open, and still short on trusted editorial voices. That is the gap we think matters most; our shopping coverage on mubboo.com/shopping is built for it.

Ask Macy's will not be the last 4.75x number this year. Expect similar disclosures from Target, Nordstrom, Best Buy, and Home Depot as beta data matures. The harder question is whether any retailer's owned AI will ever match the reach of ChatGPT's 900 million weekly users. Probably not, which is why the discovery layer still matters.