The other day, I was amazed while making an online purchase. I was ready to look for a party outfit to be worn in summer. Indeed, the massive product category was overwhelming. Soon, the retail business platform’s chatbot appeared. All I did was share the occasion details for which I needed the dress. Soon, it recommended a list of products that align with my style and preference.
That’s the power of retail chatbots now! You add the details of what you need, and you get the products that you’ve been dreaming of. Is that all? Well, retail chatbots have gone far beyond simply following your input and responding. Now, some interesting and futuristic trends have come up that can transform your retail chatbots and turn them into nothing less than human assistants. Sounds impossible? Well, 80% of retail businesses are already using or are planning to deploy chatbots by 2027.
Further, the global chatbot market is expected to experience growth at a CAGR of 23.3% by 2030, as stated by a report of Grand View Research. All of this data is enough to tell you why you need to follow certain chatbot future trends in the retail industry. In this blog, I’ll share the top 8 future trends in retail chatbots that are going to rule the retail sector in the upcoming days.
Future Trends of Retail Chatbots to Watch in 2025
We are living in 2025. Now, you cannot expect your retail business to function on the same traditional norms. Instead, it’s time to update your retail business and embrace technological innovations in it. In a 2021 journal, researchers noted that customers prefer chatbot interaction much more than human agents, especially in retail sectors like consumer electronics and fashion.
Since artificial intelligence has now gone to an advanced stage, retailers must cater to all these future trends to drive more sales and nurture customer engagement.
Trend 1: Personalized shopping assistant through AI
Do all of your retail customers have the same demands? Certainly not. As a retail business owner or founder, your job is to satisfy every customer with the right products and the perfect service. For this, you have to know what your customers are looking for. Is this possible for any human agent to find out this for individual customers?
This is where you need a retail chatbot with advanced personalization features to help you in this Herculean task. These are quite intelligent bots that are featured with not just artificial intelligence but NLP or natural language processing and machine learning to understand the requirements of your customers.
These chatbots can now understand the sentiments and intent of your customers to recommend products accordingly. Besides, they help your retail chatbots with visual features to give your customers a real-time experience even before they buy products.
Trend 2: Voice-enabled conversational chatbots
Now, your customers are a part of the mobile-first market. They use their mobile devices a lot more than any other application or even a web browser. This means your retail business needs a solid presence in mobile apps as well. Here, a better option is to offer your customers a hands-free shopping experience.
This is why the retail chatbots now need to be integrated with voice-enabled features, where your customers can get results only with some simple commands. Here, the chatbots understand the language of your customers only with the help of conversational AI and natural language processing.
By 2029, the voice commerce market is expected to grow to $421.7 billion at a CAGR of 29.2%. This indicates a massive potential. So, if you still haven’t incorporated voice-enabled conversational chatbots, it’s high time you do it now. This creates a frictionless shopping experience for the customers while you retain more.
Trend 3: Emotionally intelligent and empathetic bots
Retail chatbots are no longer restricted to only transactional roles. Instead, now retail chatbots can function emotionally like human beings. Yes, you read that right. With the help of sentiment analysis and emotional AI, the retail chatbots can now analyze what your customers are saying and recommend products accordingly.
Right from identifying emotional cues like frustration, hesitation or excitement to figuring out the customers’ personal identity, these retail chatbots can analyze the browsing history of the customers and satisfy them. For example, as a shopper, if you are confused about any makeup product and don’t know which one to buy, the chatbot can make you try the products virtually and then select the ones that suit your skin type.
On the other hand, when you express excitement, the chatbot reads it and recommends real-time complementary offers and exclusive products. In fact, in a study of Frontiers in Psychology, researchers found that chatbots that understand human emotions improve the satisfaction of customers and repurchase intentions.
Trend 4: Hyper-automation in retail workflows
Think of the time retail chatbots were first launched. Back then, these tools would only cater to FAQs or customer queries. Now, things have changed a lot. Your customers are no longer happy with just QnA. Now, retailers are integrating chatbots with their business’s backend systems to complete complex tasks only with automation.
So, right from inventory management to order processing, invoice generation, delivery status tracking and post-purchase customer management, these AI-integrated chatbots are now taking care of everything. In a WNS whitepaper, researchers found that hyper-automation can shorten customer journeys by 35%.
Consider the chatbots of Levi’s and Nykaa. These chatbots automate routine operations that manage customer requests and deliveries independently. This means such industry biggies do not need human force to make customer workflows. With hyper-automation, you can streamline work processes without the need for any human agents.
Trend 5: Chatbots in the phygital retail experience
Phygital is the perfect convergence of physical and digital, where you provide in-store customer shopping experiences digitally, only with the help of AI. Now, retailers are trying to integrate chatbots into voice-based assistants and QR codes to help shoppers navigate through the humongous product catalog.
In fact, some of the chatbots also offer augmented reality to the customers to help the try on products first and then purchase the suitable ones. Again, to offer better phygital retail experiences, you can incorporate chatbots into omnichannel synchronizations. This means your customers get to interact with the customers across all touchpoints without losing context.
In a news report of Salesforce, it was found that 39% of the shoppers and 54% of the Gen Z shoppers already use AI chatbots to discover products. Keeping this in mind, retailers are now increasing their investment in artificial intelligence by 76%. This means these AI chatbots are here to stay in the upcoming days while offering a phygital shopping experience.
Trend 6: Multilingual chatbots for Tier-II and III markets
If you want to focus on the global market, you have to understand the population of Tier II and III cities. Not all of them speak the same language. This is where retail chatbots use conversational multilingual support. So, even if your customer is not an English-speaking one, the chatbot will revert to its native language.
Let’s consider the example of the Nykaa virtual assistant chatbot. It is a beauty and skincare retail chatbot all across India. Now, think of the vast range of Indian languages. To cater to all the customers across India with a variety of languages, the chatbot takes the help of the NLP mechanism. With this, it understands the sentiments and intent of the customers as well.
So, if you want your retail chatbots to run autonomously and manage customer requirements on their own, integrating multilingual support is a must. It offers your customers the right kind of services that they are looking for.
Trend 7: Predictive commerce and proactive bots
The retail chatbots have come a long way. From being reactive intelligent tools to transforming into proactive smart virtual assistants, these retail chatbots are now equipped with large language models and predicted AI. With these technologies, the retail chatbots can now anticipate what your customers are looking for even before they ask.
Further, the retail chatbots also analyze the behavioral patterns of the customers like their previous purchases, browsing history, and previous interaction with the chatbot, to recommend bundled products and refills. Result? Your customers experience less friction in shopping decision-making.
Besides, your retail customers also experience a personalized shopping approach. This not only helps them build loyalty for your retail brand but also a trustworthiness that spreads via word-of-mouth. Again, predictive AI allows chatbots to approach customers even before they come up with a query.
Trend 8: Retail chatbots in the metaverse
Think of how your customers will feel if you can offer them a complete tour of your retail business’s physical store or products even before they think of purchasing. Isn’t it wonderful? That’s exactly what your competitors are doing now and you too should.
Several retail brands are now coming up with VR malls that have chatbot avatars in their different showrooms to function as navigators, stylists and shopping consultants. On receiving any query, these chatbots follow the commands and guide customers through hyper-personalized recommendations.
According to a press release from Gartner, several organizations will shift to adopting small task-specific AI models by 2027. Such visual digital interfaces not only provide a complete virtual reimaging of your retail store but also make it convenient for them to shop.
How Retailers Can Prepare for Chatbot 2.0?
The next-gen AI-integrated chatbots are chatbot 2.0, where your customers get a proactive response with the help of mechanisms like LLM, AI, NLP and more. Such chatbots go beyond simply scripted commands. Rather, these chatbots understand the sentiments and intentions of your customers and respond accordingly.
To adopt to the new demands of the customers, this is how you should evolve your strategies that go beyond traditional chatbot usage.
- Building hybrid (bot + human) service models: To offer a hands-on customer experience, especially at times of complex queries, combine AI chatbots with human support. Such a combination helps chatbots function with empathy while improving customer satisfaction.
- Training the chatbot based on datasets: You certainly want the chatbot to never disappoint your customers. For this, it needs to answer accurately. Here, integrate your retail business’s datasets with the chatbot. Keep on updating the dataset along with the chatbot for more accuracy.
- Investing in scalable chatbot platforms: Scalable chatbots are those that allow you the flexibility to make the necessary updates and changes along with your business. Besides, the chatbot should also be integrated across multiple platforms via omnichannel deployment support.
- Aligning CX goals with AI touchpoints: To make your customers' experience more personalized and drive more conversions, craft chatbots that are well-aligned to the buying journey of your customers. This enhances your retail business’s retention rates and overall satisfaction.
Top Platforms Leading Retail Chatbot Innovation
Since conversational commerce is the new buzzword in the retail sector, choosing the correct chatbot-building platform is key to the success of your retail chatbot. Here are the top two best-performing retail chatbot-building platforms that offer scalability, multilingual support, and omnichannel integrations.
1. Copilot.Live
.webp)
Of all the chatbot building platforms, Copilot.Live is gaining traction these days because of its amazing features. With the chatbot built by Copilot.Live, you can integrate your retail chatbot on WhatsApp, Slack, website, and voice calling. The smart integration modules of the chatbot allow customers to reduce cart abandonments. Besides, the chatbot helps you with promotional marketing campaigns as it promotes different sales and offers to customers via timely notifications.
2. Yellow.ai
.webp)
Being a global leader, the Yellow.ai chatbot-building platform offers multilingual support in more than a hundred languages. The generative AI modules of the chatbot help customers with intelligent conversations while deploying your retail chatbot across the web, apps, WhatsApp and more. Further, the emotion-aware sentiment modulation feature of the chatbot makes your retail chatbot understand the mood of your customers and satisfy them accordingly.
Mini Case Studies: GoFynd, Levi’s, Nykaa
To bridge the gap between retail brands and customer personalization, businesses are now heavily relying on AI chatbots and their charisma. To show how AI chatbots are taking over the global retail industry, let’s consider these three mini-case studies:
1. GoFynd
.webp)
A reliable fashion retail business, GoFynd has its chatbot (Fify) built by Copilot.Live. Since it is a fashion brand for Gen Z, the chatbot speaks to the customers in a trendy language that suits the millennial lingo. To recommend relevant outfits to the customers, the chatbot goes through the previous orders of the customers to understand their style preferences and choices of them.
Besides, the chatbot also takes care of order tracking and post-purchase customer service. This has enhanced customer engagement and reduced bounce rates.
2. Levi’s
.webp)
The chatbot of Levi’s, known as the virtual fit assistant, helps customers find their perfect jeans according to their size and stature. Instead of any manual support, the chatbot helps customers take care of product returns and exchanges. Further, the chatbot is trained well and fed with all the necessary customer data that predicts accurate responses to the customers. Over time, this has reduced product return rates and improved customer satisfaction.
Nykaa
The Nykaa chatbot, known as the Nykaa Virtual Assistant, has brought a complete transformation in the entire beauty sphere. It has a try-on feature where customers can try different makeup products even before purchasing them. To understand the skin concerns of the customers, the Nykaa chatbot has a fun quizzing method to learn about their skin types and issues. This delivers customers a hyper-personalized skin and beauty consultation by the chatbot.
Conclusion
Well, all eight future trends in retail chatbots are enough to prove their worth. All of the trends indicate that your retail businesses can thrive only when you implement these chatbots across all your retail platforms. Right from catering to your customers' needs emotionally to intelligently, these retail chatbots are a perfect addition to improve your retail business and satisfy your customers. So, if you still haven’t added a chatbot in your retail business or if you haven’t upgraded the existing chatbot, it’s time you do it now.
