AI shopping is coming to your favorite brand’s website

FastCompany: 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 ” 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 .

[Image: courtesy Daydream] 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 , an AI-powered fashion search and discovery platform , 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. Unlearning 30 Years of Search Habits The launch comes as the retail industry wrestles with the broader question of where agentic commerce 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. [Image: courtesy Daydream] “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.

[Image: courtesy Daydream] Turning Search Queries into Data 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.

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The article discusses the significant impact of AI on brand strategies and consumer engagement, which is highly relevant and somewhat novel in the context of current digital marketing trends.