Interview with iAdvize: AI redefines the buying journey

At a time when conversational AI is profoundly transforming purchasing paths, Ifop’s Media & Digital division has teamed up with iAdvize to analyze these new uses.

We spoke to Yves Le Grouyer, Chief Marketing Officer at iAdvize, who discusses the main findings of this study and their implications for brands.

Question 1: Can you introduce iAdvise and tell us what prompted you to launch this study into the use of AI in online shopping journeys?

iAdvize is building the future of agentic commerce.
In concrete terms, we’re helping e-retailers turn their visitors into customers with an AI Shopping Assistant designed with sales in mind: it anticipates questions, recommends relevant products and guides through to checkout.
More than 350 brands (Joué Club, Samsonite, Bobochic, Stihl among others) rely on our platform to generate over a billion euros in online revenue every year.

On the genesis of the study: we are a company deeply convinced that AI will radically transform online commerce.
But we had a real frustration: data on consumer behavior in the face of AI in shopping remained almost non-existent on the European market, and very Anglocentric.
There was a lot of discussion about the future of retail, agentic commerce, delegated purchasing… but it was based on American projections.
We wanted to give a voice to French consumers, really measure their level of maturity, and build a factual basis on which brands could make decisions.

Question 2: The study shows that AI is already influencing the purchasing decision of one in two online shoppers, and that 62% of AI users consult it before buying: what does this change, concretely, in your reading of “pre-shopping” and in the way a brand should appear at that point?

Quite honestly, these results were a slap in the face. But a good one.
We were observing very strong growth in usage among our customers (interactions with our Shopping Assistant AI tripled between 2024 and 2025, from 24 to 78 million).

But the scale of the phenomenon on the consumer side surprised me.

When we see that one in two online shoppers is already influenced by AI in their decision, and that 62% of AI users consult it before even arriving on a merchant site, it profoundly changes the way we read the shopping journey.
What this means in concrete terms for brands is that the moment of truth has shifted. Part of the buying journey now begins before even arriving on the site: on generalist AI assistants, in conversational searches.

This is a real challenge for visibility.

But this is not where the battle is won or lost. The real blind spot, the one that the study forcefully reveals, is what happens on the merchant site itself.
Consumers arrive with new habits, new reflexes, a new way of searching and deciding.

And what do they find? A search bar, filters, static product sheets. The gap between what they’ve just experienced on a conversational AI and what the brand offers them has become glaring.

And that gap means lost sales. It’s precisely this problem that iAdvize solves: offering, on the brand’s own site, a shopping experience that lives up to consumers’ new expectations.

Question 3: We’re also seeing a trend towards more “delegated” uses (pre-selection, or even purchasing in the consumer’s place, particularly for users of shopping assistants). In the future, what do you see as the most structuring priorities for brands (usefulness, trust, control, etc.), and how do you arbitrate between them?

Delegating purchasing to AI is on everyone’s mind. And the study shows that consumers are beginning to be ready for it, at least psychologically.

But there’s a gulf between intention and reliable execution. OpenAI’s setbacks with its Instant Checkout project, and its refocusing on the product discovery phase, are the best illustration of this: even the best-armed players technologically come up against the complexity of an end-to-end purchase.

So what are the priorities? I see them in this order: utility first, then trust, and control as a sine qua non.
Utility, because a consumer will never delegate a purchase to an AI that doesn’t really help him choose. Value must be proven at every stage of the process.
Trust, because delegation means accepting to let go – and that’s something you build over dozens of successful interactions.
Finally, control, because the majority of consumers want to stay in control, and brands that forget this will pay the price in abandonment and mistrust.

However, retailers have an advantage that the big AI platforms don’t: the trust their customers already place in them, the control they have over their catalog, their brand DNA, their technological environment. Brands that know how to build an end-to-end agentic experience on their own e-commerce site (from discovery to checkout) will have a considerable competitive advantage over those that let third parties get in the way.