Guided discovery for better experience

An AI shopping assistant combines the power of LLMs and the retrieval of Algolia Search to help customers discover products, get personalized recommendations, and complete purchases through natural conversation. Unlike traditional chatbots, it understands context and can support multi-step shopping tasks when connected to real systems.

A chatbot typically answers predefined questions. An AI shopping assistant interprets intent, keeps context across turns, retrieves relevant products, and can take actions like checking inventory or guiding a shopper toward the next step.

Algolia is the AI Retrieval Platform that unifies search, generative, and agentic experiences with fast, high-quality retrieval. For retailers, that means agentic shopping journeys that understand intent in real time — using signals like preferences, location, inventory, and business goals — to surface the right products, recommendations, and content in the moment.

Because accurate retrieval keeps AI grounded in what’s actually true, your shopping assistant experiences won’t “guess” and lose the trust of your customers. You can deliver this without large data science teams or custom-trained models, making advanced agentic commerce achievable at scale — and with  built-in controls, the experience stays on-brand as discovery shifts beyond the search box

Algolia supports OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini, and OpenAI-compatible LLMs. See the complete list of supported models in our docs. 

Choose a model based on your requirements like relevance, speed, and cost. Use the LLM Leaderboard to compare options and find what fits your use case.

Your agent retrieves real-time data from your Algolia index, so answers are grounded in your current catalog data, policies, and other approved sources — instead of relying on generic model knowledge or outdated catalog data. 

At minimum: clean product data with consistent attributes, plus the sources that matter for your experience (inventory, pricing, promotions, policies). Strong data quality improves outcomes immediately. The Algolia Intelligent Data Kit makes it easy to transform and enrich data as it’s being added to your index. 

Many teams start with a focused scope (discovery + Q&A) and expand over time. Platforms that don’t require building every layer from scratch can shorten time to value. Simple agents can be configured and tested in a matter of minutes.

Yes — it can follow your ranking strategy, business rules, and campaign priorities so the experience stays aligned with how you run your store. Use the Algolia Merchandising Studio to configure campaigns, boost or bury results, and much more.