Retail & Shopping AI Assistants covers the set of conversational, voice and multimodal agents used to help shoppers discover products, complete purchases, and resolve post‑purchase issues. By 2026 these assistants sit at the intersection of personalization, omnichannel customer service, and automation: cloud‑hosted recommendation engines and voice agents (AWS retail assistant, Alexa‑powered solutions, Google retail AI) power search and contextual suggestions, while purpose‑built platforms integrate with commerce systems and marketing stacks. Key examples include Shopify‑integrated chatbots like HelloAI that provide real‑time order tracking and on‑site conversion support; LookBook AI’s virtual stylist and avatar try‑on for visual personalization; Llamalo’s autonomous voice agents that handle calling and spoken customer interactions; and eBay’s agentic AI that offers hyper‑personalized, real‑time recommendations within a marketplace. Behind customer interactions are CRM and marketing AI tools — Brevo and Mailchimp for multichannel messaging and automated lifecycle campaigns, and HubSpot’s Breeze for context‑aware, embedded assistant functionality across sales and service. Relevant trends: tighter commerce platform integrations, agentic assistants that proactively assist users, expanded use of AR/try‑on and avatar experiences, and increased emphasis on privacy, latency, and measurable ROI. For retailers and platform teams, the practical considerations are interoperability (APIs/webhooks with carts and inventories), consistent cross‑channel identity, and governance for data and safety. This topic helps buyers compare assistant types and vendors by use case (on‑site conversion, voice support, virtual try‑on, post‑purchase service, and marketing orchestration) and by technical needs such as platform integration, real‑time data access, and compliance.