Gift shoppers usually know who they are buying for and what they can spend. What they do not know is which product to pick. Kohl’s is betting that a conversation closes that gap faster than a search box. The retailer launched a Gift Finder for Mother’s Day this April. Built with Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, the AI agent asks about the recipient’s interests, hobbies and style, and offers products that shoppers can browse and add to a cart from within the chat. Shoppers can also upload photos to find similar items.
In July, Kohl’s expanded the tool into a shopping assistant on Kohls.com and its app. The assistant answers requests like “show me the best deals right now,” compares products, searches by image and walks shoppers through store pickup and discount codes. Kohl’s built the gifting agent on the same Google platform that runs an internal analytics agent for associates, Kyle Luchinski, Kohl’s director of enterprise data platform, analytics and AI enablement, said in a Google Cloud case study. “By bringing discovery and purchase together, customers can shop frictionlessly,” he said.
Early Users Convert Better
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Kohl’s put numbers on the assistant for the first time on its second-quarter call. “Adoption is still small, but customers who engage with our AI shopping assistant are showing stronger conversion and higher revenue per visit,” CEO Michael Bender told analysts on Aug. 26, Digital Commerce 360 reported. Digital sales rose 2.8% in the quarter and reached 27% of net sales, up from 26% a year earlier, Kohl’s said.
Conversion is the problem the assistant was built to fix. Digital sales were flat for all of 2025 because lower conversion canceled out higher traffic, Chief Financial Officer Jill Timm told analysts in March, Digital Commerce 360 reported. Timm said the solution was better inventory availability and findability. Kohl’s has not disclosed how many shoppers use the assistant or by how much their conversion exceeds the site average.
The Holiday Quarter Is the First Full Test
Kohl’s has tried AI gifting before. In December 2023, it launched Storybook Magic, a tool that wrote a personalized holiday poem around a gift recommendation, PYMNTS reported. Last November, Target introduced an AI holiday gift finder that built recommendations from a recipient’s age and interests, Retail Dive reported.
Shoppers are already using AI for the part of the trip Kohl’s wants to own. Among consumers who shopped with AI help, 46% used it to find the best price or deal, and 53% said a lower price could persuade them to leave a large marketplace and buy from a brand’s own site, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Will the 2026 Shopping Season Go Agentic?,” based on surveys of 2,061 U.S. consumers and 60 retail merchants fielded through August. About 132 million people have made a retail purchase with AI assistance, the report found, and 22% now start online research in an AI tool.
The upcoming holiday quarter is where Kohl’s finds out whether the assistant can convert gift shoppers at scale.
