For Alexander Lee, back-to-school shopping used to mean hours spent comparing prices, reading reviews, and figuring out where to buy a growing list of supplies for his two kids. “The pens and pencils are not that big of a deal,” Lee said in a CNBC interview ahead of the Labor Day weekend. Things like “calculators, locks, back-to-school clothes, and if they’re playing sports, you have to get the sports gear … when you have 30 different items, that adds up quickly,” he added. Lee is an accounting professional. His wife is an elementary school teacher. They have a 5-year-old going into first grade and a 3-year-old preschooler. This year, they outsourced much of their back-to-school shopping to artificial intelligence. Instead of “rifling through all the different reviews, all the different forums, and Reddits,” Lee said he used AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude to figure out which products offer the best value for their budget. Perhaps the biggest benefit is that AI can consolidate a shopping process that once required searching across numerous retailers. “There’s less stress of having to go to Target , Home Depot , and Costco ,” Lee said. “We don’t have to do any of that because AI has been so much easier and has even helped adjust the shopping list.” Lee, who lives with his family in Brooklyn, said the chatbots even told him when to buy to get the best deals. “I’m not going to wait until the month before to buy, if it’s going to save me 20% or 30% [sooner].” While most public schools across the nation started school before Labor Day, which falls on Monday, Sept. 7 this year, Lee’s first-grader will start after the holiday. New York State public schools go back Sept. 10. Lee’s experience is increasingly becoming the norm. Artificial intelligence is playing a much larger role in how consumers prepare for school this year, particularly as families look for ways to stretch their budgets. According to the National Retail Federation’s latest survey , 61% of shoppers said they used generative AI and other AI-powered shopping tools this year to find the best prices and discounts and ask for shopping recommendations and ideas. “What’s different this year isn’t that parents are using AI for discovery — it’s that they’re using it to delegate their decision-making,” said Kristina Coughlin, senior vice president and general manager of creator marketing agency Trevant. “Almost 70% of shoppers are asking AI to find the deals, compare products, and summarize the reviews for them,” according to Coughlin. People have been using the internet to compare prices and research products for decades. But increasingly, they’re asking AI to do that work for them. For consumer-facing companies, AI is a gateway from product discovery to the completed transaction. That evolution — consumers using AI to simply search for products to now using it to delegate parts of the shopping process — is where the opportunity for Google parent Alphabet and…
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