Re-Imaginging Retail:
Building an AI Shopping Assistant That Bridges Customer Trust and Business Growth
Focus
Mixed-method research
Longitudinal/rolling research
Behavioral & sentiment measurement
Cross-team strategy
Client: Fortune 500 retailer
Role: Manager and strategist
Impact: Meaningful lifts in revenue per visit and conversion, unlocking a significant new revenue opportunity
AI experiences don't ship once. They evolve continuously, and so does the research behind them. This project taught me that research can't just validate an AI experience; it has to keep pace with one.
The Challenge
A national retailer set out to explore how AI could show up in the shopping journey. The initial direction was narrow, focused on a single use case, in a space where most of what worked was still unknown. My job was to widen that lens before the team built too far in one direction.
What I Did:
Audited existing customer feedback and engaged people already using AI tools in their daily lives to find where the real retail opportunity lived
Reframed the initial direction into a broader vision: an assistant that helps customers compare, decide, and trust what they're seeing
Established a rolling research cadence — recognizing that a probabilistic, constantly-shifting experience couldn't be validated with a single round of testing
Built out a framework for evaluating AI-specific UX patterns (onboarding, input, output interpretation, feedback, and system learning) rather than testing features in isolation
Partnered with engineering to define customer intents and train internal models to classify conversations against them
Designed and piloted new methods for capturing sentiment directly within the experience, since traditional transcript analysis wasn't robust enough on its own
What Happened Next:
Insights from this work shaped product capabilities beyond what was originally scoped, strengthening both the retailer's experience and the broader platform
The rolling research model became the foundation for how the team continues to evaluate and evolve the assistant today
The work delivered a measurable lift in conversion and revenue per visit, translating into a significant new revenue opportunity for the business
Want to go deeper?
This case study includes proprietary business details and is protected for privacy. Reach out to request access.