Craft retailer Michaels says its Gemini-powered assistant Ask Mike converts shoppers at double the rate of traditional site search, after 75,000 conversations since May. Take the retailer's own number with salt, but the lever is real. Most conversion problems are friction problems.
Search makes the customer do the work. A good assistant does the work for them, and more of them buy.
Craft retailer Michaels says its new AI shopping assistant converts shoppers at double the rate of traditional site search. That is the kind of number that gets a boardroom's attention.
Michaels launched Ask Mike, an assistant built on Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise, publicly on 21 July after a quiet start in May. It answers open prompts like help me plan my kid's birthday party or I need fabric for DIY curtains across the website and its iOS and Android apps. The retailer says it has handled 75,000 conversations since May and, per Digiday, doubles the conversion rate of shoppers who use it versus those who use standard search. Michaels went from concept to production in six weeks.
The mechanism is simple. Traditional search makes the shopper do the work of translating a project into product keywords. The assistant does that translation for them, which keeps more of them moving toward a basket.
Why it matters
Most conversion problems are not traffic problems. They are friction problems. A thousand people walk into your shopfront and a handful walk out with a bag. The question is always what happened to the rest. If an assistant that understands intent lifts conversion this much for a big retailer, the lever is real, and it is a lever most Australian businesses have not pulled.
The conversion rate Michaels reports for shoppers using its Gemini-powered assistant versus traditional site search (Digiday)
The caveat is the source. This is a retailer sharing its own early number about its own tool. Take the exact figure with salt. The direction, though, is worth taking seriously.
What to do about it
The prize here is not the technology. It is removing the friction between a customer's intent and your product. Measure that, and the tool becomes a decision instead of a bet.