AI-generated review summaries could upend online shopping

0:01Dawn Hilarczyk:The best proxy is if we think about how people were talking about AI six months to even a year ago and how people were using it in daily life, I think the same evolution is going to happen here, right? Where most people didn't have any subscription to any AI tools, let's say a year ago, and that's massively shifted to today. I think the same thing is going to be true with Agenda Commerce, where it's going to feel like nothing is changing. And then all at once, it'll feel like it's been here all along. That's Juan Pellerano Rendon, Chief Marketing Officer at Swap, our sponsor on this episode of the Modern Retail Podcast.

0:41Dawn Hilarczyk:Later in the show, Custom Intelligence talks with Juan about the rise of Agenda Commerce, its education phase, and what retailers should keep in mind.

0:58Dawn Hilarczyk:Join us for the Modern Retail Marketing Summit

1:00Gabi Barkho:taking place April 20th through 22nd in Huntington Beach, California. Brand leaders from Thrive Market, Coterie, PacSun, and many others will dive into how they're navigating a marketing landscape

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1:20Gabi Barkho:working groups, casual networking, and more. Don't wait.

1:24Dawn Hilarczyk:We're offering$200 off with the promo code SUMMIT2026, no spaces. Again, that's SUMMIT2026, no spaces. Go to modernretail.co slash marketing summit to learn more and secure your pass. Brands and retailers may be eligible for a complimentary pass. Apply on the event page to see if you qualify.

1:58Nick Lafferty:Hello and welcome to the Modern Retail Podcast, a show about the ways that the retail industry is changing and modernizing. I am senior reporter Gabby Barco. One way that the retail industry is changing, one that we've talked about on this podcast before, is through AI. Not only is it changing the way marketers are doing their jobs, but it's also showing up in the consumer experience. For example, I needed a new trash can. I did what I usually do. Went to Amazon and filtered reviews to four stars and above. Eventually, I settled on this one style that had over 6 ,500 reviews. I thought that was pretty good.

2:41Nick Lafferty:So I scrolled down to read the reviews and the first one I saw was, Customers find this trash can to be of high quality with an attractive and simple design that fits well in various spaces, particularly in bathrooms and offices. They appreciate its compact size and, for example, one customer mentions it's perfect for reusing plastic shopping bags. Opinions are split about how well it works. While some say it works very well, others report that it stops working after some time. That wasn't written by one of the 6 ,500 buyers. That was an AI-generated summary by Rufus, Amazon's AI chatbot. Here's another one for a hairstyling product that I came across.

3:28Nick Lafferty:The product received mixed feedback about its stickiness with some saying it's not sticky while others find it very sticky. Wow, thanks Rufus. As a frequent Amazon user, I've learned to ignore Rufus's summaries and scroll down to people's actual written reviews, product images, and videos. What used to be one of the most reliable ways to decide what to buy on the internet, authentic reviews written by real customers on how the product works or feels or looks for them, has gotten squished down and summarized into generic phrases that don't really help you come to that decision either way. And it's all because of AI.

4:09Gabi Barkho:What I think is interesting is the shift. So the AI agents are really rewriting the review culture. And that is really something that I'm paying close attention to as I look at reviews and how we start showing up. Because one of the most important things for us as a brand is to be transparent and ensure that our community has a voice.

4:29Nick Lafferty:That's Dawn Hilarczyk, the chief operating officer at Borghese, an almost 70-year-old Italian skincare brand. Part of Dawn's job has been reinventing the brand and reestablishing its social presence.

4:43Gabi Barkho:AI and even GEO and SEO and how we discover a brand is the most important thing right now in how we are discovered is that we're not trying to be number one in the page. We're trying to be the answer. And so that's the big shift between SEO and GEO. You know, SEO, it's like you are number one on the page, you're top ranking on the page. And GEO and how we use AI, and this will lead to the reviews as well, is we want to be the answer. But when you have AI rewriting the reviews, it's a really big shift from this plural voices to a single narrative. And then how are you taking these summaries and understanding them and making sure that you're summarizing them correctly.

5:31But the challenge I find with AI is that you struggle with the nuances of it.

5:39Gabi Barkho:So AI can tell you what product is great for you, but it doesn't tell you how you felt about it. Where single voice reviews are, I like the product, but I wish it was thicker. Or I like the product because it felt smooth on my skin. or I didn't like the product because I had a bad reaction. So that's what single reviews were doing in the sense of our community. And now with AI and these summaries, we're missing that piece of that nuance.

6:07Nick Lafferty:Borghese's number one product is the Fango Active Mud Mask. For$58, Borghese customers get a seven and a half ounce jar of the product that exfoliates skin and helps minimize the appearance of fine lines.

6:22Gabi Barkho:So if you think about on traditional reviews, right, you look at a review of a product like Fango. It's our number one product. We have a lot of reviews on it, right? And you can read true reviews and testimonials from customers. So you can see how they liked it, how often they've been using it. I mean, they talk about, I've been using this for generations. I love this product. They make it personal. They talk about how their family uses it or their auntie introduced into it.

6:46Nick Lafferty:The reviews on Borghese's website are full of people writing about their personal connection. That it's the same one their mom used or that they've used it for 30 years ever since a facialist recommended it. And firsthand experience of its efficacy. That the pores on their nose had shrunk in size after just one use. Even Bravo star Bethany Frankel gave her own review of the product last year. Specifically talking about the scent and the feel of the jar and that her teenage daughter steals it.

7:16Gabi Barkho:Oh, the scent. It's more than just like clay. Borghese. I don't know. I love it. And I love this jar and it like doesn't dry up. And I love it. And Bryn stole a lot of it and we're fighting. So there.

7:31Nick Lafferty:But Dawn started noticing that reviews for Fango on Amazon and other retailers were getting summarized by AI and losing that personal touch.

7:41Gabi Barkho:I mean, I'll give you an example. If you start to see repeat patterns in the behavior, then it starts to feel like it's true. And that's not always the case. But if you're getting these repeat phrases like good value, good price, good quality, those are all generic, basically aggregated information. And you're rewriting the narrative, to be honest. And that is what feels misleading. Because they're aggregating these points together that are common. They're summarizing it, which is all fair and great, to speed at which we want to see comments aggregated together. But you're missing the contextual information behind it that has dramatically shifted from when you literally used to write your review and leave your little comment.

8:32Gabi Barkho:And you would talk about how long you've lost the product or why you love it or why it's changed your life. That's not being added to the summary.

8:40Nick Lafferty:The Rufus summarized review says, Customers find the mud mask effective at cleaning pores and achieving porcelain-like skin, with one noting it leaves skin feeling hydrated. The product receives positive feedback for its quality, softening effects, pleasant smell, and ease of application while also lasting a long time. Opinions on value for money are mixed, with some saying it's worth the price while others find it too expensive for the amount received. The comment on value is what Dawn takes offense to.

9:16Gabi Barkho:I think the word value is so terrible. I'm just going to be honest with you. Now I'm going to get my soapbox. So, okay, Dawn, be positive, be kind. Okay, value is for the eye of the beholder. We as a brand and or as a retailer should not, nor do we, have the right to tell customers what the value is to them. And here's a good example. Our Fango mask is$58. So it's a big jar. Is that value to you the cost? Is the value how you feel when you use it only for five minutes in the morning and you literally, the rest of the day, your skin feels amazing? Is the value that you can't have time to go to a spa or don't have the means to go to a spa, but you can get a treatment at home.

9:59Gabi Barkho:So when we use the word value, we, and these AI summaries are doing it. And some of our third party and our retail partners are doing it. You are conceptually deciding what matters to the consumer. And that I have a problem with.

10:15Nick Lafferty:I think the big question is like, it's so hard to tell whether it's impacting their decision, right?

10:21Gabi Barkho:I mean, I can tell you, I can, we can see it in the sense that we're in a renaissance period. So the brand is in a high brand awareness moment in the last two years. And so we're spending a lot of investment and time on brand awareness. And what we noticed with brand awareness, it's driving really to DTC, but more than Amazon, because 71 % of the Amazon customers are new for us, where it's about 34 to 38 % on DTC. So right there, we are seeing the impact of these reviews on Amazon. We're very fortunate that Fango, which is one of the big products that we sell, has over four-star rating. Actually, all of our top five SKUs on Amazon are really highly ranked and rated.

11:03Gabi Barkho:What people don't know when you look at Amazon is you have to have a certain amount of reviews for Amazon to rank you and support you and initiatives, right? Climb the charts, and also be able to be participating in Amazon promotions and things like that. So So there is a algorithm in the Amazon ecosystem that consumers probably don't know about, but we as brands are always paying attention to. So I think there's a positive in the summary. I will tell you that. I will say that brands, while we cannot control the summary directly, we can't influence the input. So, you know, encouraging reviews, being more specific on how you can review your product, making sure prompting customers to have trade-offs like why if you had a negative review well what was the reason why this happened versus that monitoring your summaries to make sure they make sense and they're not just star ratings i mean all of those things we can do better at as we pay attention to it and we need to be paying attention to it much more often than we have been

12:04Nick Lafferty:it's hard to know for sure how much these generic and impersonal review summaries can affect sales But Borghese is not the only brand noticing how AI, whether it's Amazon's Rufus or Google Gemini or ChatGPT, has made reviews more complicated than just star ratings.

12:26Dawn Hilarczyk:I'm Christina Ko, Senior Editor at Custom Intelligence, Digiday Media's and Modern Retail's in-house agency. In this podcast, Interstitial Story, sponsored by Swap, we speak with Juan Pelerano Rendon, Swap's Chief Marketing Officer, about the rise of agentic commerce, its education phase, and what retailers should keep in mind. I certainly think that there are misconceptions and misunderstandings at this point. And this is a new way for commerce to transact agent to agent or with customers using agents. And that's fundamentally different from just a chatbot making recommendations, right? Or the ability to virtually try on.

13:06Dawn Hilarczyk:This is a fully new and innovative way to transact. And I think we're in a bit of a chicken or egg situation where we don't know if it will be the brands that drive the transition by forcing consumers to adopt, bringing the innovation to the consumers, or if the consumers will start to demand these types of tools and make it so that the brands have to adopt them because they just want to transact in this way and use agents. So it will fundamentally shift in my view this year, where consumers are already using LLMs all the time in terms of how they work, questions that they ask personally and professionally.

13:52Dawn Hilarczyk:So it's only right that the next thing that will come is in terms of commerce. So will consumers be the ones that want that experience from the retailers or will the retailers bring the innovation to those consumers? We're working on the latter, but hope that consumers will also help drive that innovation and change by having that expectation from the brands and retailers to bring these experiences to life. While agentic commerce has been a hot topic, consumers need to understand how the technology benefits them before they can be active proponents. components. Until now, AgenteCommerce, I think it's been a lot of noise and consumers are probably tired of hearing that there's going to be this big change and it's going to make shopping and consuming a lot easier.

14:41Dawn Hilarczyk:But now, once they start to see the utility of AgenteCommerce, they're using LLMs in their daily lives. Once it comes to commerce and how you transact, it's going to be exponential adoption overnight Because they realize you can have guided discovery, guided shopping experience, and really blur the line as close as you can between physical in-store and digital and e-commerce. Where you can have one-to-one experiences with the agentic sites and ask questions, ask for recommendations, virtually try things on, and then transact very simply through voice or text in the way that you would in-store.

15:21Dawn Hilarczyk:So if you're able to blur those lines between online and physical retail, certainly consumers are going to adopt it and want to have that experience more and more. As consumers realize the benefits of agentic commerce, retailers will need to figure out how they can deliver solutions that make sense for them while offering consumers what they're looking for. I think retailers are starting to educate themselves and honestly looking for answers in terms of what's the best way to enable agentic commerce. That's what we're working on right now and have a lot of brands beta testing with us to enable true end to end agentic commerce.

16:00Dawn Hilarczyk:So as these things become more widely available, then brands and retailers, I think, will start to act a lot quicker. tariff with flash, supply chain issues. That's been kind of where everyone's minds have been. I think as the conversation has shifted in Q1 to be more focused on Agenda Commerce more broadly, you're seeing a lot of retailers roll out their own Agenda Commerce solutions that are built in house. So as these things get brought to light more and more, there will be more options for retailers in which they're able to better decide what makes most sense for them. But until retailers feel like they're educated enough on what's out there, I don't think there's going to be a ton of movement in terms of enablement.

16:49Dawn Hilarczyk:Being in the education phase of the industry at large and as consumers adopt it and as brands adopt it and solutions come to market, I think it'll be something that really fundamentally shifts as we go into Q2 and Q3 of this year. You've been listening to Juan Pelerano Rendon, Chief Marketing Officer at Swap, our sponsor on this episode. And now back to the Modern Retail Podcast.

17:20Dawn Hilarczyk:We believe that this shift of moving from traditional search to AI search is really the biggest shift in marketing in the history of the internet.

17:32Nick Lafferty:That's Nick Lafferty. He leads growth marketing at Profound, a tool that helps brands understand, control, and scale how they show up in AI search. Profound works with brands like Walmart and Target, among other Fortune 500 companies.

17:49Dawn Hilarczyk:And really, we believe in two fundamental things right now is that one, every brand on the planet will care how AI talks about their product, brand or service. And two, that every marketing team will use AI and agents to scale their output. So profound is building products for both of those things.

18:13Nick Lafferty:So how exactly does AI know how to talk about products?