The Future of Shopping is a Conversation

For the last two decades, online shopping has been built around search bars, filters, and product grids. But real-world shopping doesn't work like that. People don't always know exactly what they want — they ask questions, browse options, get recommendations, and make decisions over time.

With Basket's conversational assistant, we're bringing that natural experience online. This isn't just a voice bot or a glorified search engine. It's a context-aware shopping companion, powered by advances in AI and Basket's unmatched behavioural data.

The idea of a tidy, linear funnel — from awareness to consideration to purchase — no longer reflects how people actually shop. Today's consumer journey is fluid, non-linear, and constantly in motion.

What we're seeing now is better described by 4S behaviours:

• Streaming — passive consumption, inspiration, vibes
• Scrolling — casual grazing, low intent
• Searching — pointed queries, emerging intent
• Shopping — high intent, actionable moments

These states don't follow a set order. They overlap, repeat, and blend. A user can go from streaming to shopping in a single tap — or sit in scroll/search limbo for weeks. Basket's assistant is designed to move fluidly between these states — to support shoppers no matter what mindset they're in. That's what makes conversational commerce so powerful.

Until recently, conversational commerce was more promise than reality. Legacy systems lacked the depth of understanding and real-time intelligence needed to make it feel personal, helpful, or even remotely intuitive.

But three things have changed:

1. The AI leap — Large language models now understand nuance, emotion, and context.
2. Voice as a native interface — Users are ready to speak to technology the way they speak to people.
3. Basket's intent data — We've captured years of real-world product consideration across millions of interactions.

That last piece is our edge — the "missing layer" that turns a clever chatbot into a truly smart shopping assistant.

Basket's assistant isn't starting from scratch every time you say hello. It knows what you've saved, what you've hesitated on, what you've waited for, and what kind of products tend to resonate with you.

It also understands price sensitivity, buying patterns, and gifting occasions across user cohorts. This means the assistant can:

• Suggest a gift before a birthday is even mentioned
• Recommend similar items when a saved product goes out of stock
• Hold off pushing a product it knows you're still undecided on

By layering AI on top of real behavioural data, we're creating a new category: predictive conversational commerce.

As users chat with our assistant, every interaction makes it sharper. It learns:

• Your tone
• Your preferences
• Your priorities

And because Basket already knows how people shop across verticals — from fashion to tech to beauty to home — we're not just personalising the experience; we're benchmarking it against deep intent signals from a broad user base.

The more people use it, the better it gets — for everyone.

As users grow to trust the assistant and connect their email accounts, calendars, and other data sources, our utility levels up. We move from helpful to indispensable — surfacing receipts, managing warranties, anticipating gifting moments, and tailoring recommendations with precision. This deepens user loyalty and creates a formidable data moat that compounds over time. Loyalty and historical context become defensible assets that no other commerce platform can replicate.

We believe the next generation of shopping experiences will feel more like talking to a friend than clicking through a catalogue.

Basket's assistant is just the beginning. It's a new interface, a new kind of user relationship, and a new way to build trust, loyalty, and value.

We're not building a chatbot. We're building the operating system for how people will shop — naturally, contextually, and conversationally.