Steve Madden, a client of Narvar, is leaning into AI for holiday.
COURTESY OF NARVAR
Steve Madden is ready for the holiday season and increased consumer use and adoption of AI. However, retailers in general aren’t prepared. Consumers are adopting AI for holiday faster than retailers are preparing for it, according to a new study from Narvar, an AI-powered platform that delivers brand hospitality at scale. According to the report, 65% of consumers plan to use AI for at least one part of their holiday shopping this year, but only 8% of retailers characterize themselves as very confident in using AI to improve the shopping experience.
That’s because consumers see AI as one seamless conversation, while retailers are still operating across many separate systems. A retailer answering a consumer’s needs accurately might have to leverage product data, inventory, personalization, fulfillment logic and returns, which are all part of different networks.
“I don’t think the biggest challenge is the AI itself, it’s connecting the infrastructure behind it,” said Colleen Waters, vice president of ecommerce at Steve Madden, and a client of Narvar. “It’s one answer. It’s a good answer, but it’s just one part of the journey. Consumers are moving very quickly from an answer to simple questions to expecting retailers to understand the full context. That’s a bigger operational leap for retailers.”
The gap sits squarely at the center of Narvar’s 2026 Holiday Shopping Report, which surveyed 100 retail decision-makers and 1,348 U.S. consumers to find out whether retailers agree or disagree with what shoppers expect this holiday season.
Narvar builds infrastructure for a long list of retail customers such as eBay, Sephora, and some of the LVMH brands. Consumers who buy from those retailers, in turn, interact with Narvar. The company claims it sees 98% of the U.S. population on its platform.
Meanwhile, Narvar’s role has evolved as the retail landscape has shifted, said Anisa Kumar, CEO. The company is no longer a logistics layer that tracks packages and lets consumers know where their parcel is and when it will arrive at their door. Narvar’s business is now brand hospitality.
“Actually, brand hospitality started in hotels, airlines, and kind of went down that path to where now retailers need to be thinking about it,” Kumar said. “There’s this broader concept of brand hospitality. Given that, we wanted to understand how consumers are thinking about AI and how they’re going to be using it.”
Steve Madden was an early adopter of ChatGPT at checkout and has been working over the years on improving the customer journey. “I’m most interested in places where AI can remove work for the customer and streamline the path to purchase,” said Waters.
AI can help Steve Madden understand what a customer is purchasing, how they arrived at the ecommerce site, and what they’ve already seen and connected with. The company is looking for any context it can get from the other channels, which could help it make the experience feel more connected.
The customer may have arrived via email or social media, an AI platform, or one of the Steve Madden stores, Waters said. “We see every interaction as a blank slate,” she added. “We do a better job with that than some others. That includes search and recommendations, outfitting and making our products and content more useful.”
Going into the holiday season, Steve Madden will focus on three areas: using AI to help a consumer find the right product faster, finding out if it’s given them the confidence to buy, and seeing whether it removes friction across channels.
“Holiday is a great time for testing because consumers are extremely mission driven,” Waters said. “Everybody loves free shipping. It’s something we use in our loyalty program. Speed, everybody’s used to Amazon. You have to be honest with the consumer about when they’ll be getting their order. We try to meet customers where they are. If you live within a certain radius of our stores you can order a shoe and have it delivered by DoorDash like a pizza.”
“We definitely do see this anecdotally ticking up right from the beginning of the year,” Kumar said. “In consumers surveyed the numbers keep increasing as the months go by. Right now, purchases are not happening at scale on frontier models like Gemini. People are using them for discovery, for comparing, for budgeting and for to-do tasks.”
“If you’re not feeding the frontier models with the right information, you can’t come up with the right comparison when consumers are looking to compare or they’re looking to understand where their return is or where their shipping order is,” Kumar added. “You’ve got to have the data that’s feeding where the consumer is doing the research.”
“It will be interesting to see with holiday what the promotional cadence looks like,” Waters said. “It’s been a roller coaster for a few years with tariffs. Money is always top of mind with our customers.”
AI can help with that, she said. Consumers can tell the AI agent who they’re shopping for, what their age is, what their budget is. They have a personal shopper that’s brand agnostic at their fingertips. The opportunity for AI is not to add to the shopping experience for its own sake, Waters said.
Consumers aren’t rejecting AI as much as they’re rejecting bad experiences that happen to be powered by AI. Customers generally don’t care if the experience is powered by AI. It becomes a problem when a bot gets to a dead end, doesn’t understand the question and is creating friction, not solving a problem, Kumar said.
Consumers expect to feel connected and that will lead to a higher expectations, Waters said. “The more they use ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, the more those platforms know them. On the retailer side that raises the bar on information, from being discoverable to being understood. This holiday will be a big learning period for retailers. It’s a big shift we’re seeing this holiday season.”
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