This article first appeared in the Yahoo Finance Tech newsletter. Get the newsletter sent directly to your inbox every week by subscribing here.
It’s just about the most wonderful time of the year. If you’re like me, you’ll spend Thanksgiving stuffing your face with enough turkey, gravy, and sides to fill a small swimming pool and, after a brief nap, start looking for the best Black Friday tech deals to score some savings on this year’s holiday gifts.
But Black Friday is no longer as simple as rushing into a big box store and trampling your neighbor to grab the last big-screen TV on sale.
AI is adding a new wrinkle to the shopping process, and tariffs have increased the prices of some of the most sought-after products this holiday shopping season, including game consoles.
“If I had to pick a category … most affected by tariffs on both the dimension of price elasticity and the dimension of foreign exposure as a percent of the total bill of materials, electronics is it,” Bain & Company’s Aaron Cheris told Yahoo Finance. That can include everything from headphones to keyboards and computer mice.
Some PCs are also expected to become more expensive, thanks in part to the explosion in data center construction putting a strain on consumer parts such as memory and graphics chips.
But that doesn’t mean everything will be pricier this year. You just need to know where and how to look.
Online shopping has made buying gifts easier than ever.
You can fill your cart, set up direct shipping from your couch in the time it takes to get through a commercial break. And now companies are adding AI to the mix.
On Monday, OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) announced its new shopping research tool that allows you to search for and compare products, creating a kind of AI-powered shopping guide that eventually takes you to a retailer’s site for whatever it is you decide to purchase.
Amazon (AMZN) has its Rufus AI shopping tool, which can help you find specific products or get suggestions for gifts. For instance, if you search for gifts for an eight-year-old boy who likes Legos, playing sports, and video games, Rufus will give you a list of Lego-based video games, things like portable soccer goals, and more.
Google’s (GOOG, GOOGL) AI mode and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Copilot offer similar capabilities, providing suggested gift ideas and links to appropriate retailers.
According to Bain, 30%-45% of US consumers are already using generative AI for product research and comparison, with 25% of Gen Z and 52% of millennials saying they’ll begin shopping using generative AI platforms.
