Shopping with a Platform AI Assistant: Who Adopts, When in the Journey, and What For

ArXi:2603.24947v1 Announce Type: new This paper provides some of the first large-scale descriptive evidence on how consumers adopt and use platform-embedded shopping AI in e-commerce. Using data on 31M users of Ctrip, China's largest online travel platform, we study "Wendao," an LLM-based AI assistant integrated into the platform. We document three empirical regularities. First, adoption is highest among older consumers, female users, and highly engaged existing users, reversing the younger, male-dominated profile commonly documented for general-purpose AI tools.