Should you use an AI chatbot or AI agents for your storefront? For many store owners, the answer is both—but for different purposes. AI chatbots can answer customer queries using natural language and help locate products they’re looking for. AI agents offer the ability to automate more complex tasks, such as order processing and inventory management.
Ecommerce businesses use AI chatbots and AI agents to communicate with shoppers and streamline their operations—especially as familiarity with these tools grows. According to Pew Research, roughly half of Americans report using AI-powered chatbots, and a quarter report using chatbots every day. In McKinsey’s The State of AI in 2025 report, 62% of survey respondents said they are experimenting with AI agents, and 23% report scaling an agentic AI system somewhere in their enterprise.
This guide breaks down the key differences between the two tools, helping you decide when to use an AI chatbot and when an AI agent is a better fit.
What is an AI chatbot?
An AI chatbot is a conversational tool that relies on artificial intelligence to understand customer inquiries and generate relevant responses via natural language processing.
Unlike traditional chatbots, which rely on pre-defined rules and are only able to respond to a limited range of questions, AI chatbots can handle open-ended phrasing and questions they haven’t encountered previously. They can also pull in live data from sources such as product catalogs or order histories to ground their answers in what’s actually true for each customer or store.
According to Bain & Company, about a third of US consumers use AI chatbots like ChatGPT to research and compare products. Last year, roughly a quarter of referral traffic to mass merchants and specialty retailers came from AI.
On the customer service side of things, Shopify Inbox has chatbot functionality that combines the rapid responses of rules-based chatbots with AI-powered customer assistance. Brands can use Inbox’s Instant Answers feature to deliver scripted responses to commonly asked questions, such as a store’s hours of operation, shipping times, or refund policies.
You can also use Shopify’s generative AI tool, Shopify Sidekick, both to compose Instant Answers and to suggest responses to new customer questions on the fly. Inbox also allows customers to escalate more challenging conversations to human agents.
When Paul & Joe, a French cosmetics brand, implemented Shopify Inbox’s automated responses, the fashion retailer was able to handle more than three times the number of customer interactions than they could using human assistants. When combined with real-time chat, they boosted customer satisfaction and achieved conversion rates of 17%, more than five times their email conversion rate.
Business applications for AI chatbots
Businesses can deploy AI chatbots throughout the customer experience, from initial product research to handling returns and other post-sale interactions. Here are some of the most common chatbot applications:
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Pre-sale Q&A. Chatbots can act like virtual sales assistants, answering questions about sizing, materials, compatibility, or shipping timelines, helping turn shoppers into customers.
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Product recommendations. Chatbots can analyze what products a shopper is currently interested in and suggest complementary or alternative ideas.
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Cart recovery. Bots can help close deals by engaging with shoppers who are hesitant to complete a purchase by handling any last-minute concerns.
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Order status. An AI chatbot can resolve order status questions, handling one of the highest-volume support categories without human involvement.
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Returns and exchanges. Chatbots can walk customers through the return or exchange process, either handling the entire workflow or flagging refund requests above a certain amount for human approval.
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Escalation and handoff. When questions are too complex, sensitive, or high-stakes, an AI chatbot can route the customer to a human while retaining the context of the conversation.
What is an AI agent?
An AI agent is an artificial intelligence system that can act autonomously when presented with a goal. It can interpret the final objective, determine the steps needed to get there, access multiple tools or systems along the way, then evaluate its own work and make adjustments as needed with minimal human intervention.
Sophisticated AI agents can automate many repetitive tasks for store owners, including managing inventory, processing orders, running personalized marketing campaigns, and recommending products to shoppers. Agents can even research and complete purchases on a customer’s behalf.
For example, when Shopify users enable Agentic Storefronts, platforms like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google AI Mode can browse the store catalog, answer questions about products, and make recommendations to users. Copilot and Google AI Mode go even further by allowing customers to complete purchases from within the AI conversation.
While agentic AI systems are still in their infancy, they’re showing great promise. Two-thirds of executives surveyed by PwC in May 2025 said AI agents had boosted their employees’ productivity. More than half said agents helped their companies make quicker decisions, save money, and improve the experience of their customers.
Business applications for AI agents
Shopify Sidekick offers a good example of how advanced AI agents can streamline processes for businesses. Give Sidekick an objective, such as “tag high-value customers and set up a discount for them,” and it can check store data, decide who to tag, create a workflow automating the tagging process, and generate the discount code. You can then decide whether to approve the final results or ask Sidekick to take another stab at it.
Sidekick can forecast demand and manage inventory levels of your bestselling products. It could pull data on current stock levels and sales velocity, factor in seasonal patterns or upcoming promotions, determine the right volume of product to re-order, draft a purchase order to be sent to the manufacturer, and submit the plan for final approval.
How AI agents and AI chatbots compare
In general, chatbots are best for high-volume, low-complexity interactions, such as fielding basic customer service questions, recommending items based on a customer’s browsing activity and shopping history, or answering pre-sale questions about a particular product.
Agents are better for back-end processes that involve more complex interactions. You might use AI agents to monitor prices on a competitor’s website, then dynamically adjust yours to be more competitive. You could also ask an AI agent to proactively re-order popular products when inventory crosses a certain threshold, or flag potentially fraudulent transactions.
Here’s a simple breakdown of how agents and chatbots compare:
| AI chatbots | AI agents | |
| Core function | User interactions. Quickly answer basic questions based on patterns learned from training data. | Autonomous decision-making. Perceive a goal, plan steps, and take actions across systems to complete it, potentially avoiding hours of manual effort. |
| Typical use | Simple tasks. For example, a FAQ bot answering, “What’s your return policy?” | Complex workflows. Autonomous system detects low stock, reorders from a supplier, and updates the storefront. |
| Autonomy | Reactive. Waits for a prompt, responds, waits for the next prompt. | Proactive. Can initiate multistep tasks with minimal user inputs. |
| Scope of action | Limited. Can generate responses within a specific conversation. | Advanced. Can execute actions: place orders, update inventory, send emails, call APIs. |
| Context | Often session-limited or operating with a shallow context window. | Persistent memory across sessions/tasks; can track state over time. |
Chatbots and AI agents may be used together. For example, a customer-facing chatbot might respond to a query saying “I want to return this jacket” by passing the request to an AI agent that verifies the customer’s order info, generates a return label, and processes the refund.
Even so, the boundaries between AI-powered chatbots and agentic systems are blurring. For example, tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude started by issuing text-based responses to prompts. Today both can browse the web, run code, and call on tools to help complete multi-step workflows.
AI agent vs. chatbot FAQ
What’s the difference between an AI agent and an AI assistant?
AI agents and chatbots are not the same thing. A chatbot will generate responses to natural language questions, then await further instructions. Give an AI agent a goal and it will plan steps and take actions across multiple systems to achieve it. Many agents use a chatbot-style interface, but the agentic capability lives in the planning and actions that follow the conversation, not the conversation alone.
What’s the difference between an AI agent and an AI assistant?
What’s the difference between an AI agent and an AI assistant?
Is ChatGPT a chatbot or AI agent?
By default, ChatGPT functions as a conversational chatbot, responding to prompts within each session. But it also has agentic capabilities. It can complete multistep tasks across connected business applications, browse the web, and produce finished deliverables such as slide decks or spreadsheets, as well as chat replies. As AI chatbots add more autonomous features, the line between AI chatbot and agent increasingly blurs.
