Shopping: Gen Z uses social media and artificial intelligence
Younger people are discovering new brands on social media, using chatbots to compare offers and buying second-hand. The new habits are detailed in the McKinsey report
‘Can you recommend the best deal on this product?’, or ‘Is this brand reliable?’, or even ‘Is it worth buying at this price?’. These are legitimate questions when deciding how to shop, and in recent years, younger consumers have been turning to artificial intelligence for answers. Among Generation Z, 28 per cent already use chatbots to make purchases, compared with 16 per cent of baby boomers; 60 per cent regularly consult AI-generated summaries on search engines, more than double the 29 per cent of older people who do so.
The data comes from McKinsey’s *State of the Consumer 2026*, which is based on interviews with consumers from around the world.
The shop stays, social media decides
As well as AI, younger consumers use social media: 23 per cent of Gen Z have used it to discover a new brand, compared with just 7 per cent of baby boomers. However, the physical shop remains the number one place to discover new brands (28 per cent), ahead even of word of mouth amongst friends and family (18 per cent).
When it comes to actually choosing what to buy, social media plays a key role once again: 34 per cent of Gen Z consider it an important channel, compared with 16 per cent of baby boomers. Some sectors are experiencing rapid digital growth. In the cosmetics sector, for example, TikTok is a market that has been growing by around 260 per cent a year in the United States since 2023 and now accounts for around 2 per cent of sales.
The use of new tools is, however, linked to awareness, given that levels of trust in social media and artificial intelligence are actually lower amongst younger people than amongst the older generation.
