Microsoft Shopping’s New AI-Powered Tools in Bing and Edge

Microsoft is putting in efforts to enhance the user experience of shopping on Bing

The tech world is completely immersed in introducing new updates daily, especially concerning artificial intelligence (AI). Microsoft has announced new AI features. These include new AI-powered shopping tools for its Bing search and the Bing AI chatbot in the Edge sidebar. This new collection of features genuinely looks handy, even though many shopping features Microsoft has incorporated into Edge over the years differ from a user's favorites.

The new tools help users to harness the power of AI "to make it easier to discover, research, and complete your purchase, all in one place with information you need from expert sources," the tech giant said in a blog post on Thursday.

The 'Buying Guide' tells users what to look for in each category, offers product suggestions, and shows the specifications of multiple, similar items next to each other in a smart compare table so that users can quickly compare options without having to click around to various websites. This tool in Bing is available now in the US and will roll out to other markets over time. The Buying Guide in Edge has started rolling out globally.

"Our Price Match feature continues to work for you, even after your purchase, by monitoring the item's price and assisting you in requesting a match if it drops," the tech giant said.

Given that an entire ecosystem of sites focuses on these kinds of buying guides, it will be interesting to see how they will react to this change (and if Microsoft is doing this in Bing, Google and others will surely follow suit). Nobody will grieve the end of the low-quality, SEO-optimized shopping content you often find when you try to compare different products, but this has the potential to hurt legitimate editorial operations, too.

The new buying guides in Bing are now available in the US, and the worldwide rollout for buying guides in Edge is starting today.