Ashley Furniture just announced a new shopping experience that may change how consumers buy furniture, and how retailers in the space compete. The company announced a partnership with Perplexity and PayPal to enable a fully transactional journey inside Perplexity’s conversational interface. Shoppers can ask for recommendations, browse curated options, add items to cart, and complete checkout within a chat session.
With this move, Ashley aims to stake an early claim in agentic commerce, the confluence of AI-driven discovery and direct purchase, for large home-furnishing retailers. This is in line with the leadership’s view that AI goes beyond being a marginal efficiency tool, towards setting a strategic foundation.
Internal Strategy Meets External Push
The Perplexity-PayPal integration is the outward expression of a broader, multi-year AI strategy inside Ashley.
Todd Wanek, CEO of Ashley Furniture, described AI as “as important and impactful to society as fire was to the caveman.” Beyond that metaphor, Wanek and his team have long invested in AI for multiple internal functions: forecasting demand across thousands of SKUs, optimizing supply chain logistics, using AI in HR and accounts payable, and deploying productivity tools (e.g., Microsoft Copilot) across offices.
Wanek estimated that Ashley has identified over 170 projects where AI can create value, ranging from demand forecasting to creative services. The shift to consumer-facing, agentic commerce suggests the company now intends to leverage that internal AI groundwork to reshape its front-end retail experience.
In the words of Chad Spencer, CEO of Ashley Global Retail: “AI-powered commerce gives us the ability to anticipate guest needs, personalize in real time and deliver a seamless experience from discovery to purchase.” Senior e-commerce leadership echoed the tone: offering a “fully shoppable experience within Perplexity… removes friction and gives customers a smarter, more intuitive way to shop Ashley.”
This public-facing step turns AI into a competitive claim. It offers some evidence that Ashley isn’t treating AI as optional; it views AI as a major pillar to its future business model.
What This Means for Retail
Ashley’s move places it in an early adopter category among major furniture retailers. By shifting part of the shopping funnel into an AI agent not controlled by the retailer, the company gains access to a growing population of users who begin discovery outside traditional brand websites or marketplaces.
That external reach offers upside. Reduced friction (no page-hopping, no complicated search filters) could improve conversion rates compared with traditional e-commerce flows. The convenience of conversational search plus one-click checkout (via PayPal) might raise average order value (through cross-selling and bundling), especially in a category like furniture where consumers often buy multiple pieces at once.
On a structural level, agentic commerce compresses the “time to cart”: from discovery to purchase in a single continuous session. Ashley looks towards capturing incremental demand, especially from consumers who would otherwise browse, bookmark, delay, or drop off mid-journey.
Yet the strategy carries trade-offs. Because the agent lives on Perplexity rather than Ashley’s own domain, Ashley potentially surrenders some ownership over first-party data, consumer-engagement signals, and long-term personalization opportunities. Data collected by Perplexity may not map cleanly into Ashley’s CRM or long-term customer-lifecycle management infrastructure.
Meanwhile, peer retailers have already rolled out significant AI-driven shopping tools under full control of their own ecosystems. Wayfair launched Muse in February 2025, a generative-AI tool for home-furnishings inspiration, visual search and personalized product discovery. Muse lets shoppers describe a room or style (e.g., “moody 1920s living room”), browse AI-generated room images, then view matching items from Wayfair’s catalog.
At IKEA, the retailer is investing in both design-assist and conversational-commerce capabilities. In 2024, IKEA added a generative-AI shopping assistant via ChatGPT (in the GPT Store). Users can describe their room requirements (size, style, budget, sustainability preferences) and get curated furniture suggestions, with links to check availability and purchase.
These on-site or on-platform AI investments let Wayfair and IKEA maintain first-party control over user data, inventory interactions, design preferences, shopping behaviour, and post-purchase flows. Maintaining that control supports long-term customer relationship management (retention, repeat purchases, personalization, home-life lifecycle integrations.)
By contrast, the recent Ashley Furniture initiative, pairing Perplexity (AI answer engine) with PayPal for checkout, marks a different strategic trade-off.
