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arXiv · 2609.09878

Purchase Advice and Observable Buyer Responses in Real AI Conversations

Benjamin Tannenbaum
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Abstract

How often does a generative assistant persuade someone to buy, or persuade them not to buy? Conversation logs contain recommendations, but they do not necessarily record subsequent decisions. We audit 317 historical interactions from Aiso's proprietary research database of licensed, consent-based, de-identified conversations with commercially available AI assistants. Single-agent AI-assisted screening identifies 68 purchase-directed records; collapsing one shared-prefix copy yields 67 retained episodes, dated April 2023 to July 2025. Assistant responses provide candidate options, acquisition channels, or conditional preferences in 52 episodes (77.6%). One episode contains conditional redirection away from a named accommodation candidate. No episode is coded as advice to abandon or defer the purchase category. Only 18 episodes (26.9%) contain a subsequent user turn within the same purchase-related mission, compared with 23 (34.3%) that contain any later user turn. Using conversation depth alone therefore overstates this follow-up availability by 27.8%. Across 47 retained user follow-up messages, no explicit post-advice purchase commitment, completed-purchase report, or purchase-category abandonment statement is observed. These zeros describe recorded statements, not conversion or persuasion rates. The paper supplies operational definitions, text-free annotations, and reproducible descriptive results. Its central finding is a measurement limitation: recommendation content is observable much more often than a buyer's subsequent decision. The selected historical sample, unvalidated AI annotations, and missing transaction outcomes do not support a population-level or causal estimate of persuasion.

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Benjamin Tannenbaum. 2026-09-09. Purchase Advice and Observable Buyer Responses in Real AI Conversations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09878

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