The dream of advertising's next frontier — the conversational commerce assistant, where a shopper asks what to make for dinner and receives, along with the recipe, a gently sponsored suggestion to add Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup to the cart — turns out to be almost entirely a dream, at least for now.

A new study of 24 American grocery retailers found that precisely one of them, Amazon, has built an artificial intelligence shopping assistant and begun selling advertising inside it. The other 23 have not. Seventeen of them have no customer-facing assistant at all.

(Walmart is testing what it calls sponsored prompts inside its assistant, Sparky, but the study's authors declined to count those as advertising units, which seems like the kind of distinction that matters more to index-makers than to the brands writing the checks.)

Amazon's lead, at 63 out of a possible 100 points in the study's capability index, will surprise approximately no one who has watched the company spend the last decade building what amounts to a vertically integrated shopping empire. When you own the assistant, the product catalog, the checkout process and the advertising network, monetization becomes, as the study's authors put it, "a done deal."

The company is now selling a version of that technology stack to other retailers through Amazon Web Services, with Kate Spade already using it — an arrangement in which Amazon profits whether other retailers succeed or fail at building their own conversational surfaces.

The irony, Mr. Masters notes in the report, is that Amazon leads the capability rankings in the one grocery category where its market share actually trails: Walmart holds 31.6 percent of American grocery e-commerce, compared with Amazon's 22.6 percent.

Most of the remaining retailers appear in conversational commerce at all only because Instacart carries them there — which provides reach but not a surface they can sell advertising against. The discovery behavior has already moved. The advertising budgets are ready to follow. What hasn't been built, for most of the industry, is anywhere for them to go.

Original story published in The Drum: "Kiri Masters: The AI assistant is the next ad surface. Only one retailer has actually built it | The Drum"