E-commerce Veteran Launches AI Shopping Agent Daydream

Julie Bornstein, a seasoned e-commerce veteran, has unveiled Daydream, an AI-powered shopping agent that represents the culmination of her 25-year vision for personalized online shopping. Bornstein's journey began in the early 2000s when she was an e-commerce leader at Nordstrom, envisioning a future where online shopping could offer a truly personalized experience for every shopper. This vision has been refined through her roles at various companies, including Urban Outfitters, Sephora, Stitch Fix, and as the founder of fashion startup The Yes, which she sold to Pinterest in 2022.

Daydream, launching in beta, is an AI-powered fashion discovery and shopping marketplace designed to provide a lower-friction and highly personalized shopping experience. The platform aims to outperform existing fashion brands, retailers, and chatbots by leveraging large language models to deliver nuanced and detailed recommendations. The technology behind Daydream was inspired by the rise of ChatGPT, which demonstrated the potential of conversational queries to produce detailed answers and recommendations.

Customers navigating to Daydream.ing are greeted with a series of biographical questions followed by queries about their sizing, favorite brands, and budgets. The platform then prompts users to describe the event, mood, or product they are shopping for, encouraging longer, more conversational queries. The system quickly produces a flood of product images, each displayed in rectangular tiles, and an AI agent moves to the left-hand side of the screen to ask questions and narrow down the results based on user feedback. Purchases are completed on the retailer or brand’s own website, with Daydream charging a referral fee for each transaction.

Daydream has already secured around 200 partners, including apparel brands like Nike, Madewell, Chloe, and Khaite, as well as multi-brand retailers such as Nordstrom and Net-a-Porter. These partners provide Daydream with their product catalogue data, which the platform enriches with additional attributes to enhance the AI agent's recommendations. The startup's referral fee structure is competitive, falling between affiliate network referral fees and those charged by luxury marketplaces.

Bornstein believes that while do-everything AI chat and search experiences may become popular for product-related searches in categories like TVs or hairdryers, the impact of generative and Agentic AI on shopping is moving so fast that future breakthroughs are hard to predict. She views Daydream as a bridge between the current state of e-commerce and its future evolution, offering a highly personalized and efficient shopping experience that could attract a loyal customer base and partner brands.