Back-to-school shopping trends 2026: The rise of generative AI | Deloitte Insights

Back-to-school shopping begins before anything goes into a cart. Parents are looking for ideas, comparing prices, and deciding what their kids actually need—and they’re increasingly turning to social media and generative AI along the way.

🎥 In this video, Brian McCarthy, retail strategy leader at Deloitte Consulting, shares findings from Deloitte’s latest back-to-school survey of 1,200 US parents across income groups.

The 2026 results show that search engines remain a popular shopping tool, while social media and generative AI are linked to higher average planned spending.

📌 Key findings from the survey:
• Parents who said they don’t plan to use technology to guide their back-to-school spending plan to spend $381 on average, while search users say they plan to spend $494 this season. Search and social media users plan to spend $539 on back-to-school shopping, and those using generative AI, in addition to search and social media, plan to spend $737.
• Generative AI may make shopping more personal by helping parents specify what they need, refine it, and narrow their options.
• Gen Z respondents say they are already shopping with AI at nearly twice the rate of the average parent in our survey, suggesting this behavior may spread further.
• For retailers, the takeaway is to optimize how products appear in AI-driven discovery and make them easier to surface, compare, and confidently choose.

Watch the full video to consider what these shifts could mean for retail leaders and the next back-to-school shopping journey.

Topics covered in this video: back-to-school shopping trends 2026, generative AI in retail, AI shopping behavior, digital shopping trends, retail product discovery, search shopping, social media shopping, Gen Z shopping behavior

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