Who is choosing your taste?

I have made several purchases through Instagram posts lately.

Some good. Some definitely questionable.

One of them was a T-shirt with a sentence printed on it that I cannot reproduce in this newsletter. I loved it. My friends did not quite agree. In fact, it managed to divide them into two opposite camps, because apparently we needed one more source of polarization in our lives.

The funny thing is, I would never have searched for that T-shirt. Instagram found it for me.

And it seems I am far from alone. According to recent NIQ research, 74% of shoppers now use AI for product discovery.

For years, shopping started with a question: What am I looking for?

Increasingly, it starts with something very different: Show me what I might like.

This may sound like a small shift, but there is something deeply human hiding underneath it.

Taste has always been partly about discovery. We stumble into a strange shop, hear a song at a friend's house, notice what someone is wearing. We encounter something we weren't looking for and suddenly think: That's me.

Now algorithms are increasingly engineering those encounters.

And perhaps the interesting question isn't whether they know our taste too well. It is whether they are starting to participate in creating it.

Because my ridiculous T-shirt didn't simply satisfy a preference I already had. It surfaced something I didn't know I wanted. It made me laugh, made me buy, and eventually made my friends argue.

So are we outsourcing our taste? Or are these systems becoming a new kind of window through which we discover ourselves?

As AI becomes a bigger part of how we shop, understanding that distinction will matter. Because there is a big emotional difference between feeling understood, feeling surprised and feeling manipulated.

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How can Innate Motion help?

We can help brands understand what is really happening inside these new shopping journeys, beyond clicks and conversion rates.

We can observe how people actually interact with AI-powered discovery, uncover the emotions and behaviours behind moments of suggestion, surprise and purchase, and decode the tension between algorithmic influence and human agency.

Because the future of shopping may not just be about predicting what people want. It may be about understanding how they come to want it in the first place.

P.S. Want your business to feel more human and make a bigger impact? Let’s fix that! Book a free 30-minute consultation and let’s tackle your biggest or smallest business challenge together.

Book now!