ThredUp AI Agents Personalize Shopping in Real Time

ThredUp has added the first agentic artificial intelligence experience to its online resale platform for apparel, shoes and accessories.

The company now has this agentic product experience live for a subset of its customers, ThredUp CEO and Co-Founder James Reinhart said Monday (May 4) during the company’s first quarter earnings call.

The agent is meant to help customers find the right item quickly, a function that is critical to conversion and retention for a company like ThredUp that offers millions of unique items, Reinhart said.

In the experience that is now live, ThredUp assigns an agent or a team of agents to each customer; provides those agents with event feed from across all platforms and channels; and uses reinforcement learning so those agents can provide each customer with personalized browsing.

“No two customer journeys are the same,” Reinhart said. “Ultimately, we are working towards a customer experience that will dynamically change everything you see on ThredUp Inc. based on your clickstream data in real time. This is the true promise of agentic commerce.”

Every time agents engage with a customer, ThredUp gains better data on customer behavior in terms of browsing, clicking, and adding or removing items from the cart.

“The model takes that data and predicts the path most likely to lead to conversion, changing what the customer sees as they navigate the site in real time,” Reinhart said. “Traditionally, models have a lag — you push learnings into email or push marketing. Here, it is changing the on-site experience live.”

This first AI agent joins several AI solutions ThredUp has already deployed product search, discovery, ad buying, recommendations, photography, measurement and flaw detection.

Outlining these solutions in an investor presentation released Monday, ThredUp said they have transformed the online resale customer experience and contributed to the significant barriers to entry faced by potential competitors.

The company highlighted AI-powered search, image search and chat search that helps customers find what they want among the 4 million items it offers.

During the first quarter, ThredUp grew its quarterly revenue by 15% year over year, to $81.7 million, and its active buyers by 25% year over year, to a record 1.71 million, according to a Monday earnings release.

“Our priority is building a marketplace that delivers clear value to buyers and compelling monetization and convenience for sellers,” Reinhart said during the call.