The Role of Generative AI in e-Commerce Recommender Systems: Methods, Trends and Insights

Recommender systems have existed for decades, shaping how people consume digital content, receive information, and engage in day-to-day activities, among others. Undoubtably, recommender systems also play a crucial role in e-commerce applications as well, with industry players like Amazon, AliBaba, eBay using recommender systems within their ecosystems to give suitable and value-driven insights. However, recommender systems face some main concerns such as data sparsity, cold-start problems and so on. As a result, research is currently ongoing to solve these issues and provide high-quality recommendations to consumers. This review aims to identify prevailing gaps surrounding these issues by analysing existing research on generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) recommender systems within an e-commerce context. It explores the underlying framework of common generative AI techniques such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Transformers, diffusion models and so on. VAEs and Transformers hold great potential within e-commerce as noted by most researchers due to their ease of training and qualitative generations. This review intends to enhance recommender systems better to improve the quality of life of digital users, providing better recommendations in e-commerce as well as maximizing the value of stakeholders. It also includes potential future work for researchers to advance existing knowledge in this sector.