What is generative recommendation?

Generative recommendation is when an AI system produces the recommendation itself, such as a summary, a notification, a plan or a basket, for one person.

Traditional recommendation picks items from a catalogue and ranks them. Generative recommendation uses AI to produce the recommendation: a short overview of a news story, a push notification written for one person, a five-day meal plan with a shopping list, or a grouped basket for a request like “everything I need to make pizza.”

The term also describes a technical approach in which a model predicts the next item piece by piece, the way a language model writes text. Spotify uses this approach in production.

For retailers, the practical consequence is that an assistant can only build a recommendation from product data it can read, so structured attributes and current price and stock matter more than they used to.