Chat that speaks first
An animated mascot in the corner of a product page opening a short message as a shopper lingers over a size chart, without the shopper having clicked anything.
What sets proactive chat apart is its timing. It decides when to appear from what it sees a visitor doing, not from a single trigger or a page-load timer. Someone with a full cart who has lingered for a minute and started heading for the exit might get a contextual offer; someone on their first visit, glancing at the homepage with the cursor drifting off-screen, gets left alone. The same surface, read against different context, makes a different call.
It is a distinct category from a few neighbors:
- Reactive chat, where the visitor has to click first. The familiar pattern from the late 2010s.
- Auto-greet on page load, a single trigger that fires for everyone and quickly gets ignored.
- Outbound AI sales agents, which reach people after the visit through email, SMS, or DMs.
For implementation patterns, see the Proactive Chat in 2026 guide and the Onsite Conversion Agent field guide. For how it stacks up against legacy popups, see Proactive chat vs exit-intent popup.
Last updated May 31, 2026.