A system for providing a persona-driven and artificially-intelligent avatar is disclosed. The avatar may be utilized to represent an artificially-intelligent virtual assistant that may perform actions on behalf of a user, such as actions related to personal shopping for the user. Notably, the avatar may influence artificial intelligence algorithms supporting the functionality of the virtual assistant via quantifiable traits of a persona of the avatar. In particular, the quantifiable traits of the persona of the avatar may be utilized to range bound the controlling parameters of the algorithms such that the virtual assistant represented by the avatar performs actions that conform to the ranged-bounded controlling parameters. Metrics corresponding to the performance of the virtual assistant may be tracked, and the system may modify parameters of the virtual assistant based on the metrics so as to adjust future actions performed by the virtual assistant for the user.