AI Revenue Black Friday 2025

Lisa Ernst · 30.11.2025 · Tech · 8 min

Black Friday 2025 marks a turning point in online retail: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has evolved from an experiment to a measurable revenue driver. U.S. customers spent a record online volume of $11.8 billion, up 9.1% year-over-year, according to Adobe Analytics über Reuters meldet. In parallel, data shows Salesforce-Daten, that AI agents and recommendation systems influenced around $14.2 billion in online sales worldwide. The Indian Express emphasizes that generative AI has thus become a clearly measurable revenue driver, moving beyond the experimental stage.

Source: Own depiction

AI Agents in E-commerce

The question of whether using AI sales agents in e-commerce is profitable can be answered with concrete examples. Walmart uses Sparky, a generative AI assistant that summarizes reviews, understands use cases, and provides product recommendations in conversation. Sparky is expected to handle re-orders, service bookings, and multimodal inputs in the medium term and is being developed as an "AI-powered retail companion" for the entire shopping process. In October 2025, Walmart launched a partnership with OpenAI, enabling customers in the U.S. to Walmart-Produkte direkt aus ChatGPT heraus zu bestellen, with Sparky serving as the AI backend.

Amazon is pursuing a similar approach with Rufus, a generative AI shopping assistant trained on the complete product catalog, customer reviews, and Q&A data, available directly within the Amazon app. Laut Amazon customers who interact with Rufus are about 60% more likely to complete a purchase, which is expected to generate several billion dollars in additional annual revenue for the company, according to Yahoo Finance berichtet.

Other large retailers are also relying on AI sales agents. Business Insider beschreibt, such as Target, eBay, Home Depot, Lowe's, and Abercrombie are using their own agents for gift advice, project cost calculation, or DIY support. Salesforce predicts global online sales of $334 billion for Cyber Week 2025, of which $73 billion – around 22% – are expected to be influenced by AI agents. Retailer, die bereits eigene Agenten auf der Website einsetzen, according to Salesforce, achieved seven times higher U.S. sales growth (13% vs. 2%) in the weeks leading up to Cyber Week compared to retailers without agents. This makes AI sales agents in e-commerce a measurable growth engine, moving beyond an experiment.

Source: analytics-agentur.ch

AI agents could revolutionize Black Friday 2025 through personalized advice and optimized shopping experiences.

Personalized Online Shopping with Chatbots

Personalized online shopping with chatbots has rapidly evolved. According to Salesforce’ Connected-Shoppers-Report 39% of consumers – and more than half of Gen Z customers – are already using AI for product search and discovery. A Capgemini-Studie shows that almost three in five consumers are partially replacing traditional search engines with generative AI; two-thirds of Millennials and Gen Z use tools like ChatGPT for product recommendations.

Shopify berichtet, that retailers using AI-powered chatbots during Black Friday 2024 saw an average of around 15% higher conversion rates, as bots clarify questions about products, sizes, and delivery times in real-time. A Analyse von Bain & Company on "Agentic AI in Retail" shows that 17% of online shoppers now start their holiday shopping directly with an AI platform like ChatGPT or Perplexity; 52% of Millennials and 25% of Gen Z state they consciously use an AI assistant to start their shopping.

Another Studie aus dem Shopify-Ökosystem indicates that 81% of consumers are open to using AI to find the best prices, track coupons, or compare reviews. How this new form of shopping looks from the customer's perspective is shown in news reports like "AI could be a game changer for your Black Friday shopping."

Instead of clicking through filters and categories, a customer can type in chat: "Looking for a gift for my sister, 32, travels a lot, budget €150." A generative assistant combines product recommendations from the catalog with reviews, inventory, and shipping times, suggesting suitable bundles in seconds. This transition from manual search to conversational advice makes chatbots real revenue drivers.

How Retailers Use Generative AI in Marketing

The use of generative AI in marketing is standard operating procedure in 2025. McKinsey beschreibt unter dem Begriff „agentic commerce“, how AI agents take over product search, comparison, shopping cart, and checkout, and how retailers must rebuild their marketing to target not only humans but increasingly agents. BCG argumentiert ähnlich and sees Agentic AI as the next major lever for orchestrating personalization, dynamic pricing, and campaign optimization through autonomous systems.

In the context of Black Friday, this specifically means:

• Generative Creatives: Creating hundreds of variations of a banner or video ad takes seconds, including automatic A/B testing and optimization during live campaign operations, as BluConnet für Black-Friday-Advertising beschreibt.
• Always-On Personalization: Shopify zeigt, how retailers use every click through AI-powered search, filters, and recommendation apps to calculate dynamic product suggestions and bundles.
• Agent-Optimized Landing Pages: Berichte von Reuters describe how retailers are starting to prepare content explicitly for AI crawling and "Generative Engine Optimization" so that ChatGPT, Gemini, etc., can better rank their products in search results.

A best-of compilation on these topics is offered by the video "How Agentic AI Will Transform Retail Forever" with an AWS Retail Lead.

Salesforce zeigt im Video „Agentforce for Retailers“, how commerce, service, and marketing agents can be orchestrated from a data layer. For retailers, this means that creativity in marketing shifts from manual production to defining guardrails, target audiences, and KPIs within which AI systems can experiment at high frequency.

Data & Impact

Salesforce's Holiday 2024 evaluation shows: $1.2 trillion in global online sales, of which $229 billion directly influenced by AI and agents; 19% of all purchases were co-created by recommendation systems, personalized offers, or conversational service bots. The use of generative AI features like agents increased by 25% during the season compared to September/October 2024, and AI-based customer service chats were used 42% more frequently than the previous year. Salesforce schätzt für 2025, that $334 billion in global online sales will be generated during Cyber Week alone – $78 billion of which in the USA – of which $73 billion are expected to be influenced by AI agents and recommendations. This corresponds to 22% of all Cyber Week sales, an increase from $60 billion last year to $73 billion in 2025.

Source: de.statista.com

Projected online sales for Black Friday and Singles' Day in Switzerland until 2025 illustrate the growth potential.

In parallel, data shows Digital Commerce 360, that shoppers using generative AI platforms complete purchases an average of 38% more often than those shopping without AI. These figures clearly describe how Black Friday traffic will be valued in the future: no longer just "visits" and "clicks" count, but visibility in AI interfaces – from onsite agents to ChatGPT integrations to agentic commerce protocols that Salesforce is bringing to market with Stripe and other payment providers, as fintechmagazine.com berichtet.

What Happens If Retailers Don't Use AI?

Retailers who still face Black Friday 2025 without AI agents risk several disadvantages. The Baymard-Daten, die Couture.ai aufgreift, still put the global cart abandonment rate at over 70%; 48% of abandonments are due to unexpected costs, 22% to complex checkouts. This is precisely where AI shopping agents come in: they explain fees, optimize shipping options, and can actively search for better combinations of coupons, payment methods, and delivery times during checkout.

Globally, the Befragung von Worldpay, shows that 44% of consumers would be willing to let an AI shop for them autonomously – provided that budget and rules remain clearly definable. In parallel, Morgan Stanley, predicts that by 2030, almost half of all U.S. online shoppers will use AI agents, potentially contributing an additional $115 billion to e-commerce volume.

Source: it-business.de

The growing market size of Artificial Intelligence by 2030 underscores its transformative power for e-commerce and events like Black Friday.

Retailers who do not build AI infrastructure now risk:

• Their products will appear less often in AI recommendations because structured data, API access, and agent-friendly content are missing – a point that McKinsey im Kontext von „agentic commerce“ explizit anspricht.
• They will fall behind in service because their support teams can only respond to peak days like Black Friday with overtime instead of scalable chat and voice bots, while providers like Text.com genau für diese Peaks spezialisierte Black-Friday-AI-Toolchains anbieten.

At the same time, a new tension is emerging around data access: Amazon, for example, is blocking ChatGPT's shopping research feature for its website because it doesn't want third-party agents to scrape its product data and potentially direct customers to other stores, as Tom's Guide berichtet. The Klage Amazons gegen Perplexity due to an 'agentic' shopping tool shows how fiercely contested control over shopping agents already is. Anyone who ignores AI not only loses conversion potential but also visibility in the medium term to a new layer of gatekeepers – the customers' AI agents.

Conclusion: AI Agents are the New Revenue Drivers – and New Gatekeepers

Black Friday 2025 makes visible what has been developing for months in studies and pilot projects: AI agents are no longer a side tool but a central part of value creation in online retail. Record revenues such as $11.8 billion in online sales in the USA and double-digit billions influenced directly by AI agents show that investments in generative AI, personalization, and conversational commerce are paying off. (Reuters; Digital Commerce 360; Salesforce).

Morgan Stanley, McKinsey, BCG, Salesforce and others conclude that agentic commerce models will drive a significant portion of e-commerce growth in the coming years.

For retailers, this means:

• In the short term, the use of AI agents determines more efficient marketing, higher conversions, and stable customer support on peak days.
• In the medium term, visibility in AI interfaces will determine whether one's own products even make it into the shortlist of people and their digital shopping agents.

Therefore, those who, next Black Friday, only optimize discounts but not their AI strategy, are no longer optimizing the whole system – but merely the price in a market controlled by other agents.