Black Friday and AI: your shoppers will ask an AI first – make sure your store answers

How shoppers used AI on Black Friday 2025

Last year was the first Black Friday season where AI shopping assistants showed up clearly in the numbers. Adobe Analytics, which tracks over a trillion visits to US retail sites, measured a 693% increase in traffic to retail sites from generative AI tools over the 2025 holiday season – and a 670% jump on Cyber Monday alone. That’s shoppers clicking through to a store from an AI chat, not bots crawling pages.

The influence went further than clicks. Salesforce’s Cyber Week data, covering more than 1.5 billion shoppers, put AI and agents behind 20% of all global orders that week – about $67 billion in sales – and found that retailers running their own AI agents grew sales 32% faster than those without.

Keep this in proportion. Adobe itself notes that “the base of users remains modest” – most shoppers still browse and search the usual way. But the curve is steep, and the shoppers who do use AI tend to arrive with a question already formed and a decision close.

This 2025 holiday season, consumers embraced generative AI more than ever as a shopping assistant.

Vivek PandyaLead Analyst, Adobe Digital Insights

What shoppers ask an AI during Black Friday

According to Adobe, shoppers used AI chat services to hunt for bargains and compare products, most of all in video games, toys, appliances, electronics and personal care – exactly the categories where Black Friday discounts are deepest and the choice is widest. In practice that sounds like “which of these two is better for long flights?”, “is this compatible with my console?” or “what’s a good gift for a 10-year-old who likes science?”

None of these are new questions. They are the questions shoppers have always had in front of a product page – and they land on your store too. Across the stores AskSpot runs on, “which one should I buy?” advice makes up up to 32% of pre-purchase chats. During Black Friday, there are simply many more of them, all at once, alongside the questions that only that week brings: “does the discount stack with my code?”, “will it arrive before Christmas?”, “can I still return it in January?”. An AI chat agent built for e-commerce can answer all of them from your own store’s data – if it’s set up for that week.

Why your own store has to answer – especially that week

Black Friday concentrates demand into a few days – Salesforce counted $79 billion in global online sales on Black Friday 2025 alone. Your traffic peaks, your team is stretched, and a big part of it happens when nobody is at a desk: across the stores AskSpot runs on, 56% of conversations arrive outside 9–17 in a normal week. On Black Friday the evenings and the weekend are the busiest hours of all.

A shopper with an unanswered question doesn’t wait until Monday. They open ChatGPT or another assistant and ask there – and a general AI answers from the whole web. It can recommend a competitor’s deal, quote a price that isn’t yours, or describe a product you don’t stock. We covered that risk in detail in keeping product discovery on your store, not on ChatGPT. On a normal day it costs you the occasional sale. On Black Friday it costs you the shoppers who were closest to buying.

An AI grounded in your own catalogue works the other way round. It answers only from your products, your prices and your policies, so every recommendation points at something you sell – on your product page, one tap from the cart. Here’s what that looks like in the middle of a sale:

A Black Friday checklist for your store’s AI

An AI agent on your store is only as good as what it knows on the day. Treat it like stock and staffing – something you prepare weeks ahead, not on the Thursday night. Six things to get right:

1. Get the catalogue right before the sale starts. The Agent recommends from your product feed, which syncs once a day by default – more often on some setups – not in real time. Put promo prices and stock into the feed early enough for the sync to pick them up before the sale goes live. If your prices change several times a day during the sale, ask whether a more frequent sync makes sense for your store.
2. Write your Black Friday rules into the knowledge base – with an end date. Promo terms, whether discount codes stack, the last order date for Christmas delivery, extended returns. These are the questions that week brings, and they don’t live in the product feed. Add them to the knowledge base as short answers, and remove them when the sale ends – a holiday cut-off still quoted in February is worse than no answer. More on that in what to put in a chatbot knowledge base.
3. Decide what goes to a person. Payment problems, damaged parcels and large business orders still need your team. Decide in advance which questions the Agent should hand over, and how – to your store’s own live chat, to an agent inside the same chat window, or as a ticket. We compare the options in live chat vs AI chat.
4. Cover every hour and every market. The busiest Black Friday hours are evenings and the weekend, when your desk is thinnest – see the case for 24/7 support. If you sell abroad, the Agent should answer in the shopper’s language from the same catalogue (multilingual support).
5. Prepare for the “where’s my order?” wave. The sale ends; the delivery questions start. In Salesforce’s Cyber Week data, customer-service conversations handled by AI agents grew 55% week over week, and agent actions such as address changes and returns rose 70%. Connect your order data so the Agent can answer “where’s my order?” itself – in the chat, and in your inbox with the AI Inbox Agent.
6. Measure what the chat sold. Set up chat tracking in Google Analytics before the sale, not after it, so you can see which conversations ended in an order – the guide is here: track AskSpot chat in Google Analytics.

See it in practice: Konesso turned product questions into a 21.6% purchase rate, and Morele handles its shop chat and marketplace messages with AI – both answering from their own catalogue, every hour of the day.

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