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Learn how AI can empower - not disrupt - your ecommerce strategy ahead of Black Friday 2025
We’re well past the point of AI being experimental. In the world of ecommerce, it’s the main topic of conversation as we head towards gifting season and Black Friday.
With £1.12 billion spent online in Black Friday’s 24 hours in 2024, and 89% of businesses now implementing AI tools, the brands that harness artificial intelligence effectively will capture the lion's share of this year's holiday spending surge.
Let’s learn how AI can be your ecommerce brand’s best new recruit this Black Friday.
Q4 sees more customer spending than any other time of year in ecommerce, and Black Friday is the holy grail of dates within it. Even if its sheen may have worn off, its potential impact on your business cannot be denied.
Black Friday remains the single most important date in the annual ecommerce calendar. In 2024 alone, Black Friday accounted for £1.12 billion spent online, rising 7.2% from the previous year.
If we look at how prolific AI has become - even in just the past year - and how it has enabled customers to discover new brands and new products, we can only predict that spending will surge even further this year.
But how has the landscape changed since 2024, and how do you need to approach Black Friday 2025 as a result?
If 2023 and 2024 were the testing years for AI in ecommerce, 2025 is the first year it’s the main enabler for businesses of all sizes. 89% of all businesses - not just ecommerce - are now implementing or testing AI within their operations. From personalising content at scale to predicting and preventing customer churn, online retailers and agency partners are leveraging AI to its fullest effect.
There are three main ways that ecommerce businesses are effectively utilising AI in their operations as Black Friday 2025 approaches. Personalisation, operational efficiency, and content generation.
Let’s break down the three main ways AI is impacting and enabling ecommerce businesses.
We always remember those hyper-personalised in store shopping experiences. Whether it was a sales person talking us through everything we needed to know, or a bespoke consultation. The same is true of ecommerce - the more an ecommerce experience is more personalised, the more likely we are to hit check out at the end.
Now, with AI tools at your disposal, we’ve entered into a whole new era of personalisation online.
From putting the right ad in front of the right customer segment with meta’s advantage plus campaigns, to personalised product recommendations in email marketing, AI has finally opened brands up to the personalisation tools that had been false promises for years prior.
Your ecommerce store ties into this too. And brands on the cutting edge of AI technology are employing dynamic image displays, dynamic product descriptions, dynamic merchandising, and even dynamic searching by using tools like Klevu.
When ChatGPT and other large language models first launched, most people were drawn to them due to their potential to speed up tasks. Whether it’s writing email copy or creating ideas for campaigns, the tools instantly became core parts of our workflows.
We’ll be the first to admit that successful ecommerce requires a lot of manual, sometimes uninteresting tasks. From writing meta descriptions to managing customer support - there were a lot of tasks that became much more efficient the second ecom teams adopted AI tools.
Looping back to your customer facing elements. Tools like Gorgias and Juphy, can act as on-site customer support, guiding customers through the shopping journey. Making ecommerce more efficient for you as a business, and more personalised for the customer journey
Writing copy - however poor of a job you may think it does - is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to brands using AI to generate assets and ideas for their ecommerce brand. From images and videos to 3d mockups, AI’s generative capabilities grow more impressive day by day.
This can potentially save ecommerce businesses thousands, however it should be done sparingly, and perhaps never be customer facing.
Whilst generative AI is great for creating initial ideas or tweaking near completed assets, if you falsely present a wholly AI generated image as real, you’re toying with undercutting your customer loyalty efforts.
A recent culprit of this is menswear brand JCREW, who presented an AI generated lookbook as a real representation of their product line. Once audiences clocked on, they later made this fact public, but it was clear that the brand thought they could trick their customers into believing that this AI generated fantasy was real.
If you’ve yet to implement any AI tools within your business, but are looking to do so ahead of the AI Black Friday on the horizon, the key to successful AI adoption isn't about replacing human creativity and strategy, but augmenting it and enabling AI to pick up the slack. Smart ecommerce brands are using AI as a force multiplier for their existing teams, allowing them to scale their efforts without scaling their headcount.
The J.CREW example serves as a crucial reminder: transparency builds trust, and trust drives long-term customer value. Your AI enabled efforts should not come at the expense of customer loyalty and as it becomes more prolific, customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated at detecting AI-generated materials.
Consider these best practices:
This Black Friday, yes measures immediate revenue impact, but also Track how AI implementations affect customer lifetime value, retention rates, and brand sentiment. The brands that will win in 2026 and beyond are those building sustainable, AI-enhanced customer relationships rather than just optimising for short-term conversion spikes. After all, whilst sales made on Black Friday are great, let’s not forget about all the email signups and the potential for retargeting site visitors too.
As we approach Black Friday 2025, AI has become essential infrastructure for competitive ecommerce brands. The brands that will capture the largest share of that growing £1.12+ billion pie are those that thoughtfully integrate AI into their customer experience, operational efficiency, and strategic planning.
Start small, test thoroughly, and scale what works. Whether you're implementing your first AI chatbot or deploying sophisticated machine learning algorithms for dynamic pricing, the key is to maintain focus on genuine customer value creation.
This Black Friday, let AI handle the heavy lifting so your team can focus on what humans do best: building authentic relationships with customers and crafting compelling brand stories that convert browsers into buyers, and buyers into loyal advocates.
And if you want to know how our ecommerce team can do all that and more - contact us.
