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Black Friday remains the most important day on the ecommerce calendar, but 2025 brings a new consideration to the forefront - AI. It's set to be the first of many AI Black Fridays, so let's look at how your brand should approach the date differently.
2025 will likely go down in the history books from a technology perspective. With AI becoming so widespread, businesses were finally opened up to the personalisation tools that they’d been promised for years.
We’ve moved past the piloting stage of AI. In fact, with 89% of businesses actively using or testing AI in their business operations, you’re officially a late adopter if you haven’t done the same.
In the world of ecommerce, all of this is likely to come together at the most important date on the annual calendar - Black Friday.
Even with the promises of AI, brands face a unique challenge: making use of AI's undeniable advantages while navigating consumer uncertainty and maintaining the authentic brand experiences that drive loyalty.
Get it right, and AI could be the difference between a record-breaking Black Friday and watching competitors steal market share. Get it wrong, and you risk alienating the very customers you're trying to serve.
So how do you strike that balance? With this being the first Black Friday of this era - the first AI Black Friday if you will - let’s dive into everything you as an ecommerce brand owner should be thinking about.
Black Friday remains the single most important date in the ecommerce calendar. Black Friday 2024 saw £1.12 billion spent in the UK alone, which rose 7.2% from the previous year. In fact, in 2024, nearly 25% of all ecommerce revenue occurred in November and December - and you can bet that Black Friday & Cyber Monday played a major role.
We always stress the importance of Black Friday to ecommerce businesses, but to put it into perspective, a good Black Friday performance can rescue your entire fiscal year. With increased competition and fresh faced competitors entering the market daily, the stakes for Black Friday 2025 are higher than ever. To us, that sounds like all the more reason to be hyper-aware of the role AI is going to play.
If 2023 and 2024 were the years ecommerce businesses experimented with AI, 2025 is the year they started investing seriously. Whilst consumer frustration with Chatbots and automated answering machines may dominate headlines, there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes.
From data analytics tools and generative AI models such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to specialised imagery and video generative models such as VEO 3 and stable diffusion - it would be an understatement to say that AI is speeding up the rate at which ecommerce brands can implement their strategies. In fact, those examples are just the tip of the iceberg.
According to Adobe’s 2025 Digital Trends Report, 65% of senior ecommerce executives believe generative AI and predictive analytics tools are key to their growth strategies.
To ecommerce brands who take pride in their creativity and the role their art direction, photography, and content writing plays in their daily operations, it’s fair that AI tools like this may feel like a “threat.”
Whilst generative AI might be the most obvious place for us to point our fingers, AI is playing a role at every stage of the buying journey whether you have input or not. In fact, research from Klaviyo revealed that 54% of consumers are planning to use AI search tools this holiday season to compare prices, search for products, and summarise reviews.
So where does that leave you as an ecommerce brand?
Here's where things get interesting. While enterprise ecommerce businesses are rushing headfirst into AI adoption, consumers are telling a very different story about what they actually want and expect.
The gap between business excitement and consumer reality is wider than most brands realise. According to Adobe, while 71% of shoppers want brands to anticipate their needs with personaliSed offers, only 34% of brands are successfully delivering on this expectation.
The data further reveals some fascinating nuances about where AI is welcomed and where it faces resistance:
That last one is key, and it’s what many on the brand side of the ecommerce world think of first when thinking about AI - all the AI generated images and videos. After all, even as people working in the ecommerce industry, we remain consumers ourselves.
Whilst customers - and therefore you too - express frustration with generative AI and how prolific AI generated content across social media platforms has become, for enterprise ecommerce brand owners there’s a much more positive sentiment. The data shows that 53% of businesses using generative AI report significant improvements in team efficiency, while 50% point to faster content creation and ideation. So for Black Friday campaigns where speed and volume matter enormously, these aren't just nice-to-have benefits - they're competitive necessities.
This is not to say you should blindly embrace generative AI, with marketing teams reporting it adds strain to workflows - a crucial consideration for the high-pressure Black Friday period. Furthermore, we’ve seen high profile brands get “burned” by generative AI before.
Ecommerce brand Selkie, famously lost a lot of consumer trust in early 2024 by posting AI generated artwork. Questions may arise as to whether customers would have the same reaction today, but it speaks to a larger question about brands prioritising profit and speed to market over customer satisfaction. As Meghan Fulton said for the BBC in reaction to the incident “people care about their purchases and will look into things further.”
Another more recent example; Menswear brand JCREW who were found to have fed their previous lookbooks into an AI to create their newest iteration. It’s certainly dishonest to present your brand as aspirational if what you’re asking customers to aspire to isn’t even a lived experience but a counterfeit version created by AI.
This all speaks to consumers' growing distrust in brands who use AI generated imagery and video content - after all, how are we supposed to trust in a product if the images you’re being fed aren't even real.
There’s clearly a balance to be struck here.
Here's what many brands miss: consumers are already embracing AI tools in their shopping journey, just not always in the ways you'd expect. The question isn't whether AI will impact your Black Friday performance - it's whether you'll be visible when customers use these tools.
AI tools are already embedded in major ecommerce platforms - Meta's automated campaigns outperform manual ones by 20-30%, Shopify uses AI for inventory management, and Google's AI-enhanced search means brands must optimize for AI visibility to remain competitive.
But perhaps most importantly, consumers are turning to AI search tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity for product recommendations and brand research. If your brand isn't optimised to appear in AI-generated results, you're essentially invisible to a growing segment of shoppers. This means ensuring your product descriptions, reviews, and brand information are structured, comprehensive, and easily discoverable by AI systems.
The smart move isn't to fight this trend - it's to optimise for it. Make sure your brand appears when customers ask AI tools for recommendations in your category. Ensure your product information is rich, accurate, and formatted in ways that AI can easily understand and recommend.
The most successful approach is using AI tools to speed up your workflow and enable your employees to hit the ground running with their strategies quicker than they would do otherwise.
Use AI for market research, competitor analysis, email subject line testing, and initial content drafts that your creative team can refine. Let AI handle the data analysis that helps you understand which Black Friday strategies worked last year, but keep human creativity and brand intuition at the center of your campaign development.
The brands that will dominate Black Friday 2025 won't be those with the most AI - they'll be those with the most thoughtful AI implementation- serving consumer needs while respecting their boundaries and letting the skilled creative direction and business acumen of their employees play a major role.
The stakes have never been higher, but neither has the opportunity. Get this balance right, and you’ll set the foundation for sustainable ecommerce growth in the AI era.
If you need help with employing AI and data driven insights in your ecommerce strategy - in the run up to Black Friday or otherwise - contact us, we’d love to hear how we can help you.
