How AI Is Giving Black Friday a $67 billion boost

AI is having a transformative effect on the holiday shopping season.

It played a role in $67 billion worth of sales across “Cyber Week” last year, starting with Black Friday and culminating in Cyber Monday.

And in future, AI is set to have an even bigger impact on Black Friday and holiday sales.

AI is more embedded in users’ everyday lives. New features and innovations continue to roll out. And Black Friday stats show that the holiday season itself continues to grow too.

Read on to find out how AI personalization, retail chatbots, and more are set to reshape Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Black Friday Consumers Use AI to Shop

The internet transformed the face of commerce. Amazon and eBay launched in the 1990s, and they are still behemoths today. The websites have obviously evolved and branched out with time, but the fundamentals are comparable to what they were at launch.

But in the last few years, there has been a real shake-up in online shopping for the first time.

Social commerce has arrived in a big way, primarily via TikTok Shop.

“TikTok Shop” searches are up by 1767% in the last 5 years.

In 2021, TikTok Shop's Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) totaled $1 billion. Just 4 years later, in 2025, its GMV was $64.3 billion. 

And in 2026-2027, one of the fastest-growing e-commerce trends is AI-assisted shopping. Shoppers are handing off product research to AI. They describe what they need, and the chatbot narrows all the options to a shortlist with comparisons, tradeoffs, and links to buy.

OpenAI built a feature around this behavior in 2025, just before Black Friday. It launched shopping research inside ChatGPT, which asks clarifying questions, reviews sources across the web, and draws on past conversations to produce a personalized buyer's guide in minutes. OpenAI offered nearly unlimited usage on every plan through the holidays.

In June 2026, the ChatGPT app's monthly active user base passed 1 billion.

During the 2025 holiday season, traffic to retail sites from generative AI tools like ChatGPT rose 693.4% year over year, according to Adobe Analytics. And in 2026, Adobe expects another 130% increase.

Salesforce's forecast is even more bullish: it predicts AI chat agents will originate 20% of all holiday e-commerce traffic in 2026.

And consumers that use AI for shopping say it works well for them. In an Adobe survey of 5,000 consumers, 77% of those who had shopped online with AI said they felt more confident in their purchase, and 69% said they were less likely to return what they bought.

This holiday season, 29% of consumers intend to use AI somewhere in their shopping journey, whether it's to compare prices, search for products, or get personalized recommendations.

Meanwhile, an Exploding Topics study has found that research (including product research) is the top personal AI use case.

Black Friday 2026 is a big step into a new era of visibility, one in which AI optimization and software like the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit are vital.

The Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit lets you track topics and prompts where AI is mentioning your brand, as well as showing opportunities to improve.

Holiday Shoppers Embrace Retail AI Assistants

AI-assisted shopping in ChatGPT works because it meets shoppers where they already spend their time. In this respect, it has a lot in common with social commerce.

Retailers are also putting AI to work on their own sites. Many now run branded shopping assistants that answer questions, compare products, and build baskets for customers.

“AI chatbot” searches are up by 2800% in the last 5 years.

Retailers with AI shopping assistants pulled ahead last Cyber Week. According to Salesforce, brands using Salesforce's Agentforce 360 and their own branded agents saw sales grow 32% faster than brands without them. AI agents also took on a lot of the holiday support load, with agent-led customer service conversations up 55% week over week.

Amazon is a great example. Black Friday 2025 was the second holiday season for Rufus, Amazon's AI shopping assistant.

Users can ask Rufus for product recommendations and comparisons. The AI chatbot, which has access to Amazon’s extensive catalog of item descriptions, reviews, and ratings, returns helpful, plain-language advice.

Sensor Tower found that on Black Friday, Rufus sessions made up about 40% of Amazon sessions but produced roughly 66% of purchases. Sessions using Rufus converted at 3.5 times the rate of those that didn't. In May 2026, Amazon merged Rufus with Alexa+ into a single assistant called Alexa for Shopping.

Walmart is taking a similar approach with Sparky, the assistant in its app. In February 2026, CEO John Furner said Sparky users have order values about 35% higher than non-users, and roughly half of Walmart's app users have tried it.

And AI chatbots during Black Friday and Cyber Monday aren’t only for the retail giants. Salesforce predicts that one in three e-commerce sites will have a site-specific AI shopping agent by Cyber Week 2026.

The e-commerce chatbot trend is helped along by no-code tools that let any e-commerce business set one up.

“ecommerce chatbot” searches have increased by 167% in the last 5 years.

Typebot is one popular chatbot builder. It has published more than 1.5 million bots, handling 2 million chats per month.

It says that its bots can engage thousands of visitors per month during surge events like Black Friday, where human teams would traditionally get overwhelmed.

Typebot and other AI chatbot builders integrate natively with Shopify, enabling millions of sellers to set up chatbots ahead of the holiday shopping period.

Black Friday and AI Personalization

As well as staging product conversations with consumers both on and off retail platforms, AI is giving Black Friday a boost through increased user personalization.

“Hyper personalization” searches are up by 369% in the last 5 years.

AI algorithms can predict more accurately than ever what a specific consumer might want to buy. Both purchase history and live engagement (e.g., a user is spending a long time looking at children’s toys) help to create a reliable buyer persona.

Consumers may also have volunteered further information, for example, by engaging with a chatbot and taking product quizzes.

Armed with this data, AI can craft powerful, personal recommendations. Below is a comparison table reproduced from a 2024 research paper on these “small-batch” Black Friday promotions:

Aspect	Traditional Large-Scale Promotions	Small-Batch Personalized Deals
Target Audience	Mass market	Individual customers or micro-segments
Offer Variety	A limited number of broad offers	Wide range of highly specific offers
Duration	Fixed period	Can be dynamic and ongoing
Inventory Management	This often leads to stockouts or overstock	Better aligned with available inventory
Customer Experience	One size fits all	Tailored to individual preferences
Marketing Approach	Blanket marketing campaigns	Targeted, multi-channel communications
Profit Margins	Often reduced due to deep discounts	Potentially higher due to optimized pricing
Data Utilization	Limited use of customer data	Extensive use of individual customer insights

And this is explicitly welcomed by consumers: 78% of shoppers said they would use AI-powered tools if it made their shopping feel more personalized. And a Forsta survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers found that 58% made a purchase based on an AI recommendation last holiday season.

That comes with the caveat that consumers only want to receive recommendations in the right contexts and channels. According to Validity's Holiday 2026 Consumer Survey, nearly one in four consumers overall (and almost half of Gen Z) said a brand's holiday email practices have made them trust it less, buy from it less, or stop buying altogether.

But AI can help with this, too. For instance, Klaviyo uses AI-driven product recommendations, unified customer profiles, and real-time segmentation to make messages more relevant.

“Klaviyo” searches are up by 250% in the last 5 years.

Klaviyo users leaned heavily on these features during BFCM 2025. Use of AI-driven product recommendations rose 45% year over year, and revenue from those messages climbed 71%.

In total, Klaviyo delivered more than 22.7 billion messages over BFCM and generated over $3.8 billion in Klaviyo-attributed value for its customers. Nearly 20,000 customers had their best-ever sales day, and Black Friday sales for Klaviyo customers topped $1 billion for the first time.

Klaviyo’s data also showed that heavy discounting wasn’t required. Brands offering the smallest discounts posted the highest growth, up 14% year over year.

Check out our list of Black Friday marketing ideas for 2026. 

Google Lens and Virtual Try-Ons

AI chatbots get a lot of attention, but some AI shopping tools have already been around for years.

For instance, Google Lens launched way back in 2017, initially only on Google Pixel phones. The image search platform uses AI to find close visual matches.

But as Black Friday and Cyber Monday approach, the technology is more mainstream than ever before. Google Lens now handles more than 25 billion visual searches every month, and roughly one in five of those searches has commercial intent.

“Google Lens” searches have increased by 109% in the last 5 years.

Google is also bringing its AI shopping tools into physical retail. Ahead of last year's holiday season, it introduced a "Let Google Call" option for "near me" product searches. Google's AI calls a nearby store to ask whether they carry an item, what it costs, and whether there are any promotions, then sends the shopper a summary by email or text.

So AI is having an impact on brick-and-mortar retail, too. Salesforce predicts that 38% of all holiday retail dollars this year will come from "hybrid sales," where digital research, AI tools, or mobile activity combine with shopping at a physical storefront.

Circle to Search is another way to use Google's visual search. It lets users get more information about products they see on their phones, and it's now available on millions of Android devices. According to Google, shopping-related searches are among its top uses.

This could be hugely significant for Black Friday e-commerce. Since a February 2026 update, users can circle an entire outfit in a social media post, and Circle to Search identifies every component and finds similar items to shop.

You can see a similar impact with Pinterest Lens.

Like Google, the Lens feature on Pinterest started out as a way for consumers to search for items they had seen in the real world. But new AI-powered visual search features allow users to isolate individual items of clothing they like from within Pins.

CEO Bill Ready has dubbed Pinterest “where Gen Z goes to shop.” The platform now processes more than 80 billion searches per month. In Q4 2025, its revenue reached $1.32 billion, up 14% year over year, contributing to a record $4.2 billion for the full year.

On the retailer side, these kinds of AI technology have been used to facilitate virtual try-ons.

Returns are a major reason retailers invest in these tools. The National Retail Federation and Happy Returns estimated that 2025 returns would reach about $849.9 billion, with 19.3% of online sales sent back. 

So even when retailers don't offer virtual try-ons, Google is trying to fill the gap.

Google's Try On tool lets shoppers upload a photo and see how clothes look on them. It draws on billions of apparel items in the Shopping Graph across Search, Google Shopping, and Google Images. Shoppers can try on tops, bottoms, and dresses, as well as shoes. On the newest Pixel and Galaxy phones, they can also open the virtual dressing room straight from Circle to Search. It’s a potential game-changer for fashion shoppers on Black Friday.

Embrace AI This Black Friday

It’s set to be another record-breaking Black Friday and Cyber Week, with Adobe forecasting that US online sales alone will hit $275.1 billion across the holiday season (November 1 to December 31).

AI will send more of those shoppers to retail sites than ever before. Adobe expects AI traffic to retail sites to climb 159% on Thanksgiving and 95% on Black Friday.

As an online retailer, it’s essential to embrace this AI-powered version of Black Friday. It’s never been easier to set up your own chatbot or to hyper-personalize offers to individual customers.

Your store should also be optimized for LLMs and for Google Lens. This could give you a huge discoverability advantage over competitors.