AI Is Rewriting Black Friday

Some retailers are still finalizing their November discount calendars. Others are adjusting prices 47 times per hour based on real-time demand signals. That gap defines Black Friday 2025.

Morgan Stanley expects nearly half of online shoppers to rely on AI assistants by 2030, driving more than $115 billion in new e-commerce volume. The retailers who figure out how to win in that environment are building the infrastructure now.

This piece breaks down how.

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Leading retailers are using AI to dominate discovery, pricing, and performance this Black Friday.

AI agents are not replacing retailers—but they are changing how shoppers get to them. A growing share of consumers now start their buying process by asking an AI assistant to filter options, compare specs, and time purchases.

OpenAI’s new Shopping Research feature compresses the comparison process by pulling prices, specs, warranty terms, delivery timelines, and return policies into a single thread. OpenAI’s new Buy It in ChatGPT flow lets users complete purchases without leaving the assistant.

Walmart is testing its own version with Sparky, moving toward an ad-supported model in which brands compete for placement inside the agent’s recommendations.

Reviewers at TechRadar confirm that while AI isn’t perfect, it’s already becoming the first pass filter for a growing number of shoppers.

Product visibility now depends on structured, complete, machine-readable data. If an AI agent cannot parse the product, it will not recommend it—regardless of ad spend.

The most advanced retailers are replacing discount calendars with real-time pricing systems. These systems adjust prices multiple times per hour based on:

Data shows price changes during peak periods can increase 12–18% sell-through without sacrificing margin, when driven by machine-learning models rather than manual adjustments.

Retailers using static pricing models often drop prices too early or too deeply. AI-driven pricing engines keep margins intact by adjusting with precision.

Static discounting is turning into a liability. The leaders are already pricing dynamically—and changing the Black Friday margin profile as a result.

Personalization is no longer a "recommendation widget" in the corner of the page. It's becoming the storefront itself.

When a returning customer lands on a major retailer's site this Black Friday, they won't see the same homepage as everyone else. The product grid reorders based on their browsing history. Category rankings shift based on what they clicked in the last session—deals surface based on their location, purchase patterns, and even time of day.

AI merchandising platforms like Constructor, Bloomreach, and in-house engines at the big-box retailers now influence up to 30–40% of digital revenue during peak periods.

Estore Brands reports that retailers using attribute-driven AI ranking systems see a 20–35% lift in click-through rates on category pages when product attributes are complete.

Two shoppers searching for the same product may see entirely different results—and both will convert better.

Black Friday exposes operational fragility. The difference between a record sales day and a PR disaster often comes down to whether systems can absorb sudden spikes without breaking.

Amazon's fulfillment network now uses AI to rebalance inventory across warehouses in near real-time, shifting stock toward regions showing demand surges before items sell out. Target's same-day delivery system uses predictive models to pre-position high-velocity items closer to customers hours before orders come in.

The same pattern holds across three operational pressure points:

The retailers who survive peak traffic aren't the ones with the biggest teams. They're the ones whose systems scale without human bottlenecks.

Consumers are shifting from “search and compare” to “tell the AI what I want.” This is not the majority yet—but it is growing at the high end of the market.

Tom’s Guide demonstrated this trend when ChatGPT generated optimized Black Friday deal lists in under two minutes, as detailed in their review.

The long-term trajectory is clear. Morgan Stanley expects this shift to reshape e-commerce fundamentally over the next five years.

AI will become the first point of contact in the buying process. Retailers who optimize for this shift will disrupt those who don’t.

The retailers winning Black Friday aren't relying on promotions or traffic spikes—they're competing on infrastructure. Their edge comes from how they structure data, price in real time, and optimize for AI systems mediating customer decisions.

Best Buy now treats product data as a strategic asset, not a catalog management problem. Every SKU includes structured attributes—compatibility notes, use cases, comparison specs—so AI agents can parse them and accurately recommend them. The retailers still treating product descriptions as marketing copy are losing visibility in AI-mediated discovery.

Here's what separates the leaders:

Black Friday 2025 is a leading indicator. The retailers who've built AI into discovery, pricing, and operations will outperform—not because they have better deals, but because they have better systems. The gap will be visible in conversion rates, margin preservation, and customer experience metrics.

For executives watching this space, the question isn't whether to adopt these capabilities. It's whether you're building them fast enough to stay competitive.

The same applies to shoppers. The tools that give retailers their edge—AI agents, real-time comparison, personalized discovery—are now available on the consumer side too. People who learn to use them will consistently find better deals than those who still browse manually.

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