20% of all retail sales in the 2025 holiday season were made by AI, report says
Recently, I was doing some research, and I found some interesting stats about the 2025 holiday season, claiming AI and agents account for $262 billion of 2025 holiday spend.
Wow, that is “ 20% of all retail sales”.
They further went on to claim companies that deployed their own AI agents saw a 59% higher growth rate — averaging a 6.2% YoY sales increase versus 3.9%.
I do wish they had a better breakdown of the exact functionality that each of the AI Agents had that drove growth.
They also didn’t do a great job of separating out people who brought their own Agentic AI, like people using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claud, etc which I have a feeling will have their own distinct trends.
What does this mean? Let's break it down.
If you are a long-time reader, you know I am not a fan of just “slapping an AI chatbot on it and calling it AI”.
But it seems that an actual integration with tool calls and the ability to take some actions on behalf of the user (not issue refunds) has some positive effect on sales if you are an e-commerce company.
They did mention that in some cases, the companies they observed tied their chatbot to their customer service flow, and it had a positive impact. If you do this, just be sure to have a human in the loop to approve the bot’s recommendations.
The ‘59% higher growth rate’ they boasted sounds great, as long as the costs of the tokens you are spending on your chatbots don’t exceed your profit growth, and none of those numbers are being published at this point in time.
We live in interesting times.
Will you be able to survive as a company if you are not “AI first”?
As I said before, I think it will be possible to survive, but it will be like having a website in the early 2010s that is NOT mobile-friendly.
Some people will seek out sites and services that fit the way they are choosing to browse. If you are interested in getting your business ready to grab this new wave of AI traffic that evidently is driving 20% of retail spending, then I would be happy to help you with that.