Keeping Up With Retail Trends This Holiday Season … AI is Here to Help!
In the U.S. alone, Adobe predicts the 2025 holiday shopping season is expected to bring in $253.4 billion in online sales this year, up 5.3 percent year-over-year (YoY). Cyber Monday is expected to be the biggest shopping day of the year (up 8.3 percent YoY) and Black Friday a close second, seeing growth (up 4.9 percent YoY).
Retailers are preparing with some artificial intelligence-enabled help of their own to manage more traffic from AI sources, more orders from keen consumers, and more red tape from ever-changing trade policies. Deloitte has been surveying retail buyers to gauge their strategies as they navigate the run-up to the holiday season.
It found that 78 percent of surveyed retail buyers leverage AI-enabled tools to enhance buying activities, while 74 percent specifically utilize AI to address challenges stemming from trade policy-related changes. Respondents who are using AI report improvements in these areas:
- Better supply chain management: Using AI analytics to predict potential disruptions and optimize logistics.
- Pricing optimization: Algorithms analyze market trends and consumer behavior to dynamically price items based on demand.
- Product assortment optimization: AI solutions help streamline inventory management to ensure products are in the right place at the right time.
- Demand forecasting: Predictive models anticipate customer demand to reduce overstock and stockouts.
5 AI-Driven Use Cases Supercharging Retailers This Holiday Season
1. The silent shopper is always watching …
The "Silent Shopping" model uses AI to solve in-store operational issues discreetly, minimizing disruption for customers. Sensors noting sudden temperature fluctuations or in-store cameras detecting spills, for instance, generate events that are instantly routed to the relevant staff's wearable devices. An AI tool within the system prioritizes these alerts based on urgency and staff location, ensuring quick, quiet incident management.
2. Stay stocked up — always!
AI-powered inventory management moves beyond basic tracking to predict demand and automate the restocking process in real time. By integrating event data from Internet of Things devices like shelf sensors and RFID tags, AI analyzes stock levels and predicts future needs, adjusting orders based on external factors like weather. This minimizes waste and prevents costly stockouts, significantly reducing labor and human error.
3. On the lookout for theft.
For theft prevention, video feeds detecting suspicious behavior are correlated with point-of-sale and inventory data within an event-driven architecture. AI analyzes this combined stream to accurately identify potential theft events, immediately alerting security personnel with specific information.
4. Personalized experiences live on.
Achieving "omnichannel excellence" means providing a unified, seamless customer journey across all touchpoints. AI uses an event backbone to capture interactions — from website clicks to in-store beacon pings — to build a continuously updated customer profile. This ensures that when a customer switches channels, their context follows them, allowing sales associates to provide immediate, personalized recommendations.
5. Dynamic decisions fuel the future of retail management.
The AI store manager acts as a central orchestrator for all store operations. It processes real-time events from foot traffic sensors, smart shelves, staff wearables, and weather forecasts. The AI then makes dynamic decisions such as optimizing staffing levels, adjusting store layouts, or initiating restocking.
This continuous flow of information and instruction creates a highly responsive, efficient store environment, ushering in the future of retail management.
Enter the Event Mesh
An event mesh, powered by agentic AI, is uniquely positioned to address the retail AI priorities for this holiday season. By creating a unified, real-time data network, an event mesh enhances supply chain visibility and agility, enabling quick responses to disruptions. The same system anticipates the AI-powered consumer shopper demands by continuously analyzing data from various touchpoints, allowing retailers to adjust strategies rapidly.
Ush Shukla is a distinguished engineer at Solace, an enabler of event-driven architecture for real-time enterprises.
Ush Shukla is a distinguished engineer at Solace. As an Enterprise Integration Architect, Ush has more than 13 years of experience leading diverse teams in the implementation of large-scale middleware solutions across varied business domains.
