AI Strategies for Holiday Success

Transcript

I’m sorry, what? Do you want me off screen? I see you, Tara.

But no, you’re muted. No, Brian.

We’ll see them soon.

Hi, welcome, everybody. We’re going to get started in a few minutes. So thank you for joining us.

Happy New Year to everybody.

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Happy New Year. Thanks so much for joining us.

Welcome, everybody. We appreciate everybody joining us. We’re going to get started in just a few seconds.

All right. Welcome, everybody. Happy New Year. Thank you so much for joining us today for 2025 holiday shopping recap. My name is Tara Pagney, and I’m a group manager with an ultimate success in the retail and consumer goods vertical. And I will be your emcee for the next hour. And I have two esteemed colleagues with me today that will be walking through some exciting information and then we’ll be pivoting to a roundtable after that and then Q&A. So I would just remind everybody that if you have questions throughout the time, please open up the chatbot, drop in your questions. We’ll be aggregating them and going through them at the end. So feel free to drop them in at any time. And with that, I’d love to turn it over to my back and Bruce.

Thanks so much, Tara. And thanks, everyone, for joining us for the 2025 holiday recap report. This is our final word on the holiday season. So so awesome for you all to be joining us as we go through that. For those of you who don’t know the Adobe Digital Insights team, I’m the director of ADI. And we look across the Adobe Analytics data set and provide data insights on how the digital economy is performing online retail trends. We look across over a trillion visits. And so we are able to have a real dynamic view on how trends are shifting and changing. So obviously, the holiday season is our calling card. So when you’re seeing numbers out there, how much people are spending on Black Friday, how much people are spending on Cyber Monday. That’s our team. And we provide those types of insights through the year through the broader Digital Economy Index initiative. So we have a lot to cover for the holiday season, but we’ll we’ll dive right in. And please don’t hesitate to drop in questions. The 2025 holiday season had some really incredible trends characterizing what we were seeing. You can imagine we saw some resilient holiday spending, but we also saw trends being powered by AI, buy now pay later. We saw different marketing channel momentum across social affiliate partners, and we saw obviously discounting and price sensitivity. So we’ll be diving right into all those trends. And the big kind of view that we took was how the overall season did. And we saw over a quarter of a trillion dollars being spent through online through the 2025 holiday season. So pretty staggering levels of spend. We’re talking about one out of every four dollars being spent online. And that accounted for about six point eight percent year on year growth. So that growth came in sort of at the higher end of our expectations, but was down a bit from what we saw in 2024. I think we saw consumers leaning on the online space to get value and discounts and get a sense of what they can buy and drive into ease and efficiency. But, you know, when we think about the discount environment, we saw discounts kind of on par with 2024, but we didn’t see them get much stronger than that. So we’ll talk more about discounts. But this is where we saw the overall season net out. Now, I’m sure many of you have heard people say Black Friday. You know, is that a big deal anymore? Some of these days, their deals happening all across the season. But what we did find is that consumers view that Black Friday, Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday, some of these marquee days as having the best absolute pricing. And because of that, while they were spending throughout the season, they definitely rallied around these major days and accelerated their spending. So that helped the Cyber Week from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday really escalate in terms of spend growth up to seven point seven percent. So when you think of it in those sorts of terms, there was definitely momentum through the Cyber Week. And brands that really prioritized this period saw some pretty good gains.

Thanksgiving, as you can imagine, we have stores, many stores out there still closed on Thanksgiving, but you still have consumers pulling out their phone after a Thanksgiving meal and getting to shopping. So some of those trends are still holding. So it really kicked off the momentum at six point four billion dollars, five point three percent growth. Black Friday growing at nine point one percent. Again, consumers anticipating the best absolute deals on these days. And this day really holding onto its brand equity and driving up about eleven point eight billion dollars. So very important day still Black Friday. And then Cyber Monday became sort of the last call. And we saw about fourteen point two billion dollars processed through there. And consumers taking advantage of those very elevated discounts through that period. Now, it’s not breaking news that mobile spending is happening, but it was happening at quite a heavy clip through the holiday season. Fifty six point four percent of online spending happened through a mobile device. So as important as ever to prove those mobile experiences, make sure app investments are driving what they want for your brands. You know, the season drove growth at six point eight percent, but mobile growth was up at ten point seven percent. So the brands that continue to invest in mobile and drive frictionless payments and ease of payment through mobile see much stronger growth. And so that boded well for the holiday season. And those peak periods happen on major days like Christmas and Thanksgiving, where we saw mobile shopping make up about sixty six to sixty one percent of share. So pretty important still in terms of how much upside they can be from having mobile conversion rates that are outperforming laptop desktop, because then you can benefit from the tailwind of that mobile migration versus a headwind.

Now, as you can imagine, the overall spending was categorized and classified through these categories like electronics, apparel, furniture, home goods. And we saw decent growth out of them. Apparel came in at seven point four percent year on year.

electronics at 8.2%. And when we see smaller share categories like cosmetics doing 9.3% and grocery, you know, over indexing at 10.2%. I think it’s really indicative of consumers leaning on the holiday event to do shopping across the board, be it for discretionary goods for friends and family or just day-to-day essentials and gifts. So a lot of value and a lot of opportunity through the holiday season there. Discounts, as I mentioned, were pretty much on par with where they were in 2024. 2024 had the strongest discounts we’d seen on record. And here we saw discounts, category to category, stay at those levels. Sometimes they were a little weaker across some categories, a little stronger across the others, but on par, nothing earth-shattering in terms of the escalation of discounts.

Now, when you think about the top-performing categories, it ended up being toys, sporting goods, and the next apparel, it really benefited from, even though those discounts weren’t significantly stronger than 2024, consumers still expected value and they invested across these categories as a result. And we find that many consumers during this period are a little more willing to trade up and sort of splurge a bit more. They’re usually getting gifts for friends and family, so they’re willing to go into those higher-priced tier items. So the more expensive tier goods saw about a 20% increase in terms of share. So important for many categories, especially like electronics, personal care products, appliances, super important to capitalize on these periods for those more expensive tier goods.

Now, I know many of you are very curious about Gen AI’s role in this season, and it was pretty astounding for us to see a 693% increase in traffic coming from generative AI platforms to retail sites. And that was up pretty significantly year on year. And we’ve seen that momentum through 2025, and we expected it to continue to scale. This exceeded our expectations. So you have consumers are trying to get shopping lists together. They’re trying to lean on generative AI platforms for ideas and options, where they can find the cheapest goods. And that’s when the AI platforms really delivered. And now if you look at these major days, like Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, they really over indexed. And we find them, a third of them were using sort of AI assistance for some level of the shopping journey. So that becomes very important during high buying periods like the holiday season and eventized moments. I think as we get into 2026, using eventized moments to drive this type of momentum will be key. And if you remember anything from this session, remember this slide, this was the level of conversion happening from AI source traffic to retail sites compared to non AI source traffic on retail sites. We saw AI source conversion really pull away. It over performed non AI source traffic by 31%. And that was up over a hundred percent year on year. So this type of trend is really taking off and it’s here to stay in terms of consumers leaning on ways to make shopping easier, more efficient, faster, and AI’s role in helping assist in that journey. So very important to think about your GEO or generative engine optimization initiatives this year, because there is strong capability in converting this traffic and the brands that get strong visibility in the LMM platform space will benefit and see strong upside.

And this traffic is becoming very mobile. We’re finding that consumers, they had a steady migration to mobile in terms of overall e-commerce. It’s on steroids when we think about AI. It’s very much becoming a laptop desktop behavior in terms of interacting with AI to the apps. And so making sure the mobile app journey from an AI platform to the app, to social apps, things like that is all seamless will be very important in terms of experience.

Many of these different categories saw boosts from AI traffic, but the categories that have more complexity involved with them. So you think about electronics and appliances, we’re talking about specs, sizes, how much memory do I need, RAM, all that type of thing. That’s what consumers want synthesized by the AI platform to them. So they benefited the most from this type of traffic coming in and making its way into the e-commerce journeys they were embarking on.

Now, a new area of data that we’ve been able to tap into is returns. And obviously we did see an uptick in returns about 4.7% year on year in terms of returns through the period of the 26th to the 31st. But through the overall season, November 1st to December 31st, we actually saw returns down about 1.2%. And so obviously that’s moving in the right direction. And I think it’s, when we look at the broader picture, you have consumers who are very conscientious that different retailers are gonna have different return policies and they’re incorporating them, but also they’re being much more strategic and conscientious about what they buy, especially in this economic environment and leaning on AI to help in aid the purchase decision. So with all those things combined, you have a little bit of an improvement in terms of the return rate and people being satisfied with the products they purchased. So again, these trends are kind of converging amongst one another, and there’s a big upside in the implications in terms of what it matters for things like returns.

And when we think about return experiences, desktop laptop is still where people go for returns, but brands that make returns easier on mobile could stand to see an upside because that’s how we’re seeing the broader environment move in terms of mobile.

Now, obviously returns aren’t great for brands to have to process, but if you make it easy, if you provide upside in terms of additional goods someone can buy in exchange for that return, there can be a bigger lifetime value opportunity unlocked there.

Consumers are looking for that impulse driven purchase on a mobile device. They wanna trust specific retailers and just go to them for their very needs. So ensuring that that loyal relationship is being developed and built in and out of these big eventized moments is key.

Then we’ll move into buy now pay later. Buy now pay later continued to be important for this season because it’s still popular. About $20 billion was processed through buy now pay later this season. And that was up 9.8% year on year.

So consumers are still finding it as a popular mode of financing, utilizing it, especially through social mobile payment gateways. And we find that there’s a broader cost of living crunch consumers are still dealing with. So buy now pay later is still holding importance to them. And the brands that offer buy now pay later through their payment gateways tend to see a stronger conversion rate. So a couple of things to keep in mind in terms of the drivers for this season. Again, Cyber Monday, given the spend velocity happening there, that also drove up buy now pay later to over a billion dollars on that day.

And lastly, as I mentioned, you’ll probably hear the theme here. It’s very mobile centric. This whole experience is happening on the mobile front. So about 82.2% of the revenue from buy now pay later was happening on a mobile device. And then social is the big story across our marketing channels. As you can imagine, we did Telegraph that social would be impactful and that’s what we saw. We saw 40.3% revenue share increase year on year from social networks, affiliate partners, which includes some affiliates that promote through social, also saw a 15.9% increase. So you’re seeing the story emerge of AI support, social media ideation, influencer recommendations, and the mobile purchasing aided through buy now pay later. That’s the sort of predominant journey we started to see these upward trends. So you do still have these other channels being pretty dominant, paid search, direct, but we do see that the momentum is happening pretty heavily on the social and affiliate partner front. And this is really interesting to see when we think about what the holiday season means for 2026 and just how top of funnel ideation introduction and discovery is absolutely key in terms of engaging the consumer on a consistent basis. And then as you build that loyal relationship, they’ll lean on you through their apps for that impulse purchase in and out of these eventized sales moments.

Couple of other additional insights that we call out is that we saw curbside pickup, continue to be in that 17 to 17.5% range. It did peak up at about 39% of orders on December 23rd. So you do have some of that last minute utilization happening, but really consumers are prioritizing, especially in this type of environment, the easy free shipping where available and any kind of quick shipping becomes a vector to compete on. So while in the past curbside was really benefiting from the sort of coming out of the COVID environment, we’re now in an environment where consumers are just expecting it at their door as quickly as possible. And the brands that are able to deliver on that the best stand to gain quite a bit.

Also call out here that we had many products and items that we anticipated to see upticks. A lot of them came to pass, but again, it varied. You did have the gifts, the stuffed animals, the Lego sets, things like that, TVs, as you’d expect. But then you also have just seasonal purses, cross body bags, bed and linen sets, makeup and skincare, all those benefited from a pretty sizable boost across these discount motions through the season.

And with that, I’ll kind of hand it over to Bruce to talk through some of the strategic implications and what this means for 2026.

Take it away, Bruce. Thanks for that. Okay, can we just click on my…

There we go, okay. I think I’m on screen now. Thanks, Yvette, so much to unpack from the holiday season for 2025. And guys, one of the reasons we do this and hold these webinars with all of you is so that not only can we share what we saw throughout a particular season, but how do we help you understand how to unpack all of that and start to make some changes within your business for not only the upcoming seasons in early and mid 2026, but how do you do that to prepare for the holidays of 2026? And it sounds a little crazy that we’re already talking about that, but the realities are in retail, it’s a seasonal business. So you’ve got to move quick and start to think about how do you leverage what consumers did and how they behaved with your brands for the coming year.

So first, look, digital spending growth, staying strong, it tells us something really important. Digital isn’t just a channel, it’s the operating backbone of the business. The brands that win will treat e-commerce like mission critical infrastructures, not revenue add-ons. And that means building for scale, resilience, and peak moments before they happen, not after. So use this information when Vivek talked about all of those peak moments during the holiday season, how do you use that and leverage that intelligence throughout your year and figure out where are those peak moments going to happen? And it’s often that’s driven by your business model, the type of products that you have in market, but how are you building your digital infrastructure to meet those needs? And that connects directly to mobile. Vivek talked about the enormous growth of mobile. It’s now the primary way consumers experience brands. And in 2026, mobile isn’t about optimization, it’s about intent. Shoppers are making faster decisions on smaller screens so every extra click matters to them. So brands that design mobile first journeys from discovery to checkout, they’re the ones that are gonna outperform the ones who are still retrofitting desktop experiences into a mobile environment.

AI and Gen AI, hot topic, that probably should have been the first one we covered. It’s another area where 2026 is gonna look very, very different. We’re moving past experimentation very, very quickly. And in 2026, AI becomes the layer that shapes how consumers shape and discover and get search and discover and get support, right? So strategically, that means that brands have to invest in AI that drives relevance in real time, not just efficiency behind the scenes. So when we first started talking about AI, Gen AI a few years ago, it was all about how do we do this more efficiently? And you need to focus on that, but now you have to create relevance that converts, right? So it’s how do you use that efficiency and then create the relevance for the consumer that converts your business. And remember, this is the area and the conversion stats that Vivek highlighted. It’s the one thing he wants you to remember coming out of today is how AI and Gen AI are driving conversion in your business.

Value and deal seeking, they’re also evolving. They’re not disappearing. So going forward, the real advantage won’t be deeper discounts. It’ll be smarter ones. The brands that pull ahead are going to be able to use data and AI to personalize the value that consumers see, offering incentives only when they actually change behavior. That’s how you protect margin while still meeting consumer expectations.

Payments and fulfillment, flexibility is becoming full table stakes. In 2026, the differentiator isn’t whether or not you will offer buy now, pay later or buy online pickup in store. It’s how seamlessly everything will work together. Shoppers don’t think in channels or systems. Brands that orchestrate payments and inventory and fulfillment into one frictionless experience, they’re the ones that are gonna see higher conversion and loyalty.

Social and affiliate channels, those top of funnel plays. Creators and affiliates, they’re gonna continue to become embedded in the commerce engine. The strategic shift is moving from one-off influencer campaigns to always on creator ecosystems that drive consumer discovery and trust and measurable sales, especially with younger audience who are digitally native. This is what they’re looking for when they’re interacting with your brands.

Next slide, please.

All right, category behavior. It points to more selective conversion of premiumization.

Premiumization, I can’t even say the word. Even value conscious shoppers are gonna trade up in 2026, but only when the value is clear. So as Vivek said, when they were shopping for gifts for family and friends, they traded up. How do you leverage that mentality throughout the year so when they’re shopping for themselves, they’re doing the same? Brands need category specific strategies that highlight quality, longevity or emotional benefits, not just features and price. So it’s broadening the message that you put in front of your consumers.

Vivek said for the first year ever, we’ve been able to look at returns. And returns and post-holiday behavior also signal a bigger shift. Returns aren’t an operational afterthought. They’re part of the brand promise and the overall experience. Making returns easy, especially on mobile, as Vivek pointed out, that becomes a loyalty driver, not just a cost to manage. Yes, it is a cost to manage, but you’ve gotta be able to leverage it in the context of the overall relationship with your consumers and your customers. And then finally, operational excellence is becoming a growth strategy. In 2026, doing more with less isn’t optional. We’re all talking about budget cuts. So doing more with less becomes a critical component of everything you do every day. Brands that are investing in AI-driven productivity across planning, content, service and operations, they’re the ones that will grow profitably while still improving customer experience. So when you connect all of these themes, the brand’s best position for 2026 aren’t just reacting to consumer behavior, they’re designing for it. So when we talk about 2025, yes, understand how consumers behaved and how they interacted with your brand, but design the future based on that behavior. Don’t just say, okay, I get it. This is what they did with my brand. They’re mobile first. They’re AI enabled. They’re digitally resilient. They’re focused on removing friction whenever it shows up. And if there’s friction there, they’re walking away. They’re not giving you another chance to fix the friction. They’re just gonna walk away and find another brand because another option is to click away.

So now that we’ve set the strategic context for 2026, let’s ground that in reality. So I’m really excited to bring in our panel to share what this looks like in practice. So am I tossing to you, Tara? Yes, yes, thank you so much. I learned a ton, thank you so much. Bruce and Vivek, I love the key themes around AI, affiliates, emotional connections. In the top seller slide, I bought something in each and every one of those buckets for myself and for my family and for friends. So I appreciate that I was in the top categories, and I had fun. And so as Bruce mentioned, I’m so excited to bring my colleagues to this next section where they’re gonna share their experience and working day to day with our customers. I’m here at Adobe and before they joined Adobe, walking through some key questions that are top of mind for me, and I’m a bit of that top of mind for many people on the call today. So with that, I’m gonna start with Marla. Marla, if you wouldn’t mind, in this holiday season, we saw influencer and creator content continue to drive strong, measurable commerce. How would you personally recommend retailers leverage influencer campaigns to optimize for conversion, but not just impressions? Yes, so as Vivek and Bruce mentioned, that influencer power towards the bottom line is becoming stronger and stronger each season, and this year was certainly no exception. To actually optimize on that influence from the influencers, it’s really key to not just think of them as the awareness play, but to ensure that they are intentionally well integrated into the end to end strategy for real bottom line impact. A great example that I heard from this year was one of my customers partnered with over 200 creators this year and integrated them into connected TV ads for the first time, which was really cool, but the real revenue unlock for them was tying those influencer storefronts directly to shopable landing pages and gift guides, and that allowed them to promote and track engagement beyond impressions all the way through to the actual purchase. Wow, I love that. That’s a great example.

What are a few more brands, a few more ways brands can connect influencer driven engagement to downstream revenue, especially thinking about omni-channel? Yeah, so measurement is key, and from a measurement standpoint, the multi-touch attribution is incredibly important. Just thinking about last click alone will always undervalue influencer impact because a lot of those campaigns tend to happen early on in the shopping journey. So brands should be tagging influencer content to analyze the conversion paths across channels along the entire way.

Next, think about how to optimize what you’re already doing. I had another customer who layered their influencer content and holiday specific promo codes on top of their foundational all year round journeys that were already there, and that helped them to capitalize on that additional peak seasonal traffic without having to reinvent the wheel. I’d also say that cross channel orchestration is critical, especially as we’re thinking about the influencer impact happening early on, but email is still your strongest closer a lot of the time. So thinking about some of those very smart, specific personalized discounts and followups and engagement content that Bruce mentioned, triggering that based on the influencer engagement signals can be really powerful. I love that. Thanks for bringing up promo codes. It’s a key topic with most of our customers and most retailers, as well as pulling that through to an email strategy. Thanks for adding that to that example. And then I just want to encourage everyone to feel free. We have a few questions in the Q and A area. We will get to that in the end. So feel free at any time to drop in questions as we go through. Next, I’m going to pivot to Brian. Brian, we’ve seen a lot of brands are noticing their customers are using AI to help make decisions and purchases. I know I do it every day. I did it for almost every holiday gift as I was making decisions. What are you seeing brands do to prepare for an AI driven customer experience? Yeah, so I think all of us have experienced the ease of asking AI to do some of the research that we used to do ourselves. In the past, we’d have to go see a whole bunch of different websites, try to synthesize all that information. And I myself would build spreadsheets and comparisons and that meant sometimes getting lost in navigation and it wasn’t always the best experience. But now you can tell AI to prioritize what you want. So Vivek and Bruce both kind of hit on this where you can have a natural conversation with an assistant and tell them what you value and what’s most important to you. You can even ask it what kinds of things people in your circle, influencers that you follow might think about a product.

So the assistants themselves can actually do a lot of that heavy lifting and make it so much easier to make a decision. But it’s not just on the AI assistant. Brands that are doing this well are thinking about the content that they’re creating and more than just what a visitor, what a site visitor might see, but on the actual content management itself.

That includes things like making sure that your assets are tagged with the right information, that you have specifications and FAQs and other types of content that an AI assistant can reference.

And a lot of that is built by the brand intentionally as they’re thinking about how their customers or their site visitors are gonna be ingesting and viewing that content. So the brands that are doing it the best are the ones that are able to think about not just what is visible to the customer, but thinking about their own content management strategy. And it gives site visitors and AI assistants the best chance at delivering a great digital experience for customers.

I love that you brought up content. I think that in the olden days, we said content was king. That hasn’t changed, but it’s pivoting a little bit. So based on everything you talked about, how do you expect this will impact digital content demand and asset generation this year? So content is changing a lot. So in the past, a brand may put out just a couple of polished campaigns, but now with just a couple of clicks, a brand can generate all sorts of different types of assets that are going to be much more relevant to a customer. So we’ve talked a little bit about having assets that best match a device type or screen size, but without much effort, a brand can actually deliver content that is hyper-personalized to their customers. So relevant to their segment, their location, and even real time customization based on what they’ve been looking at in the past and how they may prioritize different features and functionality, showing what the product would look like in ways that matter to a customer. So that content also goes beyond just images. So as I mentioned before, with things like product specifications, FAQs, reviews, a lot of that can also be generated with AI as well to overall improve a site navigation and how people consume the digital content.

Content’s critical, but think about the types of content, the when and the how. I love that, I love that. My last person on the panel, J.F., I’d love to put this last question to you. What role can AI play in deciding if and how to engage a shopper, knowing that the ultimate goal is being able to provide high touch value, contextual, as well as respecting the boundaries of individuals? How would you address that? Yeah, hi everybody, happy new year. Well, we know that marketers are facing growing challenges. Personalization is becoming more complex, right? You’ve got a plethora of channels that you’ve got to reach out to your customers with. And so communication fatigue is real. In addition, as my colleagues have mentioned, there’s more and more data out there. And so customers’ expectations have skyrocketed. What are you going to do with my data? How are you going to personalize to me as an individual? So brands are turning to AI really to assist with customer centricity and improving that experience and designing moments that matter in a customer’s shopping journey. So AI really can help with the right offer at the right moment and on the right channel specifically. So for example, brands are looking at offer decisioning and having AI compare competing offers and experiences and selecting the one that is most likely to create value. So for example, a shopper could have bought running shoes and then could potentially browse athletic apparel. So rather than offering a generic 20% off blast, the system would promote a complete look offer for running shorts and moisture wicking t-shirts. So making it much more relevant to the shoppers experience.

In addition to that, the concept of send time optimization is front and center from an AI perspective. So we all know we don’t shop the same way. We don’t engage in the same way. So rather than all shoppers getting a message, for example, on a Tuesday at 10 a.m., the AI would effectively understand each shoppers engagement rhythm and schedule deliveries according to how that person is best to engage. So for example, if you’re thinking about a customer A who typically opens an email at seven o’clock in the morning and then another shopper who typically likes to get a push message and engage with that at 8 p.m. in the evening, it would stagger the send times individually, improving the likelihood for customer engagement. And then the third thing, as long as it’s growing, is this concept of message prioritization. So effectively conflict resolution. As you can imagine, shoppers are now qualifying for multiple messages journeys. And so that could be a promo, it could be loyalty, it could be a service notification. So how do you rank them and enforce frequency caps to ensure you’re not bombarding them and making sure that you’re not using those messages at the same time? So at the end of the day, you wanna focus on one coherent message across channels to reduce that fatigue. And of course, we’re looking at customers who are effectively looking and qualifying for store wide sales, credit card, milestone reminders, and shipping delay. For example, that shoe that you purchased, it’s been delayed, how do you prioritize? So the system can’t prioritize a shipping delay first, because as my colleagues have mentioned, you might wanna build trust first over a promotional campaign, and then suppress the promo for 24 hours, and ultimately schedule the delivery, the loyalty reminder for the following day. All the while respecting frequency capping, avoiding messaging collisions. And then really at the end of the day, the goal is customer centricity, not sending more messages, but using AI to send less, and become much more targeted, and making sure it’s relevant for a one-to-one scale.

So good, so good. That was so nice and meaty. Thank you for that. Just, you gave so much great information, but do you have any best practices to begin using AI for orchestration? You hinted a little bit of that, but anything else you’d wanna add on? Yeah, I would say most customers that I’m dealing with starting small, right? We’re not going broad and wide. So think about the outcomes that you’re gonna accomplish first. What is the business result that you’re trying to achieve? Whether it’s customer lifetime value, reducing fatigue.

So design your message based on your business goal. In addition to that, I would say, ensure that you’ve got the foundation from a data and readiness perspective. The data doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does need to be trusted, right? So make sure that you feel good about your profile IDs. You’ve got the right customer behavioral signals, that’s down, you understand and can figure out the audience pre-checks. So for suppression rules, opt-outs, that sort of thing, you wanna make sure that that’s locked in. I would say the third thing you wanna think about, and I believe my colleagues have mentioned this, measurement is king. If you can’t understand what your campaign is doing, then you’re not gonna be able to fine tune it and you’re not gonna build that trust. So make sure you understand how you’re reporting on incrementality. What are the fatigue trends you’re gonna report on or the opt-outs, et cetera. And then the last thing I would say is really, pilot it on a small number of journeys that are probably gonna be high value for you and build that confidence to increase that moving forward. So maybe pick on the loyalty milestones that you wanna drive, perhaps service updates. So building trust and ensuring that those messages make it out on time. And then think about how you wanna potentially re-engage with the customer with cadence controls to reduce the opt-outs. So those would be some of the foundational aspects that I would consider and that I’m seeing customers look at. Great, thank you, thank you. Sometimes we need an ABC to start. So thanks for giving a good ABC, D, E and F to get us started, thank you. With that, I’m gonna bring back everybody on camera and we’re gonna start to answer some of the questions that have come through. So I’m gonna put in your question, it’s not too late. And if you have a question that we can’t answer, we’ll definitely respond when we send out the material. But we do have a few I wanna jump into and definitely have my friends and colleagues help answer for me or with me. The first one was asked was, I was surprised to see that desktop contributed to 73% of AI traffic. Was there any measurable difference in product by product converted from a Gen AI source on mobile devices versus desktop? That was a great question.

Yeah, I’ll take that one. So this is a factor of AI platforms and the discovery journey that people are on. People started experimenting with coding with AI or doing research and things like that for school or think this, all these different types of questions. I think people forget how early we’re into this journey with AI, about a year and a half ago, you couldn’t even click a link to get onto a different site from an AI platform. It was a closed loop. You were on the platform and you were just kinda stuck there. So what we are finding is the types of categories are gonna vary in terms of how they perform themselves, laptop, desktop versus mobile. We see a lot of things like stationary electronics purchases, things like that happening on laptop, desktop, cosmetics, pretty high on mobile. And so you’re gonna have those journeys intersecting with the AI journeys, which are currently pretty laptop, desktop centric. But as you saw in that chart, we’re going pretty mobile with AI apps and AI platform utilization pretty quickly. So we’re anticipating mobile trends to mimic what we saw in e-commerce on the AI front, but just much faster.

Thank you. The next question was around buy online pickup in store. And so on a slide we talked about at the call out was specific to curbside and does the percent also include shoppers that go inside the store to pick up the item ordered ahead online? Yeah, so that’s a good question. So that metric, we kind of lump it all together as some level of payment online and going to the store. So curbside, buy online pickup in store, we have in totality. I think in the future, we’re gonna be looking to kind of deconstruct that and maybe try to get the nuance of in-store versus curbside. But at the moment it’s very much together and we definitely see the category benefiting from that the most is grocery. So it was during coming out of COVID time across the board categories, but now a lot of that share is being propped up by grocery.

Next question is a little bit on scale. So when we looked at geo LLA, while the gains are super high, is the environment still small and share overall? And then secondary, do you know how much in terms of percentage the geo is making up in terms of traffic for retailers? Yeah, so we’re finding that the share is lower. If we think about the journey, something like social did in terms of social traffic from social platforms to sites, that’s still kind of in the four to 5% range, sometimes a bit higher for other brands. But then with AI, it’s smaller than that, but it’s essentially on this trajectory where it’s accelerating. We could see it hit to that four to 5% range in a couple of years, whereas social took, I would say, over a decade to get to that point. And if you think about the scale, these LLM platforms are driving a lot of volume to their sites. So they’re still throwing off millions of visits to the retail sites. And the other piece of this is that, if you recall in that slide, we also had survey information on consumers saying that they’re using generative AI platforms for ideation shopping lists. That’s a big part of the journey, ideation, and getting a sense of what’s out there and what’s available. So all that I think is gonna tell the story in the years ahead of the momentum that generative AI platforms are having and the share that’s scaling.

Thank you, thank you, Bruce. Or think of it, sorry. We’re gonna pivot to Bruce. That’s why Bruce came to the top of mind. And Bruce is gonna kind of give us some next steps, but just I wanted to take a minute to thank everyone for sending through your questions. And thank you for everyone joining our panel as well. So with that, I’ll let you let Bruce wrap it up. Go ahead. Wanna advance the slides? Yep.

Okay, well, look, I hope you guys are all walking away today with not only a good sense of what the holiday season looked like for 2025, but how do you use those findings throughout 2026 and in preparation for your next holiday season? For those of you who are based in New York or traveling to New York for NRF, stop by and visit us at our booth. We’re going to be there starting on Saturday, I believe. There’s our booth number, 5202. We’re happy to share any additional information about the ADI work, as well as we’ve got some great sessions set up with Home Depot and Macy’s and take advantage of those. We’re really taking the opportunity to highlight some of our customers and the growth and change that we’ve been able to help them implement within their organizations. And we’ve got a great theater set up in our booth with some really exciting content that you’re gonna wanna see. So if you’re at NRF, there’s our booth number, 5202. Stop by and see us.

Next slide.

And then I’m gonna throw this to Tom to go through how you can explore the holiday shopping trends report online. There’s a QR code there. Tom, I think that’s all we need to tell him, right? Use the QR code to access the report? Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Thanks, Bruce. Yeah, and we will send this out in the recording after as well. Okay, great.

So thank you, everybody. Thanks for being part of our show today and hope you’re walking away with some good information.

Thank you, everyone.