Black Friday 2024 results showcase the growing power of AI and chatbots

Black Friday, one of the most anticipated days of the entire retail calendar, has officially passed, and the results of this shopping event revealed some unique findings. 

Despite some concerns that Black Friday sales may have been diminished by month-long discount offerings, the shopping holiday proved surprisingly fruitful.

According to data provided by Adobe Analytics, online Black Friday shopping in the US hit new heights in 2024, with consumers spending a record US$10.8 billion online on Friday,​ up 10.2 per cent this year compared to 2023. 

To put these numbers into perspective, that is more than double what US consumers spent online on Black Friday 2017, which drove US$5.03 billion in e-commerce sales. 

“The initial results from Black Friday show that there is plenty of life among consumers. There was sales growth over last year, although most of this was generated online rather than in stores,” Neil Saunders, managing director and retail analyst at GlobalData, observed.

“However, in terms of where consumers are spending, it is clear that there will be a patchwork of winners and losers, not every store in the mall and online was busy, and people are being very selective about where they spend their money and what they spend it on.”

The “losers” of Black Friday 2024

As Saunders pointed out, while many US retailers certainly saw a boom in profits, this success was not spread evenly across all retail segments, especially in-store. 

Data collected by RetailNext, an in-store analytics platform, revealed that overall store traffic on Black Friday was down 3.2 per cent, with footfall down seven per cent in the Midwest, 2.1 per cent in the Northeast, 3.5 per cent in the South and 3.2 per cent in the West.

Placer.ai, a location analytics company, noted that electronic stores, which once had consumers lining up around the corner in the middle of the night to grab a good deal, saw the biggest decrease in visits, with foot traffic down 16.5 per cent year-over-year.

For those who have been observing the digital shift of retail in recent years, it should come as no surprise that online shopping played a major role in the diminished in-store shopping. 

How online shopping played a key role Black Friday turnout this year

This year’s record-breaking Black Friday sales did not come by accident. 

Several retail research firms, including Coresight Research and Placer.ai, noted that factors like the increased use of buy now, pay later (BNPL) plans and the advanced integration of AI chatbots caused an uptick in this year’s Black Friday.

According to Salesforce, a cloud-based customer relationship management platform, AI and AI agents drove over US$14 billion in global online sales on Black Friday. Data collected by the platform also revealed retailers employing generative AI had a 9 per cent higher conversation rate over those that didn’t. 

Chatbots powered by AI were also pretty influential concerning Black Friday sales, as bot-driven clicks to retail sites rose by an impressive 1,800 per cent compared to last year, Adobe found. 

As Caila Schwartz, director of consumer insights at Salesforce, commented, “For an industry that is often concerned with margins, especially ahead of rising costs in 2025, this percent increase is a game-changer.”

What the new Black Friday looks like

While this year’s profit figures were certainly higher than expected, especially with e-commerce shopping, it’s clear that the purpose of Black Friday as the retail industry once knew it has drastically shifted. 

Ethan Chernofsky, Placer.ai’s senior vice president of marketing remarked, “Black Friday is not just about purchasing products.”

In today’s retail age, Black Friday has become far less about grabbing early morning, in-store deals during Thanksgiving weekend, but on delving into month-long discounting opportunities. 

Retail experts from Placer.ai and Coresight observed that Black Friday in itself has become much more focused on festive and experiential moments. 

Coresight’s associate director of retail research Anand Kumar explained that “the future of Black Friday lies in its ability to transform and meet shifting consumer behaviours and adapt to new consumer preferences and retail trends, such as omnichannel integration, experiential in-store retail and the demand for instant gratification from Gen Zers and millennials, which is fueling foot traffic for flash sales, interactive promotions and pop-up events.”

Similarly, Chernofsky commented that while “Black Friday is still critical for many in retail, its role has fundamentally changed.”

The marketing executive remarked that the role of the store is to provide a place for consumers to discover new products, and to have the chance to touch and feel products, engage with the brand or identify the ideal size or version of a product. 

“This doesn’t reduce the value of the visit,” Chernofsky emphasised, “but it means that while the visit is still critical, the actual transaction might still be made online. This expanded view of the role of the store and digital channels places different demands and expectations on what the store should provide as a part of this journey.”

While physical retailers may be losing out on more direct profits on Black Friday, there are many players, including movie theaters and coffee shops, that benefit from experiencing some of their strongest visitation trends of the entire year on this day.

So while Black Friday has changed, it’s still absolutely critical for retailers, even if the ways they need to take advantage have shifted,” Chernofsky concluded. 

What can retailers expect beyond Black Friday 2024

Moving beyond Black Friday to the Cyber Monday shopping period, Coresight forecasted online retail sales growth of around 9 per cent in the fourth quarter.

“In a still-constrained context, consumers are spending selectively. In the holiday peak, we expect price-competitive offerings to continue to appeal to shoppers across the income spectrum but to see the greatest incremental appeal among lower-income shoppers, given that lower-income consumers have tended to show the greatest impacts from recent macroeconomic shocks,” Kumar said.

So for those retailers, both online or in-store, that missed out on potential profits during the post-Thanksgiving shopping rush, there is still time to close out the year on a stronger note by targeting consumers still seeking out enticing, last-minute bargains. 

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