While marketers had long completed their holiday work and instead planned for the future, as consumers, we spent the heart of the holiday season locked into the shopping experiences from brands we engage with as we tried to find that perfect gift for our significant others or something suitable for the white elephant party we reluctantly accepted to attend.
And between talking with countless executives and my own experiences as an everyday consumer with friends and family to buy for, something became clear: AI is going to play a major role in ecommerce moving forward.
I’ve written and talked about AI plenty so far this year – as it pertains to the way we search and customer service – but not yet about what it could mean for the way we shop. So let’s do that here, because it’s already happening. In fact, we’re helping a client right now utilize Salesforce’s Agentforce platform to empower its sellers to better support their customers.
Doing More to Feel Like Less
If there’s a theme for 2025, it’s that companies are trying to scale by getting more out of what they already have (whether that’s optimization within platforms, efficiency in workflows, etc.). Because while the demands and methods of engagement for consumers continue to rise higher, companies struggle to provide the resources and outputs needed to keep up.
All of these efforts by brands are done to make the customer journey as short (and simple) as possible. Companies are stretching themselves thin so that me as a consumer can be served up a relevant product recommendation, find it closest to me, and get it to my door in a quick and easy way. This is why organizations are going to need AI incorporated into their commerce solutions. Manually meeting my needs as a consumer takes so much time and effort that it eats into the ROI of converting me as a customer. But AI can keep those margins higher.
Expand Past the Point of Sale
Thinking about your shopping habits this holiday season and the pain points that came up during those times. Brands have made it so clicking checkout is the easiest part of the entire process. If I buy 20 gifts this season, I might spend a combined 20 minutes completing transactions (perhaps less if my payment info is saved already).
That’s not the problem. What’s more challenging is the process of searching for the right products, making sure the details are correct, getting it from the warehouse to your door, and working with the company if anything goes wrong. And this is where AI can play a huge role moving forward. Because as mentioned above, this is where the journey shortens up.
Expand Past the Point of Sale
Thinking about your shopping habits this holiday season and the pain points that came up during those times. Brands have made it so clicking checkout is the easiest part of the entire process. If I buy 20 gifts this season, I might spend a combined 20 minutes completing transactions (perhaps less if my payment info is saved already).
That’s not the problem. What’s more challenging is the process of searching for the right products, making sure the details are correct, getting it from the warehouse to your door, and working with the company if anything goes wrong. And this is where AI can play a huge role moving forward. Because as mentioned above, this is where the journey shortens up.
Steve Pruden
Steve Pruden is the Chief Executive Officer of Studio Science, a design & innovation agency. For more than 20 years, Studio Science has worked with established market leaders, enterprise software companies, and assertive venture-backed startups to deliver transformative brands, products and services. Steve joins Studio Science from Appirio where he helped lead the business through a $500M acquisition by Wipro, an $8B+ global IT services company.
