Retailers Turn to AI for Holiday Shopping Season Success

The 2024 holiday shopping season won’t be the best for retailers. Not only is the Thanksgiving to Christmas window narrower than usual, but market watchers are predicting limp sales growth for the period.

Salesforce, for example, predicts year-over-year global sales growth of 2% for November and December, totaling US$1.19 trillion, and 2% growth in the United States, reaching $277 billion. In 2023, YOY global sales growth was 3%, totaling $1.17 trillion.

One change that could be for the better, though, is the emergence of artificial intelligence as a means to optimize retail performance and consumer satisfaction during the hectic holiday shopping season.

“With Thanksgiving falling on November 28, the 2024 holiday shopping season will be shorter than usual, affecting assortment, pricing, and promotion strategies. The last time the season was so short was in 2019, pre-Covid. Those historic demand patterns are no longer reliable to predict this year’s,” said Martin Ryan, vice president of retail at EPAM Systems, a software engineering services, digital platform engineering, and digital product design company, headquartered in Newtown, Pa.

“Retailers need to adapt their strategies for demand forecasting to avoid under- or overstocking,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “AI tools can be used to provide accurate and dynamic predictions based on data analysis from historical and current data from multiple sources.”

“Social listening tools can gather real-time data about consumer preferences, which typically convert much faster into buying behavior during the holiday season when consideration time is compressed,” he added.

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