AI-ready retailers gained on Black Friday, tech executive says

Artificial intelligence helped determine which retailers converted Black Friday traffic into sales in 2025, according to Piyush Patel, chief ecosystem officer at Algolia. Patel argued in a Fortune commentary that the same pressure is likely to reach hospitality, healthcare, media and other customer-facing industries.

Patel said retailers with organized data, reliable retrieval systems and tools that could read shopper intent won a larger share of the $11.8 billion spent online that day. Companies without those foundations, he wrote, received traffic but failed to turn enough of it into purchases.

According to Patel, AI-driven visits to retail sites rose 805% on Black Friday 2025 and were tied to nearly $3 billion in online sales. He said shoppers using AI tools converted 38% more often than other groups and showed deeper engagement.

From search terms to intent

Patel described the shift as a move away from e-commerce systems built around human search behavior. For years, he wrote, online stores were designed to display information so shoppers could search, filter, compare and make decisions themselves.

He used grocery shopping as an example: a customer planning a healthy dinner may search, refine results, compare products, check details and then add items to a cart. Patel argued that an AI agent can reduce that sequence to one request followed by a completed order, changing where effort sits in the shopping process.

Patel said the retailers that benefited were not necessarily those using the most advanced AI models. In his view, the advantage came from clean product data, systems that could retrieve the right information quickly and infrastructure able to interpret intent as a session unfolded.

Other sectors face similar tests

Patel said the same pattern could affect industries where customers must sort through complex choices. He framed the issue as a business risk for companies whose systems still react mainly to clicks rather than to what a customer is trying to accomplish.

• In hospitality, Patel said platforms that understand intent could assemble trips, show policy-compliant choices and complete bookings in fewer steps.
• In healthcare, he said AI retrieval could match appointments with insurance coverage, provider networks, location and medical needs.
• In media, he said news and streaming services that rank content by intent could keep users who might otherwise leave for another tab.
• In marketing and product teams, he warned that optimizing mainly for clicks may fit a behavior pattern AI tools are beginning to replace.

Patel wrote that AI can read natural language well, but it cannot fix stale records, weak retrieval or systems built without intent in mind. He said some retailers underperformed on Black Friday because their data and infrastructure were not ready for AI-driven demand.

He urged executives responsible for customer-facing products to assess whether their data is current, trusted and structured for retrieval; whether they capture intent during interactions; and whether their systems can keep up with AI-speed sessions at scale. Patel said those questions are tied directly to revenue because AI can increase the pace and volume of customer interactions.

Fortune identified Patel as Algolia’s chief ecosystem officer, overseeing alliances with software and services companies. The publication noted that commentary pieces reflect the authors’ views, not necessarily Fortune’s views.

This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.