The 2025 Retail Holiday Guide to AI and Customer Data
By Billy Loizou, APAC Area Vice President, Amperity
The retail industry depends on major sales events, and no event shapes the year more than Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
These two holiday sales events offer more than just a surge in revenues — they represent a test of every retailer’s operational readiness, customer understanding, and creative strategy. They offer a snapshot of what’s working, what needs to change, and where the industry is heading next.
This year, Black Friday comes as key trends in technology and consumer spending collide. 2025 is likely the first year in which retailers could be applying large-scale AI experiments to their holiday sales strategies.
According to Amperity’s 2025 State of AI in Retail report:
- Nearly half (45%) of retailers use AI daily or several times per week
- 97% plan to maintain or increase AI investments in the year ahead
During Black Friday, retailers can try new approaches, stress-test data systems, and collect behavioral signals that shape smarter strategies for the months to come. In this guide, we’ll look at approaches retailers can take to leverage insights from Black Friday and Cyber Monday spike and build on the results post-peak shopping days — turning a single sales event into a year-long competitive advantage.
Are you really ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
Every shopping season is unique, but no campaign happens in isolation. To prepare, retailers need to begin with a clear-eyed understanding of what happened last year on Black Friday — what goals were set, what results were achieved, and where opportunities were missed.
Retailers that ground their strategy in historical insights and unified customer profiles are better equipped to make sharp, data-driven decisions. Look beyond topline metrics like total sales or conversion rates and dig into how specific customer segments behaved:
- Which products or price points resonated?
- Which channels drove the highest-value traffic?
- How did promotions influence repeat purchases in December and January?
It’s easy to fixate on macroeconomic trends — inflation, cost of living, consumer confidence — but those are forces beyond a retailer’s control. What they can control is how well they understand their customers.
Instead of focusing on what the market might do, focus on what the data already says. Even when customers are feeling economic pressure, you can identify price sensitivities within each customer segment and design promotions that balance perceived value with profitability.
A strong customer data foundation is critical to design campaigns around price sensitivities. The quality of your insights and strategies will depend on how comprehensive and unified your customer data is across platforms.
According to Amperity’s research, more than half (58%) of retailers said their customer data is fragmented or incomplete, while only 23% are currently using AI in production to resolve customer identities. By contrast, retailers with customer data platforms (CDPs) are twice as likely to use AI daily and far more confident in their ability to understand and act on individual customer behavior.
Identity resolution — the ability to stitch together a complete picture of each customer across channels and devices — is the foundation for personalisation, segmentation, and forecasting. Retailers using Amperity now have a complete view of the customer — meaning they’re entering the holiday season with greater insight into what their customers value, when to calibrate promotions, and which high-value customer segments can be leveraged.
For those that are navigating the 2025 holiday shopping season without a strong tool for identity resolution, that’s a problem you can’t afford to ignore in 2026.
Turn holiday customer learnings into future strategy
Black Friday is a launchpad, not a finish line. The insights you gain from the holiday weekend should power smarter decisions throughout the rest of the holiday season and into the new year.
In the immediate aftermath of Black Friday, focus on two critical areas: inventory and audience.
Understand what products moved fastest, where stockouts occurred, and which items have lingering inventory — and to pivot campaigns or inventory intelligently during the immediate Christmas surge. Then use Amperity to segment customers and identify which audiences to target for remaining stock and which new customers are worth re-engaging in Q1.
Retailers should treat Black Friday as a customer data event, not just a sales event. Armed with the data and insights from the holiday, retailers can enter December and Q1 with a better understanding of their customers and their inventory, leading to sharper strategy and stronger margins during the next periods.
With unified customer data, retailers can begin to identify patterns that will shape the rest of Q4 and new year. AI models built on clean, connected customer data can quickly and accurately predict which customers are likely to return or which should receive higher-value promotions versus loyalty incentives in Q1.
Amperity’s Real-Time Profiles make this possible by continuously refreshing each customer’s record as new events occur, ensuring predictions are always based on the latest signals. The Identity Resolution Agent ensures those profiles are complete and accurate, stitching together identities across channels to eliminate duplication and error. And with Bridge connectors, retailers can activate those audiences instantly across their marketing ecosystem — powering the tight loop between customer data inputs and AI iteration that provides a meaningful competitive advantage.
A tight loop between customer data inputs and AI iteration provides retailers with a sizable competitive advantage, allowing them to target customers in narrower segments and deliver content with higher precision.
Deepen customer relationships for the long run
Once the decorations come down, the real work begins.
Retailers should focus on reactivating customers acquired during Black Friday and the holiday season. Your goal? Turning one-time holiday buyers into loyal long-term customers.
First, retailers need to dig into their Black Friday sales data and separate new customers from existing customers. Among the new customers, look for signals that could indicate their likely purchasing frequency.
For example, those that returned to your website, emails, app or other owned channels multiple times after Black Friday are more likely to purchase regularly throughout the year; those that made a purchase on Cyber Monday and then disappeared are more likely to be seasonal buyers.
Design your re-engagement strategies accordingly. With seasonal buyers, you could use messaging that focuses on the holiday itself: “Didn’t get everything you wanted this holiday season? Check out our January sales event and cross those last few items off your list.”
For potential regular buyers, lean instead on data that shows you understand their attributes and preferences — with these buyers, it’s worth investing in tailored content that promotes items that match their price sensitivities and product preferences.
Your long-term engagement strategies should include more touchpoints that are informed by real-time signals from those shoppers, from replenishment reminders to loyalty rewards to early access for seasonal launches and beyond. If you used Amperity’s customer data unification and AI modeling for Black Friday, that data can then be leveraged to deepen relationships with your new customers.
Get ready for 2026
While Black Friday customer data will already be useful in December and January, you should take steps to set yourself up for success a year from now. With Amperity, that work starts early — using unified, AI-ready customer data to evaluate what worked, what didn’t, and where next year’s strategy can go further. Take stock of what worked and what didn’t in this year’s campaigns and use that information to guide next year’s strategy.
- Did AI-driven experiments lead to measurable lifts in engagement or ROI? If they did, how can you expand their use in 2026 using Amperity’s ecosystem? If they didn’t, what adjustments can you make to improve performance next year?
- Were customer segments accurate and actionable? What goals should you set for next year to make your segments narrower and more valuable?
- Did your identity resolution pipeline hold up under surges in data? If not, what investments do you need to make in your infrastructure to improve reliability in 2026?
Retail is a fast-paced industry, and you’re always under pressure to move on to the next season and campaign. Your 2026 strategy starts with the data foundation you build today — and Amperity keeps that foundation evolving, accurate, and ready for whatever comes next.
Drive loyalty after the ‘rush’
Black Friday and Cyber Monday provide the ultimate test for a retailer’s systems and strategies. Amperity helps leading retailers turn Black Friday data into year-round growth. From real-time insights to identity resolution, our AI-powered Customer Data Cloud provides the clarity and confidence to drive loyalty long after the holiday rush.
Download the full 2025 State of AI in Retail report to benchmark your AI maturity, and request a demo to see how Amperity can ensure your data foundation is ready for this holiday season and beyond.
