Flash: Adobe's Holiday 2025 Forecast Calls for 520% y/y Agentic Commerce Growth
Overall: 5.3% Y/Y Growth and a total $250B for the Holiday Season
Adobe is out this morning with their annual Holiday 2025 forecast that also combines fresh survey data from 5,000 US consumers.
Agentic Commerce Predictions
First, it’s great that Adobe is now including Agentic Commerce in both it’s forecasts and surveys as it gives us an additional set of data to track and triangulate on what’s going on in these earliest days of an exponentially growing new technology.
In 2024, Adobe measured a 1300% back in 2024, but at that point ChatGPT Websearch was only available Oct 31, 2024 to premium users in an early experience and didn’t receive broad distribution until 2025. Thus in 2024, all GenAI users could do is limited research and the 4o model that was widely used had a cut off data of May 2023 - so even using it for Research was pretty limited.
Flash forward to 2025, Websearch has matured, we have ChatGPT-5 and in that year ChatGPT has added not only Product Cards, but Instant Checkout capabilities.
This year we’re going to see the full spectrum of Research→Find→Buy. We saw indications of this with the Adobe data from Prime Day that showed a huge 33X surge in GenAI.
Top Agentic Commerce Use Cases
In the survey Adobe asked consumers how many had already used an “AI-powered service for online shopping” and over 33% of respondents reported they had.
They then asked what consumers are likely to use Agentic Commerce for:
53% said Research
40% Product Recommendations
36% Finding deals
30% Gift inspiration
Top Agentic Commerce Categories
According to the Adobe survey data on consumer intent, the top categories consumers will be using Agentic Commerce for are toys, electronics, jewelry and personal care.
Retailgentic Analysis on the Adobe Prediction
This feels low to me. If you recall, analysts have called for a 1.5-2.5% acceleration in e-commerce over the next 3 years. Ecommerce growing at 5.3% is mid at best. I’m going to take the over.
I predict in Q1 2026 when the Holiday 25 dust has settled we will see that we blew away the Adobe 5.3% y/y Holiday sales growth prediction. I predict we will see Agentic Commece add 0.5-1% growth pushing the e-commerce tide to rise over 6%
The premise of this prediction is based on the fact that I bet Adobe’s data scientists built this forecast on historical data using a traditional linear projection. Exponential curves break linear projections. Their model and even their survey (performed in mid Sept 2025) didn’t and couldn’t have predicted what ChatGPT released last week with Instant Checkout. On top of that we definitely have Google working on Agentic Checkout, Perplexity has made big improvements and I suspect we’ll have something from Copilot and one of the other players before Holiday 25.
Only time will tell, but I’m putting a marker down now and have put it on my calendar to revisit this in mid Feb when we’ll know how I did.
One final thought - historically we see both Adobe and Salesforce come out with Holiday forecasts (and NRF - there’s is more store/offline oriented), we’ll see where Salesforce+NRF land and if they have modeled the exponential inside of there.
Additional Non Agentic Holiday Insights
Overall Adobe expects US ecommerce to hit $253.4B this holiday season which they measure as the period from 11/1/25-12/31/25. This represents 5.3% y/y growth.
They are predicting that the 5-day CyberWeek (Thanksgiving→CyberMonday) will drive 17.2% of the Holiday sales representing $43.7B and up 6.3% y/y.
They are calling CyberMonday to retain it’s crown of top day of the year coming in at a whopping $14.2b this year. But Black Friday will be on its heels with $11.7B and grow a good bit faster - 8.3% vs. CyberMonday at 6.3%. If this keeps up, eventually they will cross.
Holiday 2025:Another year of Discount Chicken 🐓
My good friend and excellent Ecommerce analyst, Rob Garf, calls the trend over the last couple of years where we’ve faced persistent inflation, the battle of ‘Discount Chicken’ - where the consumer and the merchant face off to see who will blink first.
Adobe’s forecast predicts discount-wise up to 28% off listed prices which would be on par with what they reported in 2024.
Category Discount Predictions
Adobe expects we’ll see
Electronics - 28% in 2025 vs 30.1% in 2024 - slightly better for merchants with TVs at 23%, computers 23%
Toys flat year of year at 27% discount
Apparel at 25% off
Sporting goods 19%
Appliances and furniture at 18%
Discount Timing
Savvy discount shoppers wait for CyberWeek and Adobe expects Thanksgiving to be the best day for sporting goods discounts. Black Friday we’ll see the best discounts for TVs, toys and appliances. Finally CyberMonday will be ‘last call’ for the best deals and we’ll see electronics at peak discount.
BNPL on the Rise 🚀
Buy-Now-Pay-Later (Affirm, Afterpay, Klarna) aka BNPL will drive an additional $2B, for a total this year of $20.2b as consumers increasingly embrace BNPL to offer greater flexibility in managing their budgets and cash flow in Holiday 2025.
BNPL is expected to hit its peak on CyberMonday and have it’s first $1B day.
The majority of BNPL is focused on higher-ASP categories such as electronics, apparel and home goods/furniture.
Overall Category Trends
Three categories - electronics, apparel and furniture will drive online spending with electronics at $57.5b up 4% y/y, apparel $47.6b up 4.4% y/y and furniture at $31.1b up 6.5% y/y.
Adobe called out cosmetics as out-performing growing 9.1% y/y for a total of $8.4b.
Similar to the furniture trend, Adobe sees consumers spending a lot for home improvement items this Holiday as consumers look to up-grade their living spaces:
Power tools: 1,060% growth vs. the front half of the year (Jan-Aug 25)
Home security: 1,050% growth vs. the front half of the yr
Refrigerators: 910%
Smart home devices: 615%
Consumers are also expected to invest in their health with monitoring devices and smart watches:
Health monitoring: 1,055%
Smart watches: 950%
Top Selling Item Predictions
Adobe predicts the top sellers this season will be:
Gaming Consoles: Nintendo Switch 2, PS5, XBox Series X
Top games: DK Bananza, Elden Ring:Nightreign, Madden 26, NBA 2k25, EA Sports FC 25, COD Black Op 7
Top toys: Disney Stitch Puppetronic, Labubu Dolls and Mr Beast Lab toys
Electronics: iPhone 17, Pixel 10, Galaxy S25, Oura Ring 4, Kindle Colorsoft, DJI Osmo Pocket 3, and Dyson Airwrap Multi Styler.
Up Next: Forecasts from Salesforce and NRF
We’ll be watching for the Salesforce and NRF predictions which usually drop mid October and compare them to the Adobe - specifically looking for any call-outs around the Agentic Commerce trends. Note: Salesforce did come out with some predicted Holiday 2025 trends here, but not a full forecast yet.
Stay tuned and until next time…
Happy Agentic Commercing!