Holiday 2025 Cyber-5+CyberMonday Recap: Let's Read Some Tea Leaves and Ponder the Agentic Commerce Implications
Agentic Commerce Exceeds Expectations: 17% of purchases for CyberFive assisted by AI (Salesforce); GenAI Traffic up 760% (Adobe)
Holiday 2025 Update
Happy “Day after CyberMonday” or as we call it in my house - “get ready for packages to arrive all week” - week.
We now have the CyberFive in the books and if you consider the Holiday in the US running Nov 1 - 12/22 that’s 53 days, but by looking at the CyberFive ‘start’ of the Holiday selling period, historically in the US, we’ve been able to tell generally how things are going to go for the whole season, because these five days are the biggest days by far and thus have an outsized impact on the results - 10% of the days drive 70% of the impact.
That being said - some years we see a big ‘procrastinators pop’ where folks panic around 12/18 and there’s a V shape to the holiday (peak at CyberFive and late Dec). Most holidays we have a steady decay from this point to late Dec.
We’ll see how it goes, sadly we won’t know until Q1 2026, so this is probably our last report on Holiday 25 for a while, unless some great exciting agentic news comes out, which, let’s face it, is likely to happen at this pace.
Let’s start with a new feature I call the…
Retailgentic MEGA Cyber Five Data Tracker
Here’s our Retailgentic MEGA Cyber Five Data Tracker:
Quick Tour of the Tracker
Anything above expectations (5% y/y growth) is green, anything in-line is yellow, anything below is red.
There are three datasources: Adobe, Salesforce, Mastercard - only US is tracked in this dashboard
For each data source we look at 7 periods of time over the Holiday selling season:
Pre Thanksgiving - This was driven by Adobe’s release of Nov 1-23 data
Thanksgiving - 11/27
Black Friday - 11/28
Cyber Weekend - November 29 and 30 this year
CyberMonday - 12/1
CyberFive - Thanksgiving+Black Friday + Cyber Weekend + CyberMonday
We track the basic values and y/y growth rates for each data source and then have attempted to capture the best Agentic Commerce datapoints they have included.
All $ figures are in billions (thus $11.8 is short for→ $11,800,000,000)
Agentic Commerce Highlights From the CyberFive
Since this is Retailgentic, let’s start with some Agentic Commerce Highlights.
Adobe reports that CyberMonday GenAI driven impact was up 670% and 760% for the entire CyberFive! While it was small last year, this is a huge lift - think of all the new people exposed to the benefits of Agentic Commerce assisted shopping this year.
Earlier in the season, Adobe mentioned that GenAI driven traffic converts at 30% higher than all other traffic sources.
Salesforce reported that for Thanksgiving Agentic Commerce traffic was up 200% y/y and on Black Friday they reported that 8.3% of all purchases were ‘influenced’ by AI and for CyberMonday that shot up to 14.7% and then 17% for the entire week 🤯.
Salesforce also reported in their CyberWeekend reporting that AI traffic converts 8X better than social channels.
Overall CyberFive Observations
This happens every year and is always frustrating to folks that follow the data - there’s a lot of divergence in the data. for example, how does Adobe come up with $44.2b for CyberFive and Salesforce is $79.6b. The answer is simple - they have very different data sets, different sets of merchants using their platforms and they take that data and (I imagine) ‘extrapolate it up’ to the overall. That why I call this triangulating or reading the tea leaves, you have to do some work and also be patient. The gold standard data is the US dept of commerce reporting that will come out next year, but we have to wait.
When I look at these datapoints, I think a ‘safer’ view is the growth rates - these are big companies and they don’t have massive 300% changes in their platforms so there’s stability there and , thus, in the y/y data.
If we look at that we have Salesforce at the low at 5%, then Adobe at 7.7% and while we don’t have the MC data yet, I am going to bet it comes in at 10-11% - let’s call it 10.5. 5+7+10.5=7.5 - I’ve tracked this long enough that I’m gonna predict the USDC data for online comes in at 7.5% and offline comes in at 4-5%. Amazon always takes share so they will grow 8-10%.
I’m gonna predict the USDC data for online comes in at 7.5% and offline comes in at 4-5%. Amazon always takes share so they will grow 8-10%.
I would say this Holiday is trending to be a ‘slight beat’ overall with ecommerce growing a tad bit more than people predicted. We now have two datapoints (Morgan Stanley - I’ll cover this next week, still digesting it as it’s massive) and Bernstein state that they believe Agentic Commerce will create a material 20-30% acceleration in Digital Retail over Analog Retail and I wonder if we’re seeing the early signs of this. Reread the Agentic Commerce Highlights - that’s ‘not nuthin’ as we say in the South.
What Does Holiday 2025 tell us about Holiday 2026 and Agentic Commerce?
I know it’s early, but the Salesforce datapoint that 17% of the sales were influenced by AI, that’s big. That’s 17% of all buyers-ish experiencing this for the first time. All they have to do is tell 1 friend and we’re at 40% next year. If we’re at 40-50% that fast, well that’s CRAZY. Second, it’s a safe guess that this year 99% of that 20% is ‘Research and Find’ - but NEXT YEAR what if 10-20% of the 40% includes BUY - meaning Instant Checkout, or other Agentic Commerce assisted/attributed buying.
For the CyberFive this year if we had that bigger AC impact:
CyberFive: $62b (this year it will be higher next year but roll with me - this is the midpoint btw of adobe/sf)
40% AI influence
20% of that - 8% of overall sales is BUY
8% of $62b is $5B!
Next Year we could see 40% of Holiday sales ‘touched’ by AI and 10-20% of that ‘Bought via AI’ - that’s $5B!
Stay Tuned and Happy Agentic Commercing!