With $10.8B spent online last Black Friday, retailers can’t keep up with human-paced decisions. AI assistants and agents now drive real-time actions across Turkey 5.
Last year, U.S. shoppers spent $10.8 billion online on Black Friday, a 7.5% increase from 2023. It was a record-setting total, with the action unfolding in real time: between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., spending averaged $11.3 million per minute.
At that speed, even small delays compound. With thousands of campaign variables—bid costs, search rankings, inventory velocity—shifting faster than human teams can track, the Turkey 5, the five days that begin with Black Friday and end with Cyber Monday, favors brands built for instant decisions, not those waiting for insights to load.
That’s why more retailers are beginning to replace traditional analytics tools with AI assistants and agents that not only report on performance but act on it. Here’s how that shift is redefining what it means to keep up during the most volatile week of the retail calendar.
The Illusion of Visibility
Retailers have never had more data—or more ways to get lost in it. In one survey, 40% of marketers cited data timeliness as their top challenge when advertising on retail media networks, followed closely by fragmentation and inconsistent reporting standards.
Teams now juggle a dozen different performance views, each with its own definitions for impressions, attributed sales, and incrementality. Share of search might update hourly in one system, ad efficiency daily in another, and content health weekly in a third. The fragmentation forces teams to spend as much time reconciling metrics as improving them.
During high-velocity events like Black Friday, this noise intensifies. Decision cycles stretch as teams verify conflicting data or chase down the root cause of a performance miss. Meanwhile, campaigns overspend on SKUs already ranking organically, keywords underperform because of out-of-stock PDPs, and creative mismatches drag down click-through rates.
It’s the illusion of visibility: teams have more access to data than ever, yet they are farther from action.
From Dashboards to AI Assistants to Agents
After years of relying on dashboards and reports that surface metrics for humans to interpret, retailers are beginning to adopt AI assistants and agents that understand intent, prioritize competing signals, and take action in real time.
An assistant functions as an always-on analyst, monitoring performance, detecting anomalies, and recommending actions aligned with goals such as share of search, return on ad spend, or margin. An agent goes further by executing those actions automatically.
Here’s where AI assistants and agents can make the greatest impact during the Turkey 5:
Redirect Spend Toward New Opportunities
When bids surge or inventory starts moving faster than expected, agentic AI can instantly shift spend toward high-potential campaigns or underexposed products. This preserves margin and incrementality while sustaining rank through the day’s price wars.
Protect Margins Before the Market Moves
Agents can combine live availability data with campaign performance, pausing ads before they waste impressions on out-of-stock SKUs. On a weekend when sell-through rates can spike by 300%, this eliminates the lag between an item selling out, dashboards catching up, and a human intervening—keeping every dollar focused on products that can still ship.
Have Campaigns Evolve With Intent
These systems monitor which combinations of copy, imagery, and targeting drive the strongest engagement and automatically scale the winners. Campaigns evolve with shopper intent without waiting for manual reviews.
Respond to Competitors in the Moment
When a rival SKU drops in ranking or changes price, an AI agent can adjust bids or promotions instantly. During the Turkey 5, when top positions can turn over dozens of times an hour, acting within seconds often determines who stays visible when shoppers are ready to buy.
Make Retail Performance Operate as One System
Instead of managing each retailer or media network in isolation, AI assistants can synthesize signals across Amazon, Walmart, and Target to maintain consistent pricing, content, and share of shelf. They surface near real-time comparisons across retailers, alerting teams when pricing deviations could confuse shoppers or erode performance.
How to Approach This Turkey 5
The Turkey 5 may be just weeks away, but it’s not too late to adopt AI assistants and agents. Even modest automation across bottlenecks can unlock real-time responsiveness when it matters most.
Choose the Right Tool
Start with an AI platform built for commerce—one that unifies trusted retail, media, and digital-shelf data and layers AI on top to automate decisions teams typically make manually.
Pick One Workflow to Automate
Identify a single repetitive process that consistently slows the team down, such as pausing out-of-stock SKUs, shifting spend away from cannibalized keywords, or reconciling performance reports. Automating even one of these tasks before peak season can reclaim hours of execution time.
Use Role-specific Insights
Agentic AI works best when trained on how commerce teams operate in the real world. Role-specific assistants can tailor actions for media, sales, or category teams—automatically flagging margin erosion for sales while optimizing bids for retail media.
The Turkey 5 lasts just one week, but it offers the clearest preview of how real-time retail will operate all year. By replacing dashboards with AI assistants and agents sooner rather than later, retailers can prepare for the constant volatility that now defines modern commerce.
