The new Black Friday playbook

5 ways e-commerce leaders use AI agents to turn peak season into a competitive advantage

For most retailers, managing peak season has always meant surviving the holiday spike. Building the extra capacity needed, creating contingency plans, and hoping you had good enough coverage to maintain service quality as customer volumes doubled or tripled.

AI agents change all that. Whether you’re a retailer managing the holiday rush or a media company a big live event, your team no longer needs to spend months building that extra capacity. Instead, they can focus on maximizing the opportunities — driving more meaningful business outcomes by delivering better customer experiences.

1. Deliver instant scaleability

AI agent capacity can easily be ramped up during the holiday season to match demand — whether it's 10 inquiries, 10,000, or 1 million.

ThirdLove took a bold approach: they intentionally launched their AI agent "Barbra" during Black Friday last year. Says Amber-Lynn Richey, Associate Director of Customer Experience: "We knew that if it worked then, it would set us up for even greater success." Their approach paid off. Barbra reduced the need to ramp up and then ramp down their team, all while maintaining the brand’s industry-high 92% CSAT score.

Sun & Ski Sports has seen their AI agent transform how they handle their most critical selling period, too. As a fast-growing outdoor retailer, Sun & Ski generates most of their revenue in a three to four month winter window, requiring expensive seasonal preparation to manage the surge in customer inquiries. This year, their AI agent scaled effortlessly to meet peak demand, providing 24/7 support — without adding headcount. The result: they maintained responsive customer service during their make-or-break season while bypassing the costs and complexity of seasonal staffing.

2. Maintain service quality

Speed matters during peak season. AI agents provide instant responses 24/7, giving customers consistent advice, fast solutions, and support whenever they need it.

Take Tubi, one of the leading streaming services. They deployed their AI agent in part to help smooth the peakiness of live television events. AI leader James Jones was initially concerned about the reaction of viewers. "I had hypothesized that people really want a human-to-human interface, and sending them to AI would bring our CSAT down," he admits. "But what I realized is that people want answers — they want resolutions to their issues." The results proved him right: CSAT increased by seven percentage points, response times shifted from hours to minutes, and containment reached 80%.

At Minted, the AI agent achieved a 95% CSAT rating while helping the company handle their biggest sales day ever. Casper saw similar results — as traffic doubled during their Labor Day sale, their AI agent maintained a 74% resolution rate and drove a 20% increase in customer engagement.

3. Convert more shoppers

Peak season isn't just about managing support volume — it's about capturing revenue when buyer intent is highest.

Marcus Tyree, CFO at Sun & Ski Sports, saw this dynamic clearly: "There are a lot of people who see AI as immediately an expense-saving tool, but the true leverage is conversion. It starts with connection, which turns into conversion." The numbers prove it: customers who engage with Sunny convert at three times the rate of those who don't.

At Madison Reed, their AI agent "Madi" drove a 30x increase in chat interaction and a 2x increase in appointment bookings. Subscription cancellations were cut in half for customers working with Madi. "We are already seeing meaningful revenue generation," says CEO Amy Errett.

4. Spot and fix problems before they spread

Peak season generates enormous amounts of customer signal — thousands of conversations that contain early warnings about product issues, unclear policies, or broken experiences. AI agents can detect these patterns instantly and surface them to teams.

During the holiday rush, Minted’s AI agent caught a promotion code issue within hours — and the team fixed it before it became widespread. "This was an unanticipated win for us," says Anissa Gomez, Quality Specialist at Minted. The agent gave them a real-time view of the customer experience, allowing them to detect trends and flag problems instantly.

Wilson uses its AI agent to continuously improve its customer offerings. "We can now identify what information our consumers need and add it directly and easily into the system," explains Mary Craven from their CX team. “[That is] a benefit we didn't anticipate but now see as critical."

5. Let live agents focus on what humans do best

When AI handles high-volume, straightforward questions, human agents get to focus on what they do best: complex, nuanced conversations that truly benefit from human expertise and empathy.

The team at CLEAR saw this from the start: "Sierra gives us back time,” says Adam Leubbers, VP of Member Experience. “Our support team is now focused on more complex, meaningful conversations. If a member wants to speak to a human, that's always an option. This is about augmentation, not elimination."

Madison Reed saw a similar transformation. As the AI agent scaled to handle up to 100% of online traffic, the human team focused on high-touch, complex conversations that require genuine expertise.

Bonus: Meet your customers where they are – ChatGPT

The most forward-thinking retailers are taking this even further: publishing their agents to ChatGPT, letting customers discover and shop with them wherever they already are. They're launching experimental campaigns during their busiest periods instead of playing it safe. They're saying yes to opportunities they would have turned down before.

The future of peak season

AI agents are fundamentally changing what peak season means for retail and e-commerce companies. Instead of scrambling to build temporary capacity, companies can meet demand instantly with consistent, expert service. Instead of watching service quality potentially dip, they're seeing customer satisfaction climb. And instead of burning out their teams with repetitive questions, they're elevating them to focus on work that builds lasting customer relationships.

Peak season is no longer about survival — it's about growth.

If you're interested in transforming how your company handles peak season, get in touch. Let's build the future together.