Threepipe Reply’s Ollie Shelton says Black Friday data shows AI now drives shopping

Ollie Shelton of Threepipe Reply argues that 2025 was the year AI ceased to be optional for marketers and became the operational core of the discipline.

If 2023 was when generative AI caught the imagination and 2024 was when brands started to experiment, he says, 2025 saw advocates of agentic advertising move from early adopters to the early majority.

He cites figures from the 2025 Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) period as evidence that AI-powered discovery, comparison and decision-making are already changing consumer behaviour at scale.

In the US, online sales between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday reached $44.2bn, up 7.7%. In the UK, online spending from Black Friday to Cyber Monday rose 4.3% to £3.8bn.

AI assistants influenced more than $14bn of Black Friday sales worldwide and $9.8bn on Cyber Monday. Mobile accounted for between 55% and 70% of online purchases globally. In the UK, TikTok Shop purchases rose 28%, delivering growth of up to 50% year on year during Cyber Week.

Agentic AI takes hold

Shelton says consumers did not simply browse but asked AI to find the best price, the quickest delivery or the best-rated product, the behavioural change that he believes made 2025 the year of agentic advertising.

Agentic AI, he argues, has moved marketing away from prompt-based tasks and towards goal-based execution, inside platforms and increasingly inside brands.

This year saw wide adoption of systems that can move budget automatically in response to real-time signals, adjust creative and messaging according to audience behaviour, run repeated tests without human involvement and bring together signals from search, social, commerce and retail media.

Threepipe Reply has deployed frameworks that move budget across Google, TikTok, Meta and retail media as demand signals rise and fall, he says. With deals, competitor prices and stock levels all fluctuating over BFCM, brands with automated pipelines were able to react more quickly.

Efficiency as an advantage

The push for efficiency has run into rising media costs and fierce competition, but Shelton argues AI has turned efficiency into an advantage.

In the US, conversion rates rose even though average order volume fell because of higher prices. Globally, social media accounted for 14% of all retailer traffic, up 12% year on year, and UK mobile share grew 14% year on year, which he says reflects quicker, more decisive shopping journeys.

Threepipe Reply uses agentic modelling to cut waste, sharpen investment and let media optimise itself within set limits, he says, leaving human teams to concentrate on strategy, brand and orchestration rather than weekly bid changes.

With TikTok Shop passing $500m in US sales between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Shelton says the speed and variety of creative is clearly important. Winning content is iterative, shaped by behaviour, supported by predictive signals and tailored to formats, creators and communities.

The agency is already using creative intelligence tools that automatically generate, test and develop content automatically across beauty, retail, fashion and sport. “This was the year creativity stopped being a static asset; 2026 will be the year that creativity becomes adaptive,” he writes.

The end of channel silos

Shelton says consumers now evaluate through search, validate on social, compare via retail media and buy on mobile, often within minutes.

More than 80% of traffic spikes in the US came from AI discovery and price comparison, he says. Beauty, fitness, apparel and tech led, powered by influencer and user-generated content, while live social commerce grew worldwide and brought purchase intent forward.

According to Shelton, Threepipe Reply's mapping shows cross-channel signals increasingly outweigh insights from individual channels, and measurement will move from channel attribution towards orchestrating the whole journey in 2026.

With AI-mediated shopping, he says, products are compared instantly, preferences form before anyone visits a website, baskets are assembled in the background, and commerce, social and search merge into a single layer of intent. The agency is therefore investing heavily in AI shelf optimisation, so that brands show up in LLMs, AI search, social recommendations and retail media.

“In 2026, the majority of product discovery will happen in environments brands can’t see directly, but only influence,” he writes.

The year ahead

Shelton describes 2025 as the year of implementation, in which brands updated systems, adopted agentic models and rolled out creative and media intelligence. He expects 2026 to be the year of acceleration.

He predicts AI-native operating models, adaptive brand worlds, predictive commerce ecosystems and combined creative and media intelligence stacks, together with safe, auditable AI governance and hybrid human and AI workforces within marketing teams. Brands laying those foundations now, he argues, will lead their categories in 2026.