Unlocking Business Value with AI in Commerce: From Efficiency to Innovation

While AI continues to dominate technology conversations, its true value in commerce lies not in hype or experimentation but in its ability to solve real business challenges. For today’s ecommerce leaders, AI offers an opportunity to create more efficient, intelligent, and resilient operations. Whether it’s automating repetitive tasks, enhancing demand forecasting, or uncovering actionable customer insights, AI is becoming essential to driving performance at scale.

The focus must shift from adopting AI for innovation’s sake to applying it with the purpose of aligning capabilities with strategic goals to unlock tangible business value. This blog explores how organizations can harness AI in commerce to streamline operations, improve decision-making, and build a competitive edge in an increasingly dynamic market.

Automating the mundane: Freeing up human potential 

AI in commerce has been transformative and since 2019 businesses have experienced an incredible increase of 270% in the adoption of AI.

Manual processes continue to bog down commerce operations. From product tagging to order management, these tasks consume up valuable time and introduce opportunities for error.

AI in e-commerce excels at taking over these repetitive, rule-based tasks, allowing teams to refocus on higher-value work.

Key areas where AI drives efficiency:

Product data enrichment: AI can auto-generate product descriptions, categorize SKUs, and identify missing attributes while also providing recommendations based upon external sources to accelerate and optimize internal enrichment efforts for better market positioning.

Order and inventory management: Intelligent automation can streamline fulfillment operations by optimizing reordering thresholds, routing logistics, and distribution.

Businesses leveraging AI to automate and improve tedious processes can expect reduced labor costs, improved data accuracy, faster time-to-market, and more agile operations.

Predictability at scale: Smarter, faster decisions

Commerce thrives on foresight, yet traditional forecasting methods often fall short, especially in volatile markets and uncertain economic times. AI in ecommerce enhances predictability by identifying patterns in vast, dynamic datasets that humans can’t parse on their own. Having an AI-powered engine behind your research and analysis can provide critical, real-time insights to empower business users to make quick, strategic decisions.

Key applications of AI-powered predictability:

Pricing optimization: AI in ecommerce can analyze competitor prices, demand elasticity, inventory, analytics, historical sales, and more to recommend ideal pricing strategies in real time.

Inventory forecasting: Machine learning models can predict demand fluctuations at a granular level, helping businesses avoid overstocking or stockouts.

Real-time insights and predictability can result in increased margins, reduced inventory costs, and enhanced customer satisfaction through better availability.

From insight to impact: AI-powered customer experiences

Data alone isn’t enough. The real impact of AI comes from transforming raw data into insights that directly influence business decisions. AI in commerce plays a pivotal role in bridging that gap, turning raw behavioral signals and interaction histories into real-time, personalized experiences that truly resonate.

Keyways AI enhances customer experience:

Customer service insights: AI can mine customer support interactions, from tickets to call transcripts and social media channels, to uncover systemic issues, product feedback, and emerging trends. AI agents can then generate user stories to populate backlogs, ensuring the team is pro-actively addressing critical feedback.

Dynamic customer journeys: Predictive models can leverage behavioral analytics to anticipate customer needs, trigger personalized experiences, customize journeys, and guide product development to better serve customers in the future.

As generative AI in commerce evolves, businesses can now deliver experiences that feel increasingly human, without adding operational burden. From service to storytelling, AI is enabling a new era of customer-centricity at scale.

How AI in e-commerce drives business impact?

Let’s look at how AI is delivering real business impact across key commerce functions:

Operational efficiency and inventory optimization:

• Global retailers leveraging AI for automated product categorization, experience reduced manual tagging time by 80%.
• 30% reduction in stockouts, 25% decrease in excess inventory, and 20–50% reduction in forecasting errors with AI-driven inventory management systems.
• 47% reduction in customer service operational costs through AI-powered automation.
• Approximately 33% of ecommerce businesses plans to include agentic AI by 2028.
• 75% of IT leaders believe AI will enhance enterprise security.
• AI chatbots and virtual assistants now handle 68% of retail customer service interactions end-to-end, providing: 24/7 support, 82% faster resolution times and 73% customer satisfaction for basic inquiries.

Customer experience and personalization:

• Retailers using AI for advanced personalization report: 40% increase in average order value (AOV) and 30% increase in conversion rates compared to generic CX strategies
• AI-powered product recommendation engines can drive 15–30% revenue growth by surfacing relevant items at the right time.
• Personalized marketing campaigns see a 20–30% increase in conversion rates over one-size-fits-all approaches.

Revenue growth and strategic differentiation:

• 79% of business leaders (McKinsey, State of AI 2024) say integrating AI into marketing and sales has boosted revenue.
• Many of those businesses saw 20% or more in added revenue through AI-enabled targeting, forecasting, and automation.
• AI-powered price optimization delivers 10–15% improvement in margins by adapting to demand, competitor pricing, and elasticity in real time

Explore how we helped Formica accelerate its eCommerce evolution by embracing data-driven innovation and personalization. Read this customer success story for more details.

Getting started with purposeful AI 

To truly unlock value, commerce leaders should start with a business problem, not an AI tool. To identify AI use cases that drive true business value and purpose, you need to ask questions that uncover real pain points, opportunities for differentiation, and alignment with strategic goals. The best questions explore user value and business impact coupled with overall feasibility and alignment to strategic goals. 

Let’s take a look at some of those questions worth asking as you identify the right use cases for your business:

User value:

• Who benefits from this, and what pain points are we solving?
• Would users adopt and trust this solution?
• What behavior or process needs to change to realize value?

Business impact:

• What are the biggest challenges or inefficiencies in your current operations or customer experience?
• What key outcomes are we trying to improve (e.g., revenue, efficiency, customer retention)?
• Where are the biggest bottlenecks or costs today?
• What processes, if improved, would unlock major value?

Feasibility:

• Do we have the data, tools, and skills to make this work?
• Can it be done responsibly (ethically, legally, securely)?
• Are there existing AI models or tools that could be leveraged for this?

Strategic alignment:

• How does this use case support our strategic goals or brand purpose?
• Can AI help us create a new capability or differentiate in the market giving us competitive advantage?
• Could AI enable us to do something we couldn’t do before (vs just doing the same thing faster)?
• Does this help us serve customers better, faster, or more personally?

From there, identify your top use case, establish clear goals, expected return on investment, and KPIs to measure the success of your initiative. Avoid overengineering – start small, learn fast, and scale what works. A small proof of concept is a great way to test the waters.

Work with designated IT and data experts to ensure data readiness and the proper infrastructure. With a clear vision and proper support, you’re off to the races!

What’s next?

The commerce leaders of tomorrow aren’t just adopting AI; they’re using it to reimagine how business is done. From driving operational agility to delivering personalized, revenue-generating experiences, AI is shaping the future of digital commerce.

As leading organizations shift from experimentation to execution, the question is no longer “Should we adopt AI?” but rather “How quickly can we scale it to drive results?”

At Altudo, we help businesses like yours identify high-impact AI use cases, implement scalable solutions, and turn innovation into measurable outcomes. Whether you're just getting started or ready to elevate your current capabilities, connect with our experts to explore what AI can do for your commerce strategy.

Not sure where to start your AI or composable journey? Join our expert-led workshop to build a roadmap tailored to your goals.