9 AI Moves Retailers Can Still Make Before the Holiday Peak

For retailers, the holiday season brings the same familiar challenges: inaccurate forecasts, incomplete product content, changing demand, pricing pressure, website performance issues, delivery delays, support queues, and returns.

The difference is that AI in 2026 is mature enough to help address many of these problems.

The question is not where can AI help?

It is what can retailers realistically put to work before the peak season?

Here are nine of the biggest AI opportunities as you pep up for the holiday rush.

1. Sell the Right Products in the Right Markets

Holiday planning starts months before shoppers arrive.

Poor forecasting can lead to overstock, missed sales, and stockouts that are difficult to recover from during a short holiday window. AI-powered forecasting can help retailers better predict demand by analysing historical sales, trends, seasonality, and other signals.^[1][2]

2. Make Seasonal Product Content Go Live Faster

Holiday assortments bring a rush of new products, bundles, and seasonal variations.

Getting accurate product information across every channel is a major challenge, especially when teams are working against tight deadlines.

Generative AI tools like ContentHubGPT can speed up product descriptions, attributes, translations, and other content. Retailers can also make sure the information is accurate, compliant, complete, and discoverable through it.

That matters even more as shoppers increasingly use AI to find products. Narvar reports that 65% of shoppers plan to use AI during holiday shopping, with gift discovery among the leading use cases.^[3][4]

3. Make Products Easy for AI to Find

A product can have great content and still get overlooked if AI-powered search and shopping tools cannot comprehend it.

Product attributes, availability, pricing, reviews, and other details all contribute to how a product is understood and recommended.

This makes product data quality an increasingly important part of holiday merchandising.^[5][6][7]

4. Keep Gift Recommendations Relevant

A gift guide created in October can look very different by December.

Products sell out. Prices change. Trends shift. New products take off.

AI-powered search and recommendations can continuously adjust what shoppers see based on factors such as availability, demand, customer behaviour, and trends.

Instead of treating a gift guide as a fixed list, retailers can make it responsive to what shoppers actually want in the moment, and what is available.^[8][9][10]

5. Price and Promote More Intelligently

Holiday promotions are getting broader, while retailers face more pressure to protect margins.

AI can help retailers decide which products to promote, when to promote them, and how deeply to discount them by analysing demand, inventory, pricing, and customer behaviour.

The goal isn't simply more discounts.

It is better decisions about where discounts actually make sense, and how dynamic can they be.^[11][12]

6. Test Before Peak Traffic Hits

A site that works perfectly on a normal Friday may struggle when holiday traffic arrives.

Search, checkout, inventory, payments, and other critical journeys need to be tested under peak conditions.

AI-assisted testing can help teams create and maintain test cases faster, allowing them to cover more scenarios without dramatically increasing manual effort.

For peak season, the priority should be simple:

Test the journeys that would hurt most if they failed.^[13][14][15]

7. Make Delivery Promises More Reliable

The customer sees a delivery date.

Behind it sits a complicated network of inventory, warehouses, carriers, routes, and fulfilment decisions.

AI can help retailers optimise these decisions and improve delivery estimates. But this is typically a larger transformation that requires significant data and systems integration.

For most retailers, it is not just a holiday season need, but also a longer-term opportunity.^[16][17]

8. Answer the Question Customers Ask Most

During peak season, customer support queues fill up with one familiar question:

Where is my order?

Delivery delays and changing arrival dates can create huge volumes of repetitive enquiries.

AI-powered support can handle routine questions smartly, provide order updates, and escalate more complex issues to human agents.

The important metric is not simply how many conversations AI handles.

It is whether the customer gets the answer they need.^[18][19]

9. Catch Fraudulent Returns

Returns are an inevitable part of holiday retail. Fraudulent returns and policy abuse make them even more expensive.

AI can identify patterns across orders, locations, customers, products, and return behaviour to flag potentially fraudulent activity.

The challenge is getting the balance right. A system that treats every unusual return as suspicious can also damage the customer experience.

The goal is smarter detection, not stricter returns.^[20][21]

So, What Can Retailers Actually Do Before Peak?

Not every AI project belongs on the holiday roadmap.

The best candidates have three things in common:

They can go live quickly.
They use data retailers already have.
And a wrong decision is relatively easy to fix.

That makes three areas particularly practical for the days ahead:

Improve product content

Start with the products that matter most to holiday sales. Make their information complete, accurate, and easy for both shoppers and AI-powered discovery tools to understand.

Test critical customer journeys

Focus on checkout, search, inventory, and other high-value journeys. Test them against realistic peak traffic before customers do it for you.

Automate routine customer support

Identify the questions that consume the most agent time and give AI the ability to resolve them before the holiday queue arrives.

These may not be the most exciting AI projects.

They may be the most useful ones.

GSPANN’s Take

Retailers don't need to put AI everywhere before peak season. They need to put it where it can make a measurable difference in the time they have left.
The forecast may already be locked. The fulfilment network may take years to transform. But product content, testing, and customer support can often be improved much faster.
Start with the areas where AI can deliver value quickly. Prove the impact. Then use what you learn to tackle the bigger transformation.

Because the best AI strategy for this holiday season isn't the one with the biggest ambition.

It's the one that actually goes live.