When AI Becomes Santa: What Black Friday Just Told Us About the Next Generation

This year’s Black Friday headline practically wrote itself:

Online sales were up 9.1% year over year, and e-commerce unsurprisingly outpaced brick-and-mortar by a wide margin. Mastercard’s SpendingPulse data showed online sales growing 10.4%, compared to just 1.7% growth in-store (Reuters, 2025).

The real story is not that we have outpaced ourselves in spending this holiday season, but rather the drivers of that spending. Adobe says AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites surged 805% compared to last year, as tools like Walmart’s Sparky and Amazon’s Rufus helped shoppers navigate deals, compare prices, and find “the right” gift faster (Adobe Analytics, 2025).

When you add Salesforce’s data showing that order volumes fell 1%, average selling prices rose 7%, and units per transaction dropped 2%, you start to see the rough outline of buying trends (Salesforce, 2025, cited in Reuters).

Translation: We’re buying fewer things, at higher prices, found by smarter tools. 

Setting aside AI-influenced shopping for a brief moment, one of my favorite generational contrasts is the swing in gift-giving itself. In the Silent Generation, gift-giving was often about duty, thrift, and tradition. 

Among Boomers (and some older-born older Gen X), duty is still there, but it’s layered with a strong dose of “I want my kids to have more than I did.” That translated into bigger budgets and more frivolous gifts and “stuff.” 

Now, enter the younger generations. The joy in gift-giving and receiving is not in unwrapping a gift, per se, but in the experience of the gift. The right restaurant together. The perfect concert. The trip, not the trinket.

The numbers back it up. A wave of studies show Americans are pivoting from physical gifts to shared experiences. One review of experiential gifting research notes that around 92% of U.S. adults say they’d rather receive an experience than a physical item, when given the choice (Culture for Hire, 2024). 

Unsurprisingly, this trends far higher in younger generations. TD Bank’s “Merry Money” survey found 68% of Gen Z and 61% of Millennials prefer gifting experiences. This is nearly three times more compared to Baby Boomers at only 23% (TD Bank, 2024).

If you zoom out across the generations, you can watch the gift-giving pendulum swing.

The Silent Generation grew up with thrift and frugality woven into daily life. They were told to carefully unwrap the paper around their gifts so it could be reused. Homemade presents, such as a wooden wagon or a hand-sewn doll, were common. Practical necessities like socks, underwear, and winter clothes rounded out the essentials. In all, gifts were simpler and sentimental, rooted in a mindset of making do. They passed some of this frugality on to the ways they presented gifts to their children, the Baby Boomers.

Boomers, however, gifted more stuff to their kids. The latest toys and gadgets became symbols of visible success. That photo of presents spilling out from under the tree became its own kind of bragging right in the race to keep up with the Joneses. The fuller the pile, the more it signaled, at least to them, that they were giving their kids the life they didn’t have growing up. As I often remind readers, this is a broad generalization, but it’s helpful when you’re watching the generational swing at a macro level.

Gen X were often the recipients of this Boomer generosity and carried some of the frivolity into their gift giving, while some started to pump the brakes. Many showered their own kids with gifts, but increasingly layered in experiences as part of their holiday traditions. Taking a real-time snapshot of this generational cohort, I hypothesize a continued move towards minimalistic gift-giving by Gen X to their kids and grandkids (Millennials through Gen Alpha). The reason being, Gen X is beginning to inherit their parents’ “junk” that accumulated over the years as their parents are downsizing or leaving behind closets, attics, and basements full of accumulated stuff in a movement that I affectionately call The Great Junk Transfer.  

As Millennials moved into parenthood, they pushed the pendulum even further toward experiences. Travel, restaurants, Disney trips, concerts, Broadway shows, and extracurriculars were gifts meant to create memories rather than accumulate objects. The overflowing-tree photo that defined Boomer bragging rights has largely been replaced with pictures of families on vacations or cross-cultural adventures.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha are the beneficiaries of this shift and overcorrection. The gifts they receive reflect Millennial Minimalism: fewer things, more moments. They’ve been raised on experiences and, just as significantly, on documenting those experiences.

And this brings us to the youngest generations, the ones shaping the current swing of the pendulum, whether we’re ready or not.

Gen Z, now largely entering adulthood, is extending the experience-first mindset while simultaneously navigating the financial pinch of entering life during arguably the most expensive decade in recent memory. PwC’s Holiday Outlook shows Gen Z plans to cut holiday budgets by 23%, more than any other generation, even as they continue to value travel, wellness, and experiential gifts (PwC, 2025).

And yet, paradoxically, they’re also the shoppers most shaped by speed. About 30% of Gen Z and Millennials say same-day delivery is their preferred way to receive online orders (PwC, 2025). So when Gen Z shops in the final days before a holiday, it isn’t simply procrastination. It’s a generational rhythm shaped by two forces: 1) they’ve grown up expecting speed; 2) they wait until the last moment when plans, prices, and social cues have finally settled.

Then comes Generation Alpha, the tiny chief procurement officers of modern households. They don’t hold the credit cards, but they absolutely shape the cart. A Horizon Media study found 77% of Millennial parents say their children influence purchases far more than they did with their own parents (Observer, 2025).

And they’re not influencing pocket change. Gen Alpha already has roughly $28 billion in direct spending power through allowances and autonomous purchasing and influences more than $100 billion in spending influence, as we explored in an earlier essay. 

Layer on the fact that 69% of Gen Alpha kids request items they saw in an ad, often before age six, and you start seeing the next generation of consumer behavior taking shape (Parcel Pending, 2025). No wonder Pokémon cards and LEGO sets alongside gaming consoles and electronics were among the top Black Friday sellers (Reuters, 2025). These aren’t nostalgia purchases alone. They’re a reflection of Gen Alpha’s influence on Millennial wallets, amplified by algorithms that know what a seven-year-old watched three minutes ago.

Let’s not get stuck looking in the rearview mirror. As we look out ahead, the true signals emanating from the Black Friday trends should reveal something about the future of shopping and what to expect. If Silent Generation shoppers reused wrapping paper, younger generations are now reusing prompts:

“Find a gift that is under $50 for my Gen Z sister who loves Taylor Swift and hiking.”

AI has become the new discovery engine. Adobe and Salesforce estimate that AI agents influenced roughly $14.2 billion in global online sales on Black Friday alone, with about $3 billion of that in the U.S (Salesforce, 2025; Adobe Analytics, 2025).

PwC (2025) reports that 15% of Gen Z and Millennials expect to use AI to find gift ideas, and a majority of Millennials say they’re open to AI-generated travel recommendations. In other words, the same generations who crave experiences are also increasingly outsourcing the search for those experiences to bots and doing so without much hesitation. For now.

With trust and authenticity being key values of Gen Z, I would imagine we see a rise in growing skepticism around gift recommendations produced by artificial intelligence tools. But the 800%+ increase in AI utilization for gift purchases isn’t quite aligning with that prediction, yet. 

Apart from the rise in algorithm-driven recommendations and LLMs spitting out gift ideas, there has been another key trend on the rise. On the financing side, “Buy Now, Pay Later” or BNPL quietly underpins this entire shift. Adobe forecasts that $20.2 billion in online spending will run through BNPL this season, up 11% from last year (Adobe, 2025).

This deserves a deeper look, including how BNPL affects credit scores, how it shapes spending psychology, and how it risks pulling younger shoppers deeper into debt, but that’s a conversation for another essay.

For our purposes, it’s enough to say this: BNPL + AI + Same-Day Delivery lets you find the perfect thing faster, procrastinate until the last minute, and push the bill further into the future. And this is how the youngest generations are shopping this holiday season.

We are in an “experience-first” moment in culture. Millennials and Gen Z have made that clear. But now we’re watching something equally important unfold: the shopping experience itself is changing.

Record Black Friday spending wasn’t just the sound of cash registers ringing; it was the hum of algorithms whispering suggestions, families outsourcing gifting decisions to AI, Gen Alpha nudging parents with links and screenshots from ads targeted towards them on social platforms, and Millennials comparing trips instead of toys.

The pendulum has swung from Silent Generation thrift to Boomer abundance to Gen X mixed gifts of experience and fewer, big-ticket gifts to Millennial and Gen Z experience-first gifting.

And now, an era is emerging where our gifts might be experiences, but the discovery of those gifts is increasingly mediated by AI. It’s a fascinating moment, one where trust in chatbots is still high, but may not remain that way forever. Skepticism will creep in. But before it does, we’re watching a holiday season shaped more by prompts than catalogs, more by algorithms than aisles, and more by moments than merchandise.

And somewhere in the background, quietly intensifying with every downsizing and every estate sale, the Great Junk Transfer continues to remind us why the pendulum swung in the first place.

We may be spending more, but what we’re spending on is changing. And how we find it is changing even faster.

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