Technology
AI Steers Cyber Week Shopping Cart to $61bn in Sales
Salesforce reports that Cyber Week is expected to drive $311 billion in global sales as consumers eagerly await holiday deals, with the use of AI and agents set to influence up to 19% of those orders.
The Salesforce Shopping Index — which analyses data from 1.5 billion global shoppers, more than 1.5 trillion page views, and hundreds of millions of unique SKUs on the Salesforce Customer 360 platform — showed that since the start of October, digital retailers using generative AI and agents increased their average order value by 7% compared to those without the technology ($117 vs. $109). AI and agents were also responsible for driving 17% of global orders through personalised recommendations, targeted promotions, and smarter customer service.
Retailers using AI-powered agents during this time frame also doubled customer service engagement, addressing complex cases faster as 30% of consumers prefer agents for speedier service.
“Agents have the potential to transform the holiday season by helping retailers provide personalised, timely, and efficient service to shoppers when they need it most,” said Zuko Mdwaba, Salesforce area vice president/Africa executive and South Africa. “There is a wide open opportunity for digital retailers to use AI for personal shopper agents that help consumers find exactly what they’re looking for and continue to make the path to purchase an easy one.”
Salesforce’s Cyber Week 2024 predictions: Reviewing real-time aggregate data stemming from Agentforce, Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud, Salesforce expects to see four major trends during this year’s most critical shopping week:
AI steers the shopping cart: AI and agents will likely influence 19% of Cyber Week orders, accounting for $61 billion in global sales.
Cyber sales surge: Cyber Week sales are expected to reach $311 billion worldwide, accounting for 23% of all holiday purchases in 2024, and $75 billion in the United States.
Discount rates are expected to be attractive: Average discounts will likely peak at 28% globally and 30% for the U.S., fueling 5% YoY sales growth.
Top discounts rates globally are expected in:
Beauty & Makeup – 38%
Skincare – 33%
General Apparel – 33%
Mobile rules digital checkouts: Mobile orders will make up 70% of sales, driven by better on-the-go experiences in recent years, and presenting a new conversion opportunity with AI agents on mobile messaging apps.
Separately, a recent Salesforce survey found that 45% of global consumers are waiting to make purchases until Cyber Week, beginning November 26, to take advantage of the best deals of the season. This points to an opportunity for retailers to capitalise on shoppers’ excitement and drive more conversions with discounts and agentic customer service experiences.
In addition, the Salesforce Shopping Index’s early holiday findings, captured between Oct. 1 and Nov. 14, showed:
Global sales are growing: Global online sales dipped 1% year-over-year (YoY) during the last seven weeks, but rose 8% YoY in the first week of November, suggesting that consumer interest in holiday shopping is picking up pace.
Highest-growing sales categories:
Makeup (+10% YoY)
Active Footwear (+9% YoY)
General Handbags and Luggage (+8% YoY)
Consumers are interested in AI agents for faster customer service: Since early October, retailers who have invested in AI-powered service agents have seen double the rate of customer service engagement compared to those who have not invested in AI-powered agents.
This growth is an early indicator that agents can take on a higher and more complex case load and adequately serve customer needs.
Customers, meantime, seem open to engaging with agents. A full 30% of consumers said they would work with an AI agent if it meant faster service.
AI and agents augment the shopping experience: While a relatively new technology, major retailers are already employing AI agents to help improve shopping experiences, including:
Brands like Saks are using Agentforce to streamline routine tasks such as order tracking, enabling customer service teams to focus on delivering a highly customized shopping experience that drives conversion.
Nearly one-fifth (24%) of consumers also said they’re already comfortable with AI agents shopping for them.
Discounts and consumer demand are ramping up: Discounts peaked at an average rate of 20% in the first week of November – a 17% YoY increase, indicating that retailers are gearing up for a competitive holiday season.
Online orders have also seen a 4% YoY increase, signaling a positive shift following a year of reduced consumer spending.
Chinese shopping marketplaces entice consumers with low prices: Sixty-seven percent of buyers who use apps like Shein, Temu, and TikTok Shop reported that they are planning to make holiday purchases on them this season.
The top marketplace option for shoppers is Temu, with 40% of global consumers saying they’ve made between two and five purchases on this marketplace in the last year.
Returns present a challenge and opportunity for retailers: Returns in October and November were 33% higher than the same time frame last year, forcing retailers to take a closer look at their retention strategies and return policies to avoid losses.
By Adedapo Adesanya
Lagos State’s representative, Team Nevo, won the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) South-West Regional Hackathon, on Tuesday, December 9, 2025.
The host state took the victory defeating pitches from other south west states, including Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ekiti, and Ondo States.
This regional hackathon was a major moment for the 3MTT Programme, bringing together young innovators from across the South-West to showcase practical solutions in AI, software development, cybersecurity, data analysis, and other key areas of Nigeria’s digital future.
Launched by the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, the hackathon brought together talented young innovators from across the Southwest region to showcase their digital solutions in areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning, software development, data analysis, and cybersecurity, among others.
“This event not only highlights the potential of youth in South West but also advances the digital economy, fosters innovation, and creates job opportunities for our young people,” said Mr Oluwaseyi Ayodele, the Lagos State Community Manager.
Winning the hackaton was Team Nevo, made up of Miss Lydia Solomon and Mr Teslim Sadiq, whose inclusive AI learning tool which tailors academic learning experiences to skill sets of students got the top nod, with N500,000 in prize money.
Team Oyo represented by Microbiz, an AI business tool solution, came in second place winning N300,000 while Team Ondo’s Fincoach, a tool that guides individuals and businesses in marking smarter financial decisions, came third with N200,000 in prize money.
Others include The Frontiers (Team Osun), Ecocycle (Team Ogun), and Mindbud (Team Ekiti).
Speaking to Business Post, the lead pitcher for Team Nevo, Miss Solomon, noted, “It was a very lovely experience and the opportunity and access that we got was one of a kind,” adding that, “Expect the ‘Nevolution’ as we call it, expect the transformation of the educational sector and how Nevo is going to bring inclusion and a deeper level of understanding and learning to schools all around Nigeria.”
Earlier, during his keynote speech, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Sterling Bank, Mr Abubakar Suleiman, emphasised the need for Nigeria’s budding youth population to tap into the country’s best comparative advantage, drawing parallels with commodities and resources like cocoa, soyabeans, and uranium.
“Tech is our best bet to architect a comparative advantage. The work we are doing with technologies are very vital to levelling the playing field.”
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
One of the high points of the 2025 re:Invent was the unveiling of Graviton5, the fifth generation of custom Arm-based server processors from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Many tech enthusiasts believe that the company pushed the limits with Graviton5, its most powerful and efficient CPU, frontier agents that can work autonomously for days, an expansion of the Amazon Nova model family, Trainium3 UltraServers, and AWS AI Factories suitable for implementing AI infrastructure in customers’ existing data centres.
Graviton5—the company’s most powerful and efficient CPU
As cloud workloads grow in complexity, organizations face a persistent challenge to deliver faster performance at lower costs and meet sustainability commitments without trade-offs.
AWS’ new Graviton5-based Amazon EC2 M9g delivers up to 25% higher performance than its previous generation, with 192 cores per chip and 5x larger cache.
For the third year in a row, more than half of new CPU capacity added to AWS is powered by Graviton, with 98 per cent of the top 1,000 EC2 customers—including Adobe, Airbnb, Epic Games, Formula 1, Pinterest, SAP, and Siemens—already benefiting from Graviton’s price performance advantages.
Expansion of Nova family of models and pioneers “open training” with Nova Forge
Amazon is expanding its Nova portfolio with four new models that deliver industry-leading price-performance across reasoning, multimodal processing, conversational AI, code generation, and agentic tasks. Nova Forge pioneers “open training,” giving organizations access to pre-trained model checkpoints and the ability to blend proprietary data with Amazon Nova-curated datasets.
Nova Act achieves breakthrough 90% reliability for browser-based UI automation workflows built by early customers. Companies like Reddit are using Nova Forge to replace multiple specialized models with a single solution, while Hertz accelerated development velocity by 5x with Nova Act.
Addition of 3 frontier agents, a new class of AI agents that work as an extension of your software development team
Frontier agents represent a step-change in what agents can do. They’re autonomous, scalable, and can work for hours or days without intervention. AWS announced three frontier agents—Kiro autonomous agent, AWS Security Agent, and AWS DevOps Agent. Kiro autonomous agent acts as a virtual developer for your team, AWS Security Agent is your own security consultant, and AWS DevOps Agent is your on-call operational team.
Companies, including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, SmugMug, and Wester Governors University have used one or more of these agents to transform the software development lifecycle.
Unveiling Trainium3 UltraServers
As AI models grow in size and complexity, training cutting-edge models requires infrastructure investments that only a handful of organizations can afford.
Amazon EC2 Trn3 UltraServers, powered by AWS’s first 3nm AI chip, pack up to 144 Trainium3 chips into a single integrated system, delivering up to 4.4x more compute performance and 4x greater energy efficiency than Trainium2 UltraServers.
Customers achieve 3x higher throughput per chip while delivering 4x faster response times, reducing training times from months to weeks. Customers including Anthropic, Karakuri, Metagenomi, NetoAI, Ricoh, and Splash Music are reducing training and inference costs by up to 50 per cent with Trainium, while Decart is achieving 4x faster inference for real-time generative video at half the cost of GPUs, and Amazon Bedrock is already serving production workloads on Trainium3.
By Adedapo Adesanya
The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has issued an advisory on new vulnerabilities in ChatGPT that could expose users to data-leakage attacks.
According to the advisory, researchers discovered seven vulnerabilities affecting GPT-4o and GPT-5 models that allow attackers to manipulate ChatGPT through indirect prompt injection.
The agency explained that hidden instructions placed inside webpages, comments, or Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) can trigger unintended commands during regular browsing, summarisation, or search actions.
“By embedding hidden instructions in webpages, comments, or crafted URLs, attackers can cause ChatGPT to execute unintended commands simply through normal browsing, summarization, or search actions,” they stated.
The warning followed rising concerns about AI-powered tools interacting with unsafe web content and the growing dependence on ChatGPT for business, research, and public-sector tasks.
NITDA added that some flaws allow the bypassing of safety controls by masking malicious content behind trusted domains.
Other weaknesses take advantage of markdown rendering bugs, enabling hidden instructions to pass undetected.
It explained that in severe cases, attackers can poison ChatGPT’s memory, forcing the system to retain malicious instructions that influence future conversations
They stated that while OpenAI has fixed parts of the issue, Large-Language Models (LLMs) still struggle to reliably separate genuine user intent from malicious data.
The Agency warned that these vulnerabilities could lead to a range of cybersecurity threats, including unauthorised actions carried out by the model; unintended exposure of user information; manipulated or misleading outputs; and long-term behavioural changes caused by memory poisoning, among others.
It advised Nigerians, businesses, and government institutions to adopt several precautionary steps to stay safe. These include limiting or disabling the browsing and summarisation of untrusted websites within enterprise environments and enabling features like browsing or memory only when necessary.
It also recommended regular updates to deployed GPT-4o and GPT-5 models to ensure known vulnerabilities are patched.
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