Middle East Retail Ends 2025 Strong as AI Shapes Consumer Behaviour

The Middle East’s retail sector closed 2025 on a high note, driven by strong performance during key periods such as Cyber Week, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Ramadan shopping season. But analysts say headline growth figures only tell part of the story.

According to aggregated commerce data and consumer research from Salesforce, the region’s gains were not primarily fueled by heavier discounts or short-term promotions. Instead, growth reflects a structural shift in how consumers discover, evaluate, and purchase products, with AI-powered tools playing a central role.

During Cyber Week 2025, online sales and orders across Middle Eastern markets rose 23 per cent, while website traffic increased 19 per cent. Average discounts edged slightly down to 27 per cent from 28 per cent in 2024, signaling healthy consumer demand. Black Friday followed a similar trajectory, with online sales up 21 per cent, orders rising 20 per cent, and traffic up 17 per cent, as average discounts narrowed to 28 per cent. Even Cyber Monday, typically a slower period globally, delivered 8 per cent online growth and a 19 per cent increase in traffic.

Ramadan underscored the region’s unique retail dynamics. Online sales grew 19 per cent year-on-year in March 2025, with traffic up 15 per cent. Average discounts increased to 21 per cent from 14 per cent the previous year, reflecting heightened competition and seasonal shopping awareness.

Experts point to AI as a key driver of this shift. Increasingly, consumers are using AI-powered assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Meta AI, or Grok to search for products, compare options, and make purchasing decisions. Adoption is particularly strong among Gen Z shoppers, many of whom now expect AI tools to guide both online and in-store experiences.

Retailers across the region have responded by integrating AI into customer-facing experiences and back-end operations. On the front end, agentic AI systems personalise shopping journeys, recommend products, resolve queries, and guide customers from discovery to checkout. Behind the scenes, AI helps retailers model inventory, adjust pricing dynamically, enhance supply chain resilience, detect fraud, and automate clearance strategies, improving efficiency and scalability.

Industry observers say 2026 will be the year businesses fully embrace AI’s potential. The evolution from insight-generating tools to autonomous, multi-step systems is shifting competitive advantage toward organisations that can balance machine autonomy with human oversight and ensure reliable data governance.

The Middle East’s digitally native population and government investment in AI and infrastructure provide fertile ground for these changes. Agentic commerce enables personalisation at scale, operational agility, and real-time responsiveness, particularly during peak periods such as Ramadan and Cyber Week, which can define annual performance.

Even as prices increased, shoppers showed a clear willingness to spend when experiences were relevant, personalised, and effortless. Analysts predict that agentic commerce will soon move from a differentiator to a foundational element of modern retail in the Middle East.