6 AI Trends Transforming Commerce Promotions

The evolution of promotions in the age of AI 

Promotions have always been one of the most powerful tools in commerce for influencing purchasing decisions and creating opportunities to build stronger customer relationships.

But the truth is that behind every promotion is a complex operational reality. Merchandisers, marketers and commerce teams must balance customer expectations with business objectives, managing everything from discount rules and product eligibility to inventory considerations, customer segments and channel-specific experiences. 

As commerce becomes increasingly sophisticated, these processes are becoming harder to manage with manual workflows or simple automations. The dynamic nature of promotions means that marketers should be able to adapt campaigns as a response to changing conditions, like a competitor lowering pricing, customer backlash or lower sales than expected. 

As cliché as this may sound, AI holds the key to the next evolution of promotions, enabling teams not only to move faster but with higher accuracy. 

Here are six trends we’re seeing in this direction. 

Trend #1: AI for intelligent promotion orchestration

To this day, many promotion processes remain dependent on manual configuration and coordination. Many marketers spend valuable time setting up campaigns, validating rules, reviewing performance and making adjustments across multiple channels.

The fact that translating a high-level marketing brief into live store discounts is usually a manual, tedious and time-consuming process adds to the issue. Marketing teams write out business requirements, and then someone has to translate those rules into complex technical setups, such as configuring cart rules, setting up discount codes, typing out localized titles and double-checking conditions.

This presents an issue, particularly when customer behavior or market conditions change quickly. When processes are maintained manually, a promotion that needs immediate attention may already be outdated by the time it reaches customers. 

AI can help remove these constraints by acting as an intelligent layer across promotion workflows. Instead of requiring teams to manage every step manually, AI can assist with:

• Generating promotion recommendations based on business goals.
• Identifying optimization opportunities.
• Reducing repetitive configuration tasks.
• Helping teams evaluate different promotion scenarios.
• Accelerating campaign creation and iteration.

For example, our upcoming Promotions Agent enables marketers to achieve in minutes what once took hours or days. Using a prompt directly in the Merchant Center, commercetools’ business tooling, where merchants already build their discounts today, the Promotions Agent: 

• Acts as a copilot for setting up discounts and building new types of promotional structures. 
• Enables users to copy and paste their promotional brief into the prompt, and the AI parses the context, configures the technical rules and drafts the discount instantly. 
• Provides automated localization & Human-in-the-Loop context with field names, descriptions and promotional messaging that are automatically prefilled and translated across all active store languages based on context. The merchant stays fully in control as they review the generated draft, verify the settings and hit activate.

For marketers and merchandisers, this represents a meaningful move from “builders” to “reviewers,” in which AI doesn’t replace their expertise, but helps them amplify their focus on strategy and customer experience. They don’t spend time on setting up the nitty–gritty details of promotions and discounts, and rather bring their creativity to the table more often. 

Trend #2: AI as a commerce safety layer

Speed is crucial, but in complex commercial environments, accuracy is just as important. Usually, a promotion engine may support thousands of products, customer segments, markets and business rules. A small configuration mistake can have significant consequences, from unexpected discounts and margin erosion to customer dissatisfaction.

This is where AI can become a critical safety layer by identifying potential issues before they impact customers, such as:

• Conflicting discount rules.
• Incorrect promotion stacking behavior.
• Offers applied to unintended products or audiences.
• Campaigns that don’t align with inventory or commercial goals.
• Unexpected impacts on revenue or profitability.

In addition to automating promotions for improved efficiency, AI can serve as an intelligent quality-control mechanism that helps teams make better decisions.

Trend #3: Building trust into AI-powered commerce with different levels of autonomy 

As AI becomes more capable, the discussion of whether AI can act on behalf of humans is taking shape. The answer is more nuanced than full autonomy or no autonomy at all, as it depends on many variables, from the complexity of use cases to the level of comfort users have with delegating decisions to AI. 

For starters, autonomous commerce is still in its infancy, and naturally, it will take time to build trust. At the same time, AI is maturing even faster than expected, and guardrails are being developed to minimize hallucinations or AI agents going rogue. We expect that marketers and merchandisers will start feeling comfortable in delegating tasks to AI to set up, monitor and update campaigns in the near future. 

Today, human-in-the-loop processes still account for the vast majority of cases, with AI working alongside teams to provide recommendations and explain its reasoning, so you, as the human, can make the final call that sets up the system to run the campaign autonomously. 

As AI technologies mature, more use cases with full autonomy will emerge. At the same time, the level of autonomy will continue to depend on specific use cases, with simpler workflows the first to run autonomously. 

The beauty of autonomous commerce is that it doesn’t need to be forced. Merchants can decide what runs with full autonomy, and what needs human touch. They can adjust processes and workflows as they mature or as they perform. The key here is flexibility to go down the autonomous route where it makes sense. 

Trend #4: AI as a strategic commerce partner

The biggest opportunity for AI in promotions is to enable your business to move from reactive campaign management to proactive commerce optimization. These AI-powered promotion capabilities will help you answer strategic questions such as these:

• What promotion is most relevant for this customer?
• Which offer will drive conversion while protecting margin?
• When should an offer change based on demand, inventory or customer behavior?
• How should promotions adapt across digital and physical channels?

This requires AI to understand the commerce context: Not just customer data but also products, pricing, inventory, business rules and operational constraints.  

The result is a move toward dynamic, adaptive promotions that respond to real-time conditions while remaining aligned with business objectives. 

Trend #5: AI is only as intelligent as the commerce foundation underneath it

For AI to deliver meaningful recommendations, it needs access to accurate, connected and flexible commerce data. Any initiative in personalization and intelligent decision-making would fall apart if they’re built on top of fragmented systems with conflicting data or rigid architectures that prevent real-time information sync. 

A modular commerce approach provides the flexibility required for AI-driven experiences by allowing businesses to connect the capabilities they need, including product information, customer data, pricing, promotions, inventory and external intelligence sources.

This foundation enables AI to reason across the entire commerce ecosystem instead of optimizing isolated processes.

For example, MosAIc, our autonomous operations layer, provides agent orchestration that connects AI capabilities to commerce workflows, helping businesses deliver more intelligent and personalized experiences. 

With MosAIc’s campaign optimizer, you can write a prompt like, “Launch a summer sale in Germany with a 5,000 EUR budget,” and the solution puts together a campaign with the goals, budget, dates, the markets and products in scope, and a live preview of a discounted cart on your real catalog. You can adjust what’s needed and approve, giving the system the go-ahead to run the campaign autonomously. 

While merchants can choose to set different levels of autonomy based on their workflows, the solution works at any level of autonomy — from complete human-in-the-loop to fully autonomous — because it sits atop a single source of data. 

Trend #6: Explainability and traceability as foundations of AI trust

As AI influences more commerce decisions, transparency about how AI reached a conclusion or recommendation becomes essential for building trust among users. 

They need to understand why an AI system recommends a specific promotion, audience or optimization strategy. Without explainability, AI risks becoming another black box that teams are hesitant to rely on.

Trustworthy AI should provide context:

• Why was this promotion recommended?
• Which customer behaviors influenced this suggestion?
• What business rules were considered?
• How might this decision impact revenue, inventory or customer experience?

Explainability enables teams to confidently adopt AI by allowing them to understand, validate and improve the recommendations they receive.

The future of promotions at your fingertips

The next generation of commerce will be defined by AI that amplifies human expertise, removes operational friction, prevents mistakes, uncovers opportunities and enables personalization at scale.

Businesses that build the right foundation for AI will be able to move beyond static promotions and create adaptive experiences that respond to customers in real time. This means moving from automation alone to intelligent orchestration that combines AI capabilities with modern commerce architecture underneath, and human expertise to create more relevant, efficient and trusted customer experiences.

Contact our team for more information on leveraging AI for promotions with commercetools.