With all the puff pieces and hype around AI, it is always good to see some actual Ai spending numbers. Enter StoryBlok with research from UK ecommerce firms on their use of AI.
The research reveals that UK businesses have spent an average of £321,000 on AI in a bid to deliver a better digital customer experience. Still, 44% of UK business leaders report that AI has only made a slight improvement. Highlighting the early nature of these efforts, nearly all (93%) of UK businesses consider this a good ROI.
Looking bigger, a fifth (21%) have spent more than £500,000 on AI applications, with popular areas for investment including website content creation (59%), customer service (53%), marketing analysis (51%), and translation services (49%).
AI spending booming for ecommerce
The research is based on a new survey of senior executives at 300 large and mid-sized e-commerce companies across Europe and the US by headless CMS Storyblok.
“The transformative potential of AI for the digital experience is enormous, but our research highlights a clear gap between expectation and reality. While UK businesses are seeing some improvements, these remain incremental rather than truly transformative. What’s particularly interesting is that despite this, most business leaders still consider the capital they have committed to AI a good investment. This could suggest that many UK companies do not expect big gains immediately, but are instead taking a longer-term view of AI to transform their digital offering.” Said Dominik Angerer, CEO and co-founder of Storyblok.
The potential of AI for ecommerce
“To unlock AI’s full potential, businesses must go beyond surface-level implementations and integrate AI in a way that drives meaningful transformation. Core to this is the flexibility to scale with ease, and that’s where composable architecture comes in, enabling companies to seamlessly integrate AI-driven solutions across multiple channels without the restrictions of legacy systems. From hyper-personalisation to seamless localisation, nearly every possible AI use case could be implemented more effectively, and to
a higher standard if businesses raised the digital bar and embraced modern marketing technology.” He continued.
This follows on from previous research that shows around only 20% of firms have integrated their AI into business processes. Naturally, we’d expect gains to increase as usage, understanding and better data helps create improved ecommerce AI systems for sellers.