Key takeaway: Merchants and fraud teams should plan checkout and fraud-screening capacity around a longer, AI-mediated shopping season rather than a single Black Friday peak. Teams should also build monitoring that treats AI chatbot and assistant traffic as a routine part of the shopping journey.
Cloud communications provider Infobip predicts more than 7.3 billion customer interactions across Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2026. The company released this forecast on Sept. 22, 2026, alongside new research across nine markets showing that AI has become a routine part of how people shop.
Infobip’s research found that 63% of consumers globally have used an AI assistant or chatbot while shopping in the past 12 months. Among those willing to use AI, 73.4% said they would use it to compare products, and 67.8% said they would use it to find matching deals.
In India, the figure was far higher. A separate, Asia-focused distribution of Infobip’s research, released Oct. 26, 2026, found that 83% of consumers in India reported using an AI chatbot or assistant while shopping. That release also found 95% of Indian consumers open to virtual try-ons through messaging, and 70.5% choosing WhatsApp as their preferred channel for deal alerts.
The holiday shopping window has also stretched earlier. Close to six in ten global respondents expect to start shopping by early November rather than wait for Black Friday week.
Goran Juršić, Infobip’s chief growth officer, said in the Sept. 22 release that “Black Friday is no longer a single day or even a single week.” He added that “the winners will not be the brands that send the most messages.”
Harsha Solanki, Infobip’s VP and general manager for Asia, framed the India and Philippines findings in the Oct. 26 release. She said shoppers in both markets want earlier, relevant offers, AI that helps them compare and decide, and support that stays smooth after checkout.
Why it matters: Infobip’s release carries no fraud figures of its own. But the scale and timing it describes matter directly to checkout and fraud teams.
A shopping season that starts weeks earlier runs mostly through AI-mediated chat and messaging channels. That gives fraud teams a wider window and a different traffic mix to screen, well before the traditional Black Friday peak.
Source: Infobip