E-commerce firms bet on AI despite modest gains: Storyblok

Fibre2Fashion

07-05-2025

E-commerce companies are investing significant capital in AI to improve the customer experience, however, many businesses are yet to realise significant gains, as per the findings of a new survey of senior executives at 300 large and mid-sized e-commerce companies in the US and Europe by headless CMS Storyblok.
E-commerce businesses have spent an average of $369,916 in the past year on developing or implementing AI solutions to enhance their digital customer experience, with 28 per cent spending more than $500,000. Yet almost a third (32 per cent) state that their AI investment has only made a slight improvement to their customers' digital experience.
A Storyblok survey of 300 US and European e-commerce leaders found that while companies spent an average of $369,916 on AI to enhance digital experiences, 32 per cent saw only slight improvements. Despite this, 95 per cent reported a good ROI, suggesting a long-term investment view. Top AI uses include customer service, marketing analysis, and content creation.
Surprisingly, nearly all of business leaders (95 per cent) say that their AI investment has delivered a good Return on Investment (ROI), of which 39 per cent perceive it as a very good ROI. This potentially indicates businesses are taking a longer-term view of AI investment to improve their digital offering.
The research also explores the most popular use cases for AI amongst business leaders, which were cited as customer service (60 per cent), marketing analysis (48 per cent), website content creation (47 per cent), translation services (47 per cent), and automating admin tasks (43 per cent).
'The transformative potential of AI for the digital experience is enormous, but our research highlights a clear gap between expectation and reality. While e-commerce 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 companies do not expect big gains immediately, but are instead taking a longer-term view of AI to transform their digital offering,' Dominik Angerer, CEO and co-founder of Storyblok , said.
'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,' explained Angerer.
Fibre2Fashion News Desk (RR)