When it comes to customer experience, businesses have been talking about the importance of personalization for years. In fact, both businesses and consumers have long known what a personalized online experience should look like. Despite more than 15 years spent talking about personalization though, the actual deployment of it has always been a challenge. Technology simply hasn’t allowed us to personalize at the speed and scale that we wanted to, and that’s led to a lot of disappointing experiences.
2024 was the year that this decidedly changed. AI isn’t anything new, but it wasn’t until about two years ago that advancements in AI gave new meaning to personalization. Consumers experienced this through tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, while businesses began to see new solutions come to market that could dramatically change the digital experiences they built for shoppers. In 2024, AI’s “possibilities” really started to transform into realities.
Reflecting on Search AI Advancements
At Bloomreach, these advancements have enabled us to take our own personalization innovation to unprecedented levels. On the search side, we announced partnerships with both Google Cloud and NVIDIA during the year. Combining the enterprise-grade power of NVIDIA and cutting-edge technology from Google Cloud with our own commerce-specific Loomi AI brought to life a hybrid search engine that redefines relevance.
Powered by both keyword semantic and vector technologies, our re-engineered search engine can show each shopper exactly what they’re looking for — in addition to other relevant items — while still maintaining precision. This AI-powered search innovation is already beginning to prove to have consequential value, with double-digit revenue lifts seen in early testing.
This kind of value is particularly important when you consider just how valuable the search bar is to a personalized customer journey. This is where 45% of purchases begin. It’s one of the few places where customers explicitly tell you what they’re looking to buy. Being able to answer them with highly relevant, deeply personal results can have a huge impact on both the bottom line and the overall customer experience.
Reflecting on Marketing AI Advancements
Our AI innovation extended beyond just the search bar, of course. At Bloomreach, we know that personalization isn’t about a single touchpoint or channel — it’s about an entire experience, updating in real time to reflect a changing customer.
Online journeys are rarely linear. Customers will shop across multiple channels and timelines before making a purchase. That, in turn, puts more pressure on marketers to meet customers where they are while still maintaining consistency across those different touchpoints.
But marketers are rising to the challenge. During this year’s Cyber Week, we saw how marketers employed more channels than in years past. While email still remained the prevailing channel, mobile push notifications rose 103% YoY for Bloomreach customers on Black Friday, and SMS messages increased 45%. We’re not only helping marketers drive greater success within those individual channels with launches like Rich Communication Services, we’re also helping them drive success across the full, connected experience.
At our 2024 Edge Summit, we announced the new generation of our marketing automation platform, rebuilt around new, autonomous Loomi AI capabilities. This is game-changing technology, capable of doing all the heavy lifting of a marketing campaign, from identifying campaign types and choosing the right segments to creating copy and images. With the ability to reach wider audiences, with deeper personalization, at a greater scale, marketers will not only unlock new levels of customer engagement — they will become strategic drivers of true business impact.
Reflecting on Conversational AI Advancements
Reflecting on a year of AI innovation isn’t complete without mentioning our GenAI-powered shopping advisor, Bloomreach Clarity. When we announced Clarity in 2023, we knew that shopping was heading toward a conversational future. This year, we’ve continued to make that future a reality.
We started the year with the acquisition of Radiance Commerce, bringing on a team with deep technical expertise in conversational AI. This expertise has allowed us to continue advancing Clarity’s capabilities, particularly as we apply new learnings from real customers and shopping behaviors.
For example, we’ve learned that when and how Clarity engages with customers is absolutely critical — we need to offer guidance where it’s most valuable to shoppers. As a result, we’ve now added a new touchpoint that Clarity can connect to: the search bar. By embedding Clarity directly into the search bar, we’ve ensured search is deeply personal by making it inherently conversational. Customers can get additional guidance and expertise about products by chatting with Clarity directly within the search bar.
We’ve also begun to see the tangible results that Clarity drives. Our customers are seeing an average increase in AOV of 20%, in addition to a 9% increase in conversion rate. These are truly consequential results that we’ll continue to build upon in 2025.
The Year Ahead
If 2024 was a year of consequential innovation here at Bloomreach, we see 2025 as the year of consequential growth. We are wholly focused on making AI-powered personalization more than just a reality — we want to make it a revenue-driving reality. We are already beginning to see those results come to life, fueled by our customers around the world who are committed to being leaders in this new era of technology. Personally, I can’t wait to see what they’ll achieve in the year to come.
