Artificial intelligence (AI) in B2B e-commerce - statistics & facts
Artificial intelligence technologies pervade e-commerce operations across all market segments. In the business-to-business (B2B) environment, AI adoption has improved the online customer experience, mirroring B2C e-commerce trends. It has also changed the way procurement professionals work and interact with suppliers.
The prospects of better decision-making thanks to AI might encourage companies to fully digitalize their procurement operations, which is still an ongoing process for small and medium-sized companies . Larger organizations gather bigger investments to innovate, but they also face higher complexity in operations and supply chains. The role of AI is to help oversee such complexity, automate processes, and assist with procurement.
Most common use cases
One in two large e-commerce companies use AI for price optimization. Prices of products and services depend on multiple factors like customer demand, costs, prices of other competitors, historical data, or seasonality which AI can monitor to suggest prices that maximize revenues. B2B marketing teams use AI to enhance personalization, although the share of professionals still exploring and experimenting with AI-powered personalization is still higher than the percentage of marketers already using AI-produced personalized content. A similar trend has been observed in the adoption of AI chatbots and virtual assistants. For both use cases, roughly 15 percent of marketers are still in the training phase leading to future wider adoption.AI in e-procurement
Online procurement systems leverage AI to increase efficiency in procurement teams that manage purchases of goods and services in enterprises. In 2024, most procurement professionals used AI for data analytics and internal reporting, as well as to automate processes and streamline e-invoicing. As it does for demand forecasting, AI is expected to improve the accuracy of spend analysis and mitigate risks of supplier management. In the next three years, nearly four in ten decision-makers would invest in the mentioned applications as well as in AI-driven demand forecasting, which essentially reduces inaccuracies in supply chain networks. A survey carried out in APAC countries showed that professionals envisaged an incremental growth of AI adoption in procurement, with nearly 30 percent of them believing AI software will become a core component of sourcing processes.The prospects of better decision-making thanks to AI might encourage companies to fully digitalize their procurement operations, which is still an ongoing process for small and medium-sized companies . Larger organizations gather bigger investments to innovate, but they also face higher complexity in operations and supply chains. The role of AI is to help oversee such complexity, automate processes, and assist with procurement.
