How AI makes individualized promotions – at scale – a reality

Personalizing marketing across your customer base has always been a marketing goal, and now artificial intelligence is bringing retailers to the finish line.

Advances in AI have made actual targeting of shoppers at the regional, demographic and even individual level at scale both achievable and manageable to a degree not available even a couple of years ago. Retailers are utilizing next-gen marketing AI solutions to enhance their efforts at sending shoppers highly targeted offers and messages without excessive cost or effort.

Regional Southwest grocer Brookshire Brothers, as well as national apparel retailer Gap Inc. and sports-themed hair salon chain Sport Clips Haircuts, are all leveraging AI to transform their marketing efforts. Following are closer examinations of each retailer’s marketing AI initiatives. 

Brookshire Brothers

Brookshire Brothers has completed rollout of an artificial intelligence platform to aid promotion planning, optimization and analysis. The Texas-based, employee-owned grocer has deployed PromoAI, an advanced platform from Cognira. The implementation is intended to streamline promotional planning, enhance collaboration and maximize ROI. 

Brookshire Brothers seeks to plan and manage promotions from a single, centralized platform accessible across the enterprise, as well as improve forecasting of financial outcomes and promotion performance.

In addition, the company expects to optimize promotional activity and reduce inefficiencies, with the ability to evaluate promotional effectiveness post-event and use those insights to continuously improve its future plans for promotions.

Brookshire Brothers also utilizes technology from Birdzi to provide shoppers with personalized digital coupons and ad flyers and offers integrated coupon clipping and redemption, complex promotions, and enhanced support for two-way conversations between online customers and personal shoppers who select products by hand via digital tools from the eGrowcery food industry e-commerce platform.

[READ MORE: Brookshire Brothers personalizes discounts]

Gap Inc.

Gap Inc. is leveraging an existing cloud and artificial intelligence partnership with Google to enhance its marketing activities. The apparel giant, which entered a multi-year AI and cloud partnership with Google Cloud to accelerate its digital-enabled technology strategy in October 2025, has now launched a marketing modernization effort based on Google technology.

The initiative is designed to turn Gap Inc.’s shared marketing organization into a more scalable, real-time growth engine based on data, AI and agentic capabilities in order to deliver more relevant content, improve owned marketing channels, strengthen customer retention and remove silos across its marketing ecosystem. The effort will span all of the company’s banners, including Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic and Athleta.

As part of the transformation, Gap Inc. is leveraging its partnership with Google Cloud to build a unified, AI-compatible data foundation that brings together customer and product intelligence. This platform is expected to enable faster personalization, better decision-making and continuous learning across marketing content, activations, and e-commerce. 

The company will leverage Google Cloud AI tools including Agent Studio, Agent Engine and Gemini models to build AI-driven workflows and Google advanced image and video models like Nano Banana and Veo to create visual content at scale.   

Sport Clips Haircuts

Sport Clips Haircuts has rolled out more than 3,400 agentic AI-based SOCi Genius Agents to perform local review management and search optimization work at scale across its nearly 1,800 locations. 

With more than 7,000 customer reviews generated each month and search shifting more toward AI engines, Sport Clips needed a way to consistently engage at the local level without increasing work for store employees. 

Now, SOCi agents perform tasks on behalf of each location including responding to reviews, optimizing local search presence, and ensuring customer interactions align with local and national branding. Each SOCi agent is trained on Sport Clips' brand guidelines, tone of voice, and operational standards, while also adapting to the unique characteristics of each individual location. 

As a result, SOCi Genius Agents can incorporate regional nuances, customer preferences and location-specific context. Store owners remain actively engaged with interactions and monitoring client feedback, while SOCi agents autonomously manage responses. In addition, SOCi agents continuously learn and improve over time.

Benefits Sport Clips has received include eliminating manual review management by autonomously monitoring and responding to thousands of monthly customer interactions, which has freed local store employees to focus on in-store experience rather than performing digital marketing tasks.

In addition, the retailer can scale local execution instantly by activating agents for new locations without adding headcount and says it has improved the quality and consistency of its localized customer engagement over time by using agents that continuously learn and adapt.