01
AI & agentic commerce
How generative AI assistants are becoming a primary discovery channel — traffic growth, conversion quality, and what it means when a machine, not a shopper, reads your product page.
Director, Insights & Analytics — Adobe
Reading the digital economy in real time.
I lead the research behind Adobe's Digital Economy Index and holiday retail reports — then translate it into the numbers executives plan against and journalists quote. Trillions of data points in. One clear story out.
VP
San Francisco · Adobe Digital Insights
What I can speak to
Six beats, one dataset.
Adobe Analytics measures over a trillion visits to retail sites and hundreds of millions of SKUs. These are the questions I get asked to answer — on camera, on stage, and on deadline.
02
Holiday & peak retail
The forecast, the Cyber Week actuals, and the recap. Black Friday's rise against Cyber Monday, promotional depth, and where the season's growth actually comes from.
03
Pricing & online inflation
The Digital Price Index — measuring deflation and inflation in the online economy, often ahead of where it shows up in the wider economic picture.
04
Consumer behavior
Trade-down and trade-up, the lipstick effect, buy now pay later, and the psychology of a shopper who has been conditioned to wait for the promotional moment.
05
Mobile & the small screen
The migration of transactions to the smartphone, app investment as a growth lever, and impulse-led shopping behavior in peak windows.
06
Travel & the digital economy
Flight and hotel booking demand, price movement, and the broader index view of a digital economy that now spans retail, travel, financial services and media.
Experience
Adobe is the visible chapter. The method was built earlier.
Before the Digital Economy Index there was market mix modeling for household wine brands, predictive models and an in-house search engine at VMware, and a US market launch built from nothing. Every one of them taught the same lesson: a number only matters once someone can act on it.
The story I'm tracking
AI stopped being a side channel.
For two years I've tracked traffic arriving at websites from generative AI platforms. It went from a rounding error to the fastest-growing acquisition channel in the digital economy — and it converts better than the ones it's displacing.
+31%
AI-referred traffic converted 31% better than other traffic sources over the 2025 holiday season — nearly double the gap a year earlier.
+45%
More time spent on site by visitors arriving from generative AI sources, versus other traffic.
+13%
More pages viewed per visit — a more considered, research-led shopper.
46%
Of some retailers' website content isn't readable by machines — the gap I spend a lot of time explaining to brands.
Traffic from generative AI sources, year-over-year growth
Holiday season 2025 vs. 2024 · by industry · U.S.
Source: Adobe Analytics — AI traffic surges across industries, retail sees biggest gains, January 2026.
Selected press
On the record.
A working sample of coverage. Every card links to the original story.
Speaking, broadcast & podcasts
Where the research gets said out loud.
Published research & analysis
Bylines.
Reports and analysis I've authored for Adobe's blog and business publications.
About
Most data never becomes a decision. That gap is the job.
I'm Vivek Pandya, Director of Insights & Analytics at Adobe, based in San Francisco. I lead Adobe's consumer intelligence strategy across ecommerce, pricing, travel and emerging technologies, with an eight-person multidisciplinary team.
Day to day, that means directing the strategy, methodology governance and launch cadence for the Adobe Digital Economy Index and Adobe's flagship holiday retail reports. I built the production system that carries a finding from research intake through prioritization, QA, narrative development and executive review to publication.
The other half of the role is public. I'm Adobe's spokesperson on consumer behavior, ecommerce, pricing and the digital economy — work that has run in the Washington Post, CNBC, Forbes, Fortune, Axios, TechCrunch, ABC News and Retail Dive, plus television, podcasts, webinars and the Adobe Summit stage.
The method was built well before Adobe. At E.&J. Gallo I ran marketing measurement for brands like Barefoot Wine and Apothic, proving what advertising actually did to sales. At VMware I led data science, where predictive models I built lifted qualified lead conversion more than fortyfold and an in-house paid search system I designed served the global product line. Earlier still, I launched overseas brands into the US market at Assurant. I hold an M.S. in Predictive Analytics from Northwestern and a B.B.A. from Georgia State.
Education
Northwestern UniversityM.S., Predictive Analytics & Data Science
Georgia State UniversityB.B.A., Marketing — J. Mack Robinson College of Business
Notable
U.S. Bureau of Economic AnalysisPresented the Adobe Digital Economy Index to the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, June 2020.
Adobe Digital Economy IndexOwns strategy, methodology governance and launch cadence for Adobe's flagship index of the online economy.
Adobe SummitFeatured speaker, 2025 and 2026 — customer experience and AI trends.
Toolkit
SQLPythonRPredictive modelingStatistical analysisTableauPower BIDatabricksSASSPSSMATLABAdobe AnalyticsSalesforceMarket mix modelingExecutive comms
Get in touch
Working on a story, a stage,
or a hard question about consumers?
I'm available for media commentary, keynote and panel appearances, executive briefings, and advisory conversations on consumer intelligence and AI-driven commerce.
San Francisco, CA · Typically responds within one business day
© 2026 Vivek Pandya. Views are my own.