Hi Team!
I get a morning brief from Instinct every day and another EOD closer. It might be my favorite super-simple AI use case since I’ve gone back to simple (insert bell curve meme).
With BFCM coming, I keep thinking about the work that never makes the planning deck: chasing final creative, checking whether a discount code applies, and figuring out what the 3PL promised last Tuesday.
There's a surprising amount of admin work that needs to get done.
So here are ten jobs I'd hand Instinct, with the exact prompts I'd use and what I'd connect. The daily brief is something I already use. The others are jobs I'd test, with a human checking anything that affects customers or checkout.
Let's get into it.
This week’s newsie is brought to you by my friends at Horatio!
Is your holiday chatbot stuck in the “Bot Trap”?
A lot of ecommerce brands rolled out shiny new AI bots for the holidays, and with BFCM two weeks out, the cracks are already starting to show.
Here’s how it goes: a shopper asks about a bundle that’s missing an item, or an order that showed up in two boxes instead of one. The bot doesn’t get it, loops them back to the same three answers, and by the time a real person steps in, a simple fix has turned into a customer who’s DONE with you (and probably telling their friends about it).
The answer isn’t ripping out the bot. It’s giving it a safety net: real humans ready to catch the messy, high-stakes tickets before the bot fumbles them.
I teamed up with Horatio to put together a free playbook on exactly that, covering which tickets to keep away from your bot, how to hand off to a human without making customers start from scratch, and how to keep CSAT intact while volume spikes.
Grab it now while there’s still time to put it to work before the rush.
If you’d like to try this yourself, here’s an invite to Instinct if you need one.
1. Start with what broke last year
I'd start with last year's fires. No point making another immaculate BFCM planning deck while the same broken discount code is waiting to happen again.
Text your Instinct: "Scan my email and Slack from November and December 2025 for BFCM problems: broken codes, stockouts, shipping delays and escalations. Group repeats, rank the ten biggest issues, and link the original threads."
Connect first: email and Slack.
2. Get a 7 a.m. brief before the inbox catches fire
From the week before Black Friday through Cyber Monday, I'd want the brief I already use, tuned to the small issues about to become expensive.
Text your Instinct: "From November 20 through Cyber Monday, send me a 7 a.m. brief from my email, Slack and calendar: overnight escalations, repeated complaints, blockers and today's deadlines. Link the source for anything urgent."
Connect first: email, Slack and calendar.
3. Keep an eye on your competitors
Pick five competitors. I want the offer changes and stacking codes, ideally before the group chat starts panicking.
Text your Instinct: "Check [five competitor URLs] every day through Cyber Monday. Report only changes to discounts, bundles, shipping thresholds or stacking codes, with links. If nothing changed, don't message me."
Connect first: Just your email for promo emails.
4. Keep track of who owes you what
An agency says the assets are coming Friday. The 3PL is checking on the cutoff. Nobody seems entirely sure who owns the follow-up. I'd want the outstanding list before one of those promises becomes my problem.
Text your Instinct: "Scan my sent emails from the last 60 days. List outstanding vendor and agency deliverables, with owner, due date and a link to the thread. Flag the three most urgent each morning."
Connect first: email. Add Slack if that's where the promises were made.
5. Write the support macros while everyone is still sane
You know what's coming: the code doesn't work, where's my order, can I change the address, will it arrive by the 24th, and how do I return a gift.
Text your Instinct: "Using last year's tickets and our current policies, draft replies and help-center answers for our five most common BFCM questions. Flag policy gaps. Draft only, don't send anything."
Connect first: A helpdesk export, or email if tickets live there, plus your current policies.
6. Check your own site like a customer
I'd have it test the actual sale path in a fresh browser session. The promotional email is no use if the discount doesn't apply to the product it links to.
Text your Instinct: "Open [PDP], add [SKU] to cart, apply [CODE], and check the discount and shipping promise. Screenshot anything wrong. Stop before payment and flag anything you couldn't test."
Connect first: Store URL, promo codes and expected shipping terms.
7. Catch the promises that contradict each other
The campaign says delivery by the 24th. The FAQ says the 19th. The support macro says three to five business days. Good luck to whoever owns the inbox.
Text your Instinct: "Compare [campaign drafts], [site URLs], [FAQ] and [support macros] for contradictory discounts, shipping dates, returns and subscription terms. Quote both versions and link the sources. Don't edit anything."
Connect first: Campaign drafts, site URLs, FAQs and macro exports.
8. Make someone read the carrier fine print
Holiday shipping dates, carrier exceptions, extended return windows. All the stuff everyone agrees matters and nobody wants to spend Tuesday afternoon reading.
Text your Instinct: "Find the published 2026 holiday cutoff dates for the carrier services we use, and compare the return windows of [three competitors]. Give me a one-page summary with source links, publication dates and exceptions."
Connect first: Public web. Give it your carriers, services and shipping regions.
9. Find out what customers keep asking
Your reviews, surveys and inbound tickets are full of unanswered buying questions. I'd rather find them before spending the BFCM acquisition budget.
Text your Instinct: "Review the attached survey and review exports plus 90 days of customer emails. Rank the ten most common pre-purchase questions, show how often each came up, and tell me which answers are missing from [PDP URLs]."
Connect first: Customer email, review and survey exports, and PDP URLs.
10. Book the January reality check
Book a first read for December 2, then 60-day and 90-day checks. I'd want to know who bought again, what discounts it took, and how much contribution margin was left.
Text your Instinct: "Put a BFCM review on my calendar for December 2, then 60-day and 90-day cohort reviews. In each invite, list second-order rate, contribution margin, refunds and repeat discount use. Compare first-time BFCM buyers with a relevant earlier cohort."
Connect first: Calendar. You'll still need the actual data.
The common thread is the boring work between teams: missing files, conflicting promises, questions nobody answered and follow-ups everyone assumed someone else owned. It's remarkable how much of the holiday rush is spent looking for information that already exists somewhere.
I'd still rather see a short list of things that look wrong than spend Thanksgiving week digging through forty-seven Slack threads trying to find them.
That's it for this week!
Any topics you'd like to see me cover in the future?
Just shoot me a DM or an email!
Cheers,
Eli 💛
