Shopping’s New First Step: Agentic Search Grows 200% as Purchase Journeys Start in AI Chats

More shoppers now start with a question to an AI - in a large language model (LLM) conversation or in an AI assistant on a retailer's own site. Use of agentic search as the first step in the shopping journey grew 200% year over year, according to Salesforce's Fourth Edition State of Commerce report, which draws from surveys of 3,450 commerce professionals and 4,690 consumers, plus behavioral data from more than 1.5 billion global shoppers.

Businesses are feeling the squeeze from both directions. Eighty-six percent of commerce leaders say AI is raising the bar for customer expectations - and their teams are being asked to meet that bar with less. Against that backdrop, implementing or expanding AI now ranks as commerce leaders' #1 priority for the year ahead. It's also their #1 anticipated challenge.

"AI is remaking commerce from both directions. Customers are discovering products in places brands don't control - AI assistants, social feeds, delivery apps - and expecting the same personalized experience everywhere they go. At the same time, AI is changing how commerce teams themselves work: how they merchandise, how they fulfill, how they scale. The difference is speed. A customer can adopt AI overnight. A business has more to get right: trusted data, connected systems, teams ready to use them. The ones getting that right now are the ones that will keep pace."

- Caila Schwartz, Head of Agentic Commerce Shopper Insights, Salesforce

Dig deeper

AI is rewriting product discovery - and it's happening off brand-owned properties

The clearest behavioral signal: actual activity from 1.5 billion shoppers across global commerce sites. Traffic referred from AI chats grew between 150% and 428% year over year in every quarter measured, while overall traffic grew in the single to low double digits.

Consumers tell the same story. Between August 2025 and May 2026, the rate of shoppers discovering products through brand-owned properties fell 7% and traditional search fell 15%, while the rate of consumers choosing new channels - AI assistants, social media AI, delivery apps - grew 38%.

Commerce leaders see where this is heading: 86% agree that LLMs will be essential to product discovery within the next year. Organizations are already responding. The most common actions are improving product content quality, optimizing content for conversational queries, submitting data feeds to AI search platforms, and optimizing product descriptions for natural language - the kind that surfaces when a shopper asks an AI to "find me a waterproof hiking boot under $150." The shift is playing out first in discovery - where the journey begins - even as fully autonomous purchasing remains early.

"Customers aren't starting with 10 blue links anymore - they're asking an AI what to buy, and by the time they reach your site, they've already formed an opinion. If you aren't part of that first conversation, you're invisible before the journey even begins." - Caila Schwartz, Head of Agentic Commerce Shopper Insights, Salesforce

Agentic AI adoption is climbing - and adopters are scaling fast

Fewer than a third of organizations say they currently use agentic AI, but the shift is underway. Nearly half of non-adopters plan to deploy within the next six months, and 71% of respondents agree that scaling across channels isn't viable without AI.

Among organizations already using agentic AI, the experimental phase is over. Just 4% say they're still primarily piloting use cases, while the largest share are scaling AI across functions and teams - from service and IT to merchandising.

Adopters also report measurable improvements. Customer satisfaction leads, followed closely by personalization, development velocity, operational efficiency, and employee productivity.

One finding cuts against the momentum: only 32% of organizations have fully defined AI success metrics and KPIs. Organizations are reporting wins before agreeing on what winning means - and without defined metrics, it's difficult to know which investments are driving results and where to double down.

Inside organizations, complexity is compounding

Part of the reason: The scaling push is landing on infrastructure that was already strained. More vendors, fragmented customer data, and channels that don't talk to each other mean commerce teams are being asked to deploy AI on top of systems that already struggle to work together.

• Seventy-eight percent of commerce leaders say their vendor count has grown over the past two years.
• Only 27% of organizations say their customer data is fully unified across sales, service, marketing, and commerce.
  • Among those with fragmented data views, 40% admit to slow or ineffective responses to customer issues; 39% struggle to measure the impact of their commerce investments; and another 39% say they pay a high cost to maintain disconnected systems.
• Omni-channel breakdowns are near-universal: Just 2% of multichannel organizations report no significant failure points. The most common: inconsistent pricing and promotions (41%) and inventory not synchronized in real time (40%).

The store makes the same point in miniature. Even in physical retail - still the top holiday shopping destination for 77% of consumers - the journey is digital: 79% of shoppers use their phones while shopping in store, and 12% ask an AI assistant for purchasing advice in the aisle. Customers experience every channel as one brand; 88% of B2C respondents agree customers expect the same personalization in store as online.

The organizations that unified their data report the payoff

Among organizations that have moved toward data unification, the most commonly reported benefits are directly tied to growth: better alignment between sales, marketing, and commerce teams; improved AI and automation outcomes; and improved customer retention and loyalty.

"The organizations pulling ahead aren't the ones deploying the most AI - they're the ones using AI adoption as the reason to finally unify their data and define what success looks like. Consumers have already made their choice about AI. The foundation work is how businesses catch up." - Caila Schwartz, Head of Agentic Commerce Shopper Insights, Salesforce

Explore further

• Read the full State of Commerce report
• Turn Salesforce's commerce predictions into your holiday success
• Learn more about our latest innovations for Agentforce Commerce
• Learn how to prepare your site for LLM-powered search

Methodology

Data in this report are from a double-anonymous survey conducted April 10-June 4, 2026. The survey generated 3,450 responses from commerce professionals across 20 countries and 13 industries.

These findings are supplemented by a Salesforce analysis of platform shopping behavior from more than 1.5 billion global shoppers across 37 countries between Q1 2024 and Q1 2026, as well as a consumer survey of 4,689 consumers shoppers across eight countries from May 12-18, 2026. For more demographic information, please refer to the report.