Salesforce: Retailers respond to agentic AI search growth – here’s how
Consumers are rapidly increasing their use of next-gen artificial intelligence to search for products, and retailers are taking notice.
Use of agentic AI search as the first step in the shopping journey has grown 200% year over year and 86% of e-commerce executives surveyed as part of the Salesforce fourth edition State of Commerce report say AI is raising the bar for customer expectations.
In response, e-commerce executive respondents have taken the following steps:
- Improved product content quality (43%)
- Created or optimized content for conversational and question-based queries (42%)
- Submitted data feeds to AI search platforms (39%)
- Optimized product descriptions for natural language (39%)
- Worked to increase presence in third-party sources (38%)
- Implemented structured product data/semantic tagging (36%)
- Partnered with AI platforms for product syndication (35%)
- Monitored brand mentions in large language model (LLM) responses (35%)
Interestingly, no respondents said they had not taken any action yet.
[READ MORE: Retailers need to optimize for AI search– here’s how]
Retail agentic AI adoption climbs
Only 28% of e-commerce executive respondents are currently using agentic AI. However, 44% expect to use the technology within six months and 21% expect to use it within two years. Only 7% of surveyed e-commerce executives expect to wait more than two years.
For respondents using agentic AI this year, primary focus areas include:
- Scaling AI across functions or teams (35%)
- Deploying AI in a limited number of use cases or workflows (26%)
- Optimizing performance or ROI (19%)
- Building foundations (16%)
Other findings
- Close to nine-in-10 (86%) e-commerce respondents say their teams are being asked to meet that bar with less.
- 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.
- Between August 2025 and May 2026, the rate of consumer respondents 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%.
“AI is remaking commerce from both directions,” said Caila Schwartz, head of agentic commerce shopper insights, Salesforce. “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.”
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 the first quarters of 2024 and 2026, as well as a survey of 4,689 consumers shoppers across eight countries from May 12–18, 2026.
