Remember the last time you started a shopping trip by opening a search engine and typing “best running shoes under $150”? That habit is fading fast. A lot of shoppers now open an AI chat first and just talk it through: “I need shoes for marathon training, wide fit, under $150, and I have flat feet.” The results feel closer to what they’d actually buy, and they got there with one question instead of twenty tabs.
Salesforce put hard numbers on that shift this morning. The fourth edition of its State of Commerce report, released September 30, found that agentic search (using an AI assistant as the first step of the shopping journey) grew 200% year over year. It’s a big sample, too: 3,450 commerce professionals (100 of them in Singapore), a consumer survey of 4,690 people, and behavioral data from more than 1.5 billion global shoppers.
The message from retailers? Expectations keep climbing. Eighty-six percent of commerce leaders say AI is raising customer expectations, and 41% say meeting them is harder than ever. Shoppers have tasted what a good AI concierge feels like, and they want it everywhere.
Consumers Moved First; Retailers Are Scrambling to Follow
Here’s the gap that defines this whole story. Only 28% of commerce organizations actually use agentic AI today. But another 52% plan to adopt within six months. Consumers have already changed their behavior; most retailers are still building the thing that serves it.
That’s a classic adoption lag, and it explains why this moment feels so charged. The shoppers are already in the chat. The stores are still figuring out how to be there.
In Asia-Pacific the picture is a little further along. Only 5% of adopters in APAC are still piloting; the largest share, 35%, are prioritizing scaling agentic AI across functions. Scaling, not experimenting. That’s worth noticing: it suggests the experimentation phase is quietly over in the region’s more aggressive markets, and the build-out phase has begun.
Why the Chat Became the Storefront
Think about what a search bar asks of you. Keywords. Filters. Sorting. Page after page of near-identical listings. An AI chat flips the relationship: you describe what you want in plain language, and it does the hunting.
This matters beyond convenience. A conversation is a richer signal than a keyword. When a shopper says “I want a gift for my dad who’s just getting into gardening and hates fiddly tools,” an agent can weigh intent, budget, and taste in a way that “gardening gifts men” never could. The winners in this shift won’t be the retailers with the most SKUs; they’ll be the ones whose AI actually understands what “not fiddly” means.
There’s a real succession happening here. The search bar was the front door of online shopping for twenty years. The chat window is applying for the job, and the +200% number is its résumé. Retail SEO as we know it (keywords, snippets, ranking for “best wireless earbuds”) is giving way to something new: making sure an AI assistant recommends you when a shopper asks.
What This Means If You Sell Things
Three practical takeaways from the report:
Your homepage might be a conversation now. If agentic search is the first step of the journey, the thing a shopper meets first may be an LLM interface, not your website. Retailers need to make their product catalogs legible to AI agents: clean product data, honest availability, prices an agent can trust. The store that feeds the chat well wins the sale.
Personalization is the expectation, not the feature. Eighty-six percent of leaders say AI is raising the bar, and customers can feel the difference between a generic chatbot and one that remembers their size, their budget, their last purchase. Investing in the data behind the chat matters more than the chat itself.
Start where your customers already are. The 52% planning adoption should take heart: the biggest risk isn’t moving too early, it’s the gap between consumer behavior and merchant readiness. Shoppers aren’t waiting for permission.
The broader tech backdrop makes this feel inevitable. AI is quietly rewiring how machines do physical and digital work alike: autonomous trucking routes are being planned by algorithms, robotaxis are multiplying across Texas. Agentic commerce is the same wave hitting the checkout button.
The Optimist’s Take
Strip away the jargon and this is a consumer-benefit story. Less friction. Fewer dead-end searches. Recommendations that understand context instead of just matching keywords. A shopper with specific needs, dietary restrictions, accessibility requirements, a tight budget, gets a personal shopper for free, one that never gets tired and never judges.
Is the technology perfect? Of course not. Agents still hallucinate prices and botch availability, and retailers will have a rough year learning to feed them clean data. But the direction is unmistakable. Two hundred percent growth doesn’t lie: the chat is the new front door of shopping, and it’s open.
