Salesforce, a global leader in Agentic CRM, published its fourth State of Commerce report, based on a survey of 3,450 professionals and 4,690 consumers, alongside behavioral data from more than 1.5 billion shoppers worldwide. The report shows that the market is at a turning point: 78% of organizations already use some form of artificial intelligence, and while less than a third currently use Agentic AI, nearly half plan to implement it within the next six months.
According to the findings, e-commerce traffic referred by AI tools grew between 150% and 428% year-over-year in every measured quarter. At the same time, the proportion of shoppers discovering products through traditional search dropped by 15%, while the proportion of consumers choosing new purchasing channels, such as AI assistants or apps, increased by 38%.
Eighty-six percent of retailers agree that large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini will become a main conduit for product discovery in the coming year.
"The customer journey no longer begins on traditional search engines; it begins in chat," explained Liran Shechter, VP of digital sales at Salesforce Israel. "By the time the customer arrives at your arena, AI has already done the filtering for them and made the decision. If you were not part of the answer the AI returned in the first instance, you became invisible. We are witnessing the next historic shift in digital commerce, from passive web searching to an active conversation with AI. The sharp rise in Agentic Search demonstrates that consumers expect to receive answers, recommendations, and actions in real time, not just a list of links."
The Infrastructure Gap and Organizational Challenge
In light of this change, many organizations are already working to adapt product content for natural language queries and AI search platforms. However, the report highlights operational hurdles: 78% of retailers report that their number of vendors has grown in the past two years, and only 27% of organizations say their customer data is fully unified across all functions.
Among those managing fragmented data, 40% admit to slow response times for customer issues, and 39% struggle to measure the impact of their commerce investments. In addition, only 32% of organizations have fully defined KPIs for AI success.