AI-Powered Chatbots Drive Ecommerce Growth Amid Merchant Data Gaps
A growing number of shoppers are using AI-powered chatbots to initiate their online shopping journeys. According to Salesforce's fourth 'State of Commerce' report, traffic referred from AI chats rose between 150% and 428% year over year in every quarter measured from the first quarter of 2024 through the first quarter of 2026.
The company defines 'agentic search' as shoppers starting with a question in a large language model conversation or an AI assistant on a retailer's site. This type of search increased by 200% year over year, with 28% of commerce organizations already using agentic AI and 44% planning to adopt it within six months.
While many businesses are lagging behind in data readiness, with only 27% reporting fully unified customer data across sales, service, marketing, and commerce, the use of large language models is expected to become essential for product discovery within a year. Caila Schwartz, Salesforce's head of agentic commerce shopper insights, notes that 'A customer can adopt AI overnight. A business has more to get right: trusted data, connected systems, teams ready to use them.'