Retailers Rush to Adopt Agentic AI Search as Customer Expectations Soar

Retailers are rapidly adopting agentic AI search technology to enhance their customers' shopping experience. According to Salesforce's fourth edition State of Commerce report, use of agentic AI search as the first step in the shopping journey has grown 200% year over year.

Eighty-six percent of e-commerce executives surveyed say that AI is raising the bar for customer expectations. In response, retailers have taken several steps to improve their product content and adapt to conversational queries.

The most common actions taken by retailers include improving product content quality (43%), creating or optimizing content for conversational and question-based queries (42%), and submitting data feeds to AI search platforms (39%).

While only 28% of e-commerce executive respondents are currently using agentic AI, 44% expect to use the technology within six months and 21% expect to use it within two years.