Small Businesses Struggle to Keep Up with Rising Customer Expectations
The shopping experience has undergone a significant shift, and businesses are struggling to keep up. According to Salesforce's State of Commerce Report, shoppers are increasingly using AI chatbots to find products, with agentic search growing by 200% year-over-year.
This means that businesses need to ensure their product catalogs are readable by AI, not just humans. A clean and structured customer relationship management (CRM) system connected to commerce data is essential for an AI assistant to surface accurate details about a business.
Customer expectations are rising faster than most teams can keep up, with 86% of commerce leaders saying that AI has raised the bar. Only 28% of commerce organizations currently use agentic AI, but 44% plan to adopt it within six months.
The report also highlights the importance of unified data for small businesses. Fragmented data is holding SMBs back, with 40% reporting slow or ineffective responses to customer issues and 39% struggling to measure the impact of their commerce investments.