Salesforce report: shopping journeys increasingly start in AI chats

What happened?

Salesforce released the fourth edition of its State of Commerce report, drawing on surveys of 3,450 commerce professionals and 4,690 consumers plus behavioral data from more than 1.5 billion shoppers. The company reports that use of agentic search as the first step in the shopping journey grew 200 percent year over year, and that traffic referred to commerce sites from AI chats grew between 150 and 428 percent in every quarter measured. Consumers reported discovering products through traditional search 15 percent less often over the same period.

Why does it matter?

The report covers retail, but the behavior it measures is the same one that determines whether anyone finds your organization: people increasingly start with a question to an AI rather than a search box, and they arrive with an opinion already formed. Salesforce also found that 86 percent of commerce leaders expect large language models to be essential to discovery within the next year. This is data from a single vendor, so treat the direction as the finding rather than the exact numbers.

Should I do anything?

Nothing structural yet. This is one more data point confirming a shift you are already working with, not a new playbook. If you want a quick pulse check, ask an AI assistant the one question your organization most needs to be the answer to, and note whether you are mentioned at all. If the pattern here ever contradicts something you are doing, that is worth a closer look; otherwise file it as evidence, not instruction.

Learn more

• Salesforce newsroom: the key findings
• The full State of Commerce report
• Our guide: what makes content citation-worthy