Salesforce found that 86% of commerce professionals believe AI is raising customer expectations, while 61% said meeting those expectations has become more difficult. At the same time, 71% reported that AI is already a core part of their commerce operations.
Many organizations have shifted beyond experimentation. The report found that 35% of businesses using agentic AI are now focused on expanding production deployments rather than testing proofs of concept. The most common applications include autonomous customer service resolution, AI shopping assistants, autonomous replenishment purchasing, fraud detection and decision-making, and merchandising optimization.
Despite growing adoption, many companies continue to face operational hurdles. More than six in ten commerce leaders identified poor data integration, the absence of a defined AI strategy, and low-quality data as major obstacles to scaling AI initiatives. Security, organizational AI skills, and change management were also cited as significant challenges.
Salesforce reported that businesses already using AI agents are seeing measurable results. Business-to-business organizations listed revenue growth, higher employee productivity, and improved organizational efficiency among the leading outcomes, alongside gains in customer satisfaction, loyalty, and personalized experiences. However, only 32% of commerce leaders said their organizations have fully established AI success metrics and key performance indicators.
The report also points to increasing automation across business purchasing workflows. Nearly seven in ten B2B organizations reported positive results from automation, while more than half of common buying activities—including browsing products, configuring purchases, placing orders, tracking shipments, managing reorders, and accessing contract pricing—are now handled primarily through AI agents.
Salesforce identified fragmented customer data as one of the largest barriers to broader AI adoption. Only 27% of commerce organizations said customer information is fully unified across sales, marketing, service, and commerce teams. As a result, businesses continue to struggle with inconsistent customer records, disconnected shopping experiences, slower issue resolution, and missed opportunities for personalization and additional sales.
To address those issues, many organizations are expanding their technology stacks. Commerce leaders said they are investing most heavily in AI-powered personalization, order management systems, and content management platforms to strengthen AI capabilities and improve integration across existing systems.
Consumer behavior is changing alongside these enterprise investments. Salesforce found that shoppers are increasingly using AI assistants and large language models to research products before making purchasing decisions. Nearly four out of five organizations reported increased traffic originating from LLM-powered search, while consumer use of AI assistants as the first stop in the shopping journey increased by 200% between 2025 and 2026.
Looking ahead, nearly nine in ten commerce professionals said AI search will become essential for product discovery within the next year. To improve visibility in AI-driven search experiences, businesses are focusing on improving product information, creating content optimized for conversational queries, and submitting structured data feeds to AI search platforms.
The report concludes that commerce organizations preparing for increasingly autonomous shopping experiences will need to combine AI deployment with stronger data management and system integration. As AI agents take on a larger role in product discovery and purchasing, Salesforce argues that unified customer data and production-scale AI deployments will become increasingly important for businesses adapting to changing consumer expectations.
This analysis is based on reporting from ZDNET.
Image courtesy of Sebastien DePont.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
