While marketers had long completed their holiday work and instead planned for the future, as consumers, we spent the heart of the holiday season locked into the shopping experiences from brands we engage with as we tried to find that perfect gift for our significant others or something suitable for the white elephant party we reluctantly accepted to attend.
And between talking with countless executives and my own experiences as an everyday consumer with friends and family to buy for, something became clear: AI is going to play a major role in ecommerce moving forward.
I’ve written and talked about AI plenty so far this year – as it pertains to the way we search and customer service – but not yet about what it could mean for the way we shop. So let’s do that here, because it’s already happening. In fact, we’re helping a client right now utilize Salesforce’s Agentforce platform to empower its sellers to better support their customers.
If there’s a theme for 2025, it’s that companies are trying to scale by getting more out of what they already have (whether that’s optimization within platforms, efficiency in workflows, etc.). Because while the demands and methods of engagement for consumers continue to rise higher, companies struggle to provide the resources and outputs needed to keep up.
All of these efforts by brands are done to make the customer journey as short (and simple) as possible. Companies are stretching themselves thin so that me as a consumer can be served up a relevant product recommendation, find it closest to me, and get it to my door in a quick and easy way. This is why organizations are going to need AI incorporated into their commerce solutions. Manually meeting my needs as a consumer takes so much time and effort that it eats into the ROI of converting me as a customer. But AI can keep those margins higher.
Thinking about your shopping habits this holiday season and the pain points that came up during those times. Brands have made it so clicking checkout is the easiest part of the entire process. If I buy 20 gifts this season, I might spend a combined 20 minutes completing transactions (perhaps less if my payment info is saved already).
That’s not the problem. What’s more challenging is the process of searching for the right products, making sure the details are correct, getting it from the warehouse to your door, and working with the company if anything goes wrong. And this is where AI can play a huge role moving forward. Because as mentioned above, this is where the journey shortens up.
So, what does this look like? Take formerly manual (and tedious) processes and have AI help. Have AI write product descriptions using insights to be more impactful and save your team time. Dynamic recommendations are also a good starting point. Let your tech stack take preference and behavioral data and serve up similar products based on those insights. That data can also help predict next steps and target consumers with relevant and actionable messages when they’re most ready to buy.
But the customer service and human element is where companies can start seeing major returns. As Studio Science’s Salesforce MVP Jarrod Kingston wrote a few months ago when Agentforce was announced, these tools can allow brands to offer personal shopper AI agents that provide personalized recommendations for people hitting your site. The auto-population of service answers and automation of tickets speeds up the response time in a period where customers may be on the verge of leaving.
There’s also a B2B component here. What if your sales reps can be an expert on each of your complicated sets of products thanks to AI enablement? Imagine how much faster you could grow.
Yes, there’s a case to be made just by looking at your balance sheet and the growth and opportunity compared to your costs. Reducing churn and completing more sales in the same timeframe looks great to a CFO or board. And why wouldn’t you want to do that as soon as possible?
But there’s also another sense of urgency here. At some point in the near future, these customer-facing AI solutions for commerce will become table stakes. And that’s when the returns dwindle. Remember how I said practically every company makes checkout a simple, couple-click process? What once was a game-changer is an expected commodity. Don’t wait until AI becomes a commodity before you get involved.
If you want to learn more about Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, check out our Agentforce page.
