AI is becoming a major discovery channel: Consumers increasingly use AI assistants to find, compare, and evaluate products before visiting traditional commerce platforms.

AI traffic delivers commercial value: Businesses are seeing significant growth in AI-driven traffic, conversions, orders, and revenue, making AI an increasingly important commerce channel.

Trust will shape agentic commerce: Secure payments, accurate product data, transparency, privacy, and consumer control will become critical as AI moves closer to checkout.

A customer no longer needs to start a purchase on Google or a brand website. A simple request to an AI assistant can now lead to product ideas, price checks, comparisons, recommendations, and even checkout. This shift has moved AI from a support tool to a major part of the commerce journey. Salesforce reports that agentic search became the first step in the purchase journey 200% more often year over year. Its research covers 3,450 commerce professionals, 4,690 consumers, and more than 1.5 billion shoppers across 37 countries.

Consumer behavior shows how quickly this change has reached the market. NIQ found that 42% of consumers used at least one AI tool for shopping within the past month. The study also found that 17% used AI for product recommendations, while 10% used a voice assistant to purchase or reorder products. 

Another 10% used an AI shopping assistant , and 5% used a fully autonomous AI agent to place an order. These figures show that most consumers still use AI as a guide rather than hand over full control of their purchases.

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