Shopping’s New First Step: Agentic Search Grows 200% as Purchase Journeys Start in AI Chats

• Agentic search is quickly becoming the first step in the purchase journey, growing 200% year over year. 
• Commerce teams are feeling the squeeze: 86% of leaders say AI is raising customer expectations, while 41% say meeting them is harder than ever.
• Business adoption trails consumer behavior: Just 28% of commerce organizations use agentic AI today, though another 52% plan to adopt it within the next six months.
• Adopters in APAC aren’t waiting: Only 5% are still focused on piloting, while 35% (the largest share) are prioritizing scaling across functions and teams.

Singapore, 30 September 2026: More shoppers now start with a question to an AI — in a large language model (LLM) conversation or in an AI assistant on a retailer’s own site. Use of agentic search as the first step in the shopping journey grew 200% year over year, according to Salesforce’s Fourth Edition State of Commerce report, which draws from surveys of 3,450 commerce professionals, 100 of whom are from Singapore. This data is supplemented by an additional survey of 4,690 consumers as well as behavioral data from more than 1.5 billion global shoppers.

Businesses are feeling the squeeze from both directions. Eighty-six percent of commerce leaders say AI is raising the bar for customer expectations — and their teams are being asked to meet that bar with less. Against that backdrop, implementing or expanding AI now ranks as commerce leaders’ #1 priority for the year ahead. It’s also their #1 anticipated challenge.

AI is changing how consumers find products — and it’s happening off brand-owned properties

The clearest behavioral signal: actual activity from 1.5 billion shoppers across global commerce sites. Traffic referred from AI chats grew between 150% and 428% year over year in every quarter measured, while overall traffic grew in the single to low double digits.

Consumers tell the same story. Between August 2025 and May 2026, the rate of shoppers discovering products through brand-owned properties fell 7%, and traditional search fell 15%, while the rate of consumers choosing new channels — AI assistants, social media AI, delivery apps — grew 38%.

Singapore commerce leaders see where this is heading: 82% agree that LLMs will be essential to product discovery within the next year. Organizations are already responding. The most common actions are improving product content quality (42%), optimizing content for conversational queries (40%), submitting data feeds to AI search platforms (39%), and optimizing product descriptions for natural language (38%). The shift is playing out first in discovery — where the journey begins — even as fully autonomous purchasing remains early.

Agentic AI adoption is climbing — and adopters are scaling fast

Fewer than a third (28%) of Singapore organizations say they currently use agentic AI, but the shift is underway. Over half (52%) of Singapore non-adopters plan to deploy within the next six months, and 65% of Singapore respondents agree that scaling across channels isn’t viable without AI.

Among organizations in APAC already using agentic AI, the experimental phase is over. Just 5% of APAC leaders say they’re still primarily piloting use cases, while the largest share (35%) are scaling AI across functions and teams — from service and IT to merchandising.

Adopters also report measurable improvements. Customer satisfaction leads, followed closely by personalization, operational efficiency, and employee productivity.

Inside organizations, complexity is compounding

The push to scale AI  is landing on infrastructure that was already strained. More vendors, fragmented customer data, and channels that don’t talk to each other mean commerce teams are being asked to deploy AI on top of systems that already struggle to work together.

• Eighty-one percent of Singapore commerce leaders say their vendor count has grown over the past two years.
• Only 25% of Singapore organizations say their customer data is fully unified across sales, service, marketing, and commerce.
  • Among those with fragmented data views, 36% admit to slow or ineffective responses to customer issues; 32% struggle to measure the impact of their commerce investments; and another 40% say they pay a high cost to maintain disconnected systems.
• Omni-channel breakdowns are near-universal: Just 2% of Singapore multichannel organizations report no significant failure points. The most common: inconsistent pricing and promotions (36%) and inventory not synchronized in real time (46%).

The store makes the same point in miniature. Even in physical retail — still the top holiday shopping destination for 77% of consumers — the journey is digital: 79% of shoppers use their phones while shopping in store, and 12% ask an AI assistant for purchasing advice in the aisle. Customers experience every channel as one brand; 86% of B2C respondents agree customers expect the same personalization in store as online.

The organizations that unified their data report the payoff

Among organizations that have moved toward data unification, the most commonly reported benefits are directly tied to growth: better alignment between sales, marketing, and commerce teams (44%); improved AI and automation outcomes (31%); and improved customer retention and loyalty (42%).

“AI is changing commerce on two fronts at once. Businesses are using it to reinvent customer experience — smarter service, sharper personalization, faster fulfillment. But the bigger shift is happening outside their control: customers are no longer starting their search on a brand’s website or a search bar, they’re starting it in an AI chat, a social feed, or a delivery app. This isn’t a future scenario, it’s happening now. Companies selling online and offline need to show up wherever discovery is happening — and that only works if their data is unified enough for AI to represent their products and brand accurately, everywhere customers land,” said Swatantra Kumar, Regional Vice President, Salesforce. 

Methodology

Data in this report are from a double-anonymous survey conducted April 10–June 4, 2026. The survey generated 3,450 responses from commerce professionals across 20 countries and 13 industries. 

These findings are supplemented by a Salesforce analysis of platform shopping behavior from more than 1.5 billion global shoppers across 37 countries between Q1 2024 and Q1 2026, as well as a consumer survey of 4,689 consumers shoppers across eight countries from May 12–18, 2026. For more demographic information, please refer to the report.