New Salesforce research finds 91% of Australian commerce leaders say AI is reshaping what customers expect, and few feel ready.
More shoppers are now starting their purchase journey with a question to an AI, whether that’s a conversation with a large language model or an assistant built into a retailer’s own site. According to Salesforce’s report, the use of agentic search as the first step in the shopping journey grew 200 per cent year on year globally.
The report draws on a survey of 3,450 commerce professionals, including 250 across Australia and New Zealand, supplemented by a separate survey of 4,690 consumers and behavioural data from more than 1.5 billion global shoppers.
Salesforce’s data shows businesses are being squeezed from two directions at once. Ninety one per cent of commerce leaders in Australia and 84 per cent in New Zealand say AI is raising the bar for customer expectations, while their teams are being asked to meet that bar with fewer resources. Implementing or expanding AI now ranks as commerce leaders’ top priority for the year ahead, according to the report. It is also their top anticipated challenge.
Caila Schwartz, Director of Industry Insights at Salesforce, said the shift is playing out on two fronts at once.
“AI is remaking commerce from both directions. Customers are discovering products in places brands don’t control, AI assistants, social feeds, delivery apps, and expecting the same personalised experience everywhere they go. At the same time, AI is changing how commerce teams themselves work: how they merchandise, how they fulfil, how they scale. The difference is speed. A customer can adopt AI overnight. A business has more to get right: trusted data, connected systems, teams ready to use them. The ones getting that right now are the ones that will keep pace.”
Off Brand-Owned Channels
Salesforce’s behavioural data offers one of the clearest signals in the report. Traffic referred from AI chats grew between 150 per cent and 428 per cent year on year in every quarter measured, while overall site traffic grew only in the single to low double digits.
Consumer survey responses point in the same direction. Between August 2025 and May 2026, the report found the rate of shoppers discovering products through brand-owned properties fell 7 per cent and traditional search fell 15 per cent, while the rate of consumers using newer channels, including AI assistants, social media AI and delivery apps, grew 38 per cent.
Commerce leaders across Australia and New Zealand appear to see this shift coming. Ninety one per cent in Australia and 84 per cent in New Zealand agree that large language models will be essential to product discovery within the next year, according to the report.
Australian organisations are already adjusting. The most common responses, per Salesforce’s findings, are improving product content quality (43 per cent), optimising content for conversational queries (42 per cent), submitting data feeds to AI search platforms (40 per cent) and optimising product descriptions for natural language (42 per cent). That last change means writing descriptions closer to how a shopper might ask an AI assistant to find, for example, a waterproof hiking boot under $150.
Timothy Waters, RVP at Salesforce, said the businesses adapting fastest are treating AI as part of the sales channel rather than an afterthought.
“Australian shoppers have already moved on; they’re asking an AI what to buy before they ever land on a retailer’s site. We’re seeing this play out across ANZ and the businesses winning right now aren’t chasing the AI conversation after the fact, they’re building the agents that take part in it. That’s the shift from pilot to production we’re seeing across commerce.”
Adoption Outpaces Readiness
Fewer than a third, 24 per cent, of Australian organisations surveyed say they currently use agentic AI. But Salesforce’s data suggests that is about to change quickly. More than half of Australian non-adopters (54 per cent) and half of those in New Zealand plan to deploy within the next six months, and 80 per cent of Australian respondents agree that scaling across channels is not viable without AI.
Among organisations already using agentic AI, the experimental phase appears to be ending. Just 6 per cent of Australian leaders say they are still primarily piloting use cases, while the largest share, 24 per cent, are scaling AI across functions and teams, spanning service, IT and merchandising.
Adopters report measurable gains. Customer satisfaction leads the list of improvements, followed by personalisation, development velocity, operational efficiency and employee productivity, according to the report.
One finding cuts against that momentum. Only 32 per cent of organisations globally have fully defined AI success metrics and KPIs. In practice, that means many businesses are reporting wins before they have agreed on what winning actually looks like, making it harder to know which investments are paying off and where to focus next.
Fragmented Data, Real Costs
Much of the pressure comes down to infrastructure that was already stretched before AI entered the picture. More vendors, fragmented customer data and channels that do not talk to each other mean commerce teams are being asked to layer AI on top of systems that already struggle to work together.
Eighty per cent of Australian commerce leaders and 88 per cent of those in New Zealand say their vendor count has grown over the past two years, Salesforce’s report found.
Only 24 per cent of Australian organisations say their customer data is fully unified across sales, service, marketing and commerce, though New Zealand organisations report slightly better results at 32 per cent.
Among Australian organisations with fragmented data, 49 per cent admit to slow or ineffective responses to customer issues, 43 per cent struggle to measure the impact of their commerce investments, and 39 per cent say they pay a high cost maintaining disconnected systems.
Breakdowns in omnichannel operations are near universal. None of the Australian multichannel organisations surveyed reported having no significant failure points. The most common issues were inventory not synchronised in real time (46 per cent) and inconsistent pricing and promotions (38 per cent).
Physical retail shows the same pattern in miniature. Even though stores remain the top holiday shopping destination for 77 per cent of consumers, the report found 79 per cent of shoppers use their phones while shopping in store, and 12 per cent ask an AI assistant for purchasing advice in the aisle. Eighty eight per cent of business to consumer respondents agree that customers expect the same personalisation in store as they do online.
Unified Data Pays Off
Among the 43 per cent of Australian organisations that have moved toward unifying their data, the most commonly reported benefits are tied directly to growth: better alignment between sales, marketing and commerce teams, improved AI and automation outcomes, and stronger customer retention and loyalty.
“It’s not the businesses running the most AI experiments that are pulling ahead, it’s the ones that unified their data first,” Waters said. “With less than a quarter of Australian organisations saying their customer data is fully connected, that’s the real opportunity sitting in front of most commerce teams right now, and it’s exactly where we’re helping them start.”
For Andrew Low, Chief Executive Officer at trans-Tasman coffee roastery Coffee Supreme, the findings echoed his own company’s experience unifying its data before rolling out AI tools.
“You can’t scale AI on top of fragmented systems. For us, this has meant unifying our data before implementing agents across the business, to ensure we meet rising customer expectations head-on. Consumers can’t or won’t distinguish between channels, they just expect us to know them, whether they’re buying a bag of beans over the counter, as a cafe owner, or online. Unifying our data is why we can now deliver that same experience everywhere Coffee Supreme shows up.”
Low said the change came from connecting existing systems rather than adding new ones on top.
“The fix wasn’t about adding another platform on top, but by connecting what we already have. That’s exactly what MuleSoft and Data 360 did for us, they turned scattered systems into one system of context we can actually build agents on. By the end of this year, we expect to have an agent-augmented customer experience across Australia and New Zealand.”
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Coffee Supreme’s experience reflects one customer’s use of Salesforce’s own tools and is not independently verified as a general outcome for SMEs adopting similar systems.
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