AI chats are becoming the new starting point for online shopping

What happened

For years, online retail has been organised around a simple assumption: the customer journey begins on a search engine, marketplace, brand website, or app. That assumption is starting to look dated. Salesforce is a customer relationship management and cloud computing company based in Salesforce Tower, and its products and services include customer data platforms.

A new Salesforce report suggests that more shoppers are now beginning with a question to an AI system, whether through ChatGPT-style assistants built on […] The post AI chats are becoming the new starting point for online shopping appeared first on e27 . A new Salesforce report suggests that more shoppers are now beginning with a question to an AI system, whether through ChatGPT-style assistants built on large language model (the kind of AI system trained on text to produce text)s, an AI tool embedded on a retailer’s website, or a conversational interface inside another platform. According to the fourth edition of Salesforce’s State of Commerce report, the use of agentic (AI that carries out multi-step tasks rather than answering one question) search as the first step in the shopping journey grew 200 per cent year on year.