As the holidays approach, an increasing number of retailers—and consumers—seem to be cozying up to artificial intelligence.
Salesforce predicts that AI will influence 19 percent of global Cyber Week sales, up two percentage points from 2023’s figure of 17 percent.
Retail implementation of AI systems continues to increase, and the fact that nearly one-fifth of global e-commerce transactions could be driven, in some part, by the technology is significant, said Caila Schwartz, director of consumer insights and strategy for Salesforce.
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As a point of comparison, Salesforce data shows social media platforms drive one-tenth of e-commerce traffic and 2 to 3 percent of all orders, without much room for incremental growth. That both adoption and use of AI continue to grow year over year could be indicative of the allure of a more powerful, personalization-focused technology.
“This is having a much higher impact than social media, [even though] social media is a much more visible consumer platform,” Schwartz said.
Salesforce attributes the majority of that influence to product recommendations made by AI systems. In many cases, the systems that determine the items a site recommends to each individual consumer remain largely undetectable to the average shopper. But there’s room for new types of technology, like AI agents, which are more visible to consumers, to help grow the percentage of AI interactions driving sales, too.
“A lot of the growth we’re seeing…is coming from those newer technologies that are being implemented, so as more retailers enable these new AI technologies and experiences, this number will grow,” Schwartz explained.
AI-powered agents have only recently started to emerge in the retail space, and they differ from a run-of-the-mill chatbot; agents can automate tasks that a human would otherwise have to work on.
So, while a chatbot might be able to answer a question like, “What is this sweater made out of?” with relative accuracy, an agent might be able to help a consumer initiate the return process, find their most convenient return center and offer the most optimal refund option, all based on what it knows about a consumer’s prior purchases and habits. Agents can also offer consumers highly personalized product recommendations across a variety of channels, just as Amazon’s Rufus can do.
Second only to phone calls, online chat is consumers’ preferred way to contact customer service. Schwartz said agents can level up that experience, while also introducing customers to what agents have the ability to help them with. Three in ten consumers said they would use an AI agent if it allowed them to access faster service.
And even those who haven’t been convinced of AI’s merits in their customer experience may be benefitting from agents’ work unwittingly. Several technology providers have launched internally focused agents throughout the course of the year. That in mind, a human customer service agent may be able to ask their AI agent what product to recommend to a shopper when they call in for help on an existing order.
Salesforce’s data shows that retailers using AI agents in their customer service functions have seen engagement on their chat features grow at a rate twice as fast as their counterparts using traditional chatbots or other forms of technology for customer service. Schwartz said that’s indicative of where consumer preferences are heading.
“Consumers are leaning into AI agents for better and faster service,” Schwartz said. “[This is] an early indicator that agents are really able to take on higher case volume; they’re more efficient and they’re better able…to adequately serve the needs of the customer directly.”
One retail-specific problem agents might be best suited to conquer this holiday season is returns. Throughout October and early November, returns were up by 33 percent year on year, a trend that could cause retailers serious margin losses and customer dissatisfaction.
Schwartz said Salesforce is not yet sure why the return rate has increased so rapidly this year as compared with the same time period in 2023. In 2021 and 2022, returns also proved a major difficulty for global retailers—and at the time, Salesforce attributed it to consumers purchasing items, then returning them and re-buying after seeing a lower price during Cyber Week.
Whatever the reason for the returns, retailers know they’ll need to reduce the impact of the unwanted goods, both on their own bottom lines and on the environment. Schwartz said such a problem could be a viable one for an AI agent to tackle.
“[Retailers] are going to be trying to find creative ways to reduce that impact, and this is just another opportunity for AI and agents to not only streamline the return…process, but make it better and reduce costs,” she said.
