As Christmas in July approaches, Salesforce has started thinking about the real holiday season.
Every year, the company puts forth projections about the incoming holiday season—and this year, its hallmark theme is discovery. That’s because emerging technologies, paired with changing consumer spending habits and interests, is bringing about a new journey for product discovery.
Consumer journeys now include AI
Salesforce data shows that shopping aided by artificial intelligence could be a major trend for holiday 2025. The technology giant projects that, this holiday season, AI will influence $260 billion worth of online sales and $1.6 trillion in in-store sales.
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Salesforce, which takes periodic consumer pulses, found that nearly four in 10 shoppers use an AI chatbot during their shopping journeys; about 5 percent of shoppers now begin their product discovery with publicly available large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT’s shopping feature. One in 10 Gen Z shoppers starts their journey with an LLM.
Already, nearly half—44 percent—of consumers said they trust AI-generated, personalized product recommendations. Caila Schwartz, director, consumer strategy & insights for Salesforce, said AI-assisted search is redefining the way consumers view commerce.
“In our behavioral data, we see that LLM-generated traffic referrals to e-commerce websites convert very, very well—much better than social, and pretty much on par with more established and traditional traffic sources,” she said. “We know these are tools that consumers not only are leaning into, but [that] they trust and are buying from.”
While agentic AI—which is meant to autonomously complete specific tasks—has been tossed around as a probable next step for consumer-facing technology, it’s not widely adopted in the industry today. Schwartz said she expects AI shopping agents could be the next frontier of e-commerce, and consumers’ use of LLMs is teeing up agentic’s potential future.
“The expectations that shoppers are building based off their experience with these LLMs will transform into how they expect to interact with the brand themselves, and the retailer themselves,” she said. “Shoppers will be leaning into…AI agents, brand-owned and retail-owned agents, because their expectation for that personalized, high-touch, white-glove type of journey is going to extend.”
In the consumer context, that could mean asking an agent to purchase a gift on their behalf, or enlisting an agent to monitor the price of a high-ticket item leading up to holiday season and Cyber Week.
Salesforce’s AI projections don’t end with consumer behavior. The technology giant projects that agentic AI will help move the needle inside brands and retailers’ own offices. It projects that 35 percent of all retailers will use agentic AI to amp employees’ day-to-day work during the holiday season. While Schwartz noted that she expects customer service to be impacted by AI agents, she said Salesforce continues to monitor other business functions that could latch on to the burgeoning technology.
In-store transactions are still popular—especially with young consumers
For all Salesforce’s discussion about emerging technologies, the store is still expected to reign supreme for holiday 2025 shopping; just over half of consumers said, when shopping on Black Friday, they prefer in-store shopping, up 20 percentage points from 2024’s figure of 31 percent.
Gen Z shoppers, who are often written off as digital natives, led the pack on in-store Black Friday hunting, with 65 percent of shoppers noting they prefer to shop in stores on Cyber Week. That, they report, is because the product is immediately in their hands, they prefer the experience of being in a store and they feel that discovery is stronger in the store.
Salesforce projects that for every $1 a Gen Z consumer spends digitally, they will spend an additional $3 in stores during holiday 2025. That means brands and retailers need to find a way to further perpetuate unified commerce—and bring emerging technologies under the store umbrella, Salesforce contends.
“Being able to unlock [experiences] across channels, unlock data, to unify that data across those channels so that the brands and retailers can create a consistent and personalized experience even when they’re in store, is really going to be the opportunity moving forward, especially as these younger generations gain more buying power,” Schwartz said.
Value hasn’t disappeared, either
Consumers continue to place an onus on value—Salesforce’s theme for holiday 2024—in 2025; that’s especially true among U.S. consumers, nearly three in 10 of whom indicated that their personal financial situation has declined over the last six months.
A major portion of the reason that shoppers continue to seek out value comes from uncertainty over U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff tumult, which has seen about one-third of American consumers frontloading purchases before prices increase and more than 40 percent of U.S. shoppers buying only what they need.
Salesforce expects that the overall discount rate for holiday 2025 will drop by 2 percent compared with 2024, which could see the one-quarter of U.S. consumers who said they’re holding off on large splurge purchases waiting until Cyber Week to purchase high-ticket items this year.
Consumers’ focus on value could also be driving resale forward; one in five consumers plan to purchase secondhand goods because of tariffs, and nearly half of U.S. consumers say they will gift a secondhand item this year. Salesforce projects resale will see a consumer spend of $64 billion for the holiday season.
Unlike 2024, when players like Shein and Temu dominated holiday, consumers seem to be hyper focused on three key facets when it comes to loyalty: free delivery, lower prices and better product quality.
“We haven’t seen product quality land in the top three of this list since around the 2021-2022 era, when consumers had a lot higher buying power, the economy just looked a lot different. Last year, we know that product quality was very low on the list, especially with the rise of these discount and value brands like Temu and Shein,” she said.
