What if your next major acquisition channel wasn't Google, Facebook, or TikTok, but a swarm of AI agents making purchases on behalf of millions of consumers? That future isn't a decade away—it's happening right now. Salesforce just revealed that traffic from AI assistants to retail sites has exploded by 119% year-over-year, and these agents are projected to drive 22% of all global orders this Cyber Week. This is not an incremental shift. It is a fundamental re-routing of the customer journey.

While Google and Amazon are launching AI agents to automate campaign management, Salesforce is playing a different game. With its new Agentforce Commerce capabilities, announced on November 17, 2025, Salesforce is building the infrastructure for brands to plug directly into the new agent-led economy. This isn't about optimizing your existing ads; it's about making your products discoverable, desirable, and purchasable on the AI platforms where your future customers are already shopping.

Our team analyzed Salesforce's announcement, dug into the data, and reviewed the underlying technology. The takeaway is clear: performance marketers who continue to focus exclusively on traditional search and social channels will miss one of the fastest-growing traffic sources in a generation. Here's what's happening, why it matters, and the specific actions you must take this week to prepare.

Agentforce Commerce is a suite of tools within Salesforce Commerce Cloud designed to connect brands with the burgeoning ecosystem of AI shopping agents. It's not a single agent but an infrastructure layer that allows merchants to syndicate their product catalogs, pricing, and checkout experiences to external AI platforms like ChatGPT, as well as deploy their own branded agents on their websites and apps.

Agentforce Commerce enables a new form of "agentic commerce," where AI assistants act as intermediaries between consumers and brands. Instead of a user searching on Google, they ask an AI assistant like ChatGPT, "Find me the best running shoes for under $150 for a marathon." The AI agent then browses the product catalogs of participating brands and presents the best options to the user, often with the ability to purchase directly within the chat interface.

The system is built on two key pillars. First, through the open-standard Agentic Commerce Protocol, brands can make their product catalogs available to third-party AI agents. A partnership with Stripe enables a seamless, one-click checkout experience directly within these AI channels. This means a customer could go from discovery to purchase inside ChatGPT without ever visiting your website. Second, brands can use Agentforce to create their own AI-powered "guided shopping" agents on their websites and mobile apps. These agents are trained on the company's product data, inventory, and customer information to provide personalized recommendations, answer complex FAQs, and guide users to checkout. For example, a customer on a clothing brand's website could ask, "I need an outfit for a wedding in Miami next month," and the agent would curate a selection of appropriate dresses, shoes, and accessories.

The jewelry brand Pandora is using Agentforce Commerce to automate routine customer inquiries like "Where is my order?" and provide AI-powered product recommendations. The results so far are a 10% lift in Net Promoter Score and a measurable increase in orders and traffic. Meanwhile, Pacsun is leveraging the upcoming ChatGPT integration to create shoppable experiences that resonate with its Gen Z and Gen Alpha audience, turning cultural moments into direct sales opportunities.

The rise of agentic commerce fundamentally alters the landscape for performance marketers in three critical ways.

The Emergence of a New Acquisition Channel: For two decades, performance marketing has revolved around mastering a few key platforms: Google Search, Facebook's social graph, and more recently, TikTok's algorithm. Agentic commerce introduces a new, powerful channel. The 119% year-over-year growth in traffic from AI assistants is not a fluke; it's the beginning of a major trend. Marketers who learn how to optimize their product data and content for discovery by AI agents will tap into a massive new stream of high-intent traffic. This isn't about buying ads on ChatGPT; it's about ensuring your products are the ones the agents recommend.

The Shift from Keyword Optimization to Data Optimization: SEO and SEM have trained marketers to think in terms of keywords and ad copy. Agentic commerce demands a new skill set: Product Data Optimization. AI agents don't just look at keywords; they analyze your entire product catalog, including images, descriptions, pricing, inventory levels, and customer reviews. The quality and richness of your product data will directly determine your visibility in this new ecosystem. Brands with clean, structured, and comprehensive product feeds will have a significant competitive advantage.

The Re-bundling of the Funnel: Traditional digital marketing separates the funnel into distinct stages: awareness through social ads, consideration through search ads, and conversion through website checkout. Agentic commerce collapses this funnel. A customer can go from discovery to purchase in a single, seamless conversation with an AI agent. This has profound implications for attribution, as the last click will often happen within the AI platform itself. Performance marketers will need to adapt their measurement strategies to account for these new, compressed customer journeys.

This is not a distant future. The core components of Agentforce Commerce are live now, and the most significant integrations are just around the corner. In Q4 2025, brands are already seeing a 119% YoY increase in traffic from existing AI assistants, and Agentforce Commerce is available for deploying owned agents and optimizing on-site experiences. In Q1 2026, the native integration with ChatGPT is expected to roll out, allowing brands to make their products directly shoppable within the world's most popular AI chatbot. In Q2 2026, as the Agentic Commerce Protocol gains wider adoption, more third-party AI platforms will be able to access brand product catalogs, creating a proliferation of new shopping channels. By the end of 2026, our prediction is that optimizing for AI agent discovery will become as critical for e-commerce brands as SEO and SEM are today. The competitive window to build an early advantage is the next 6-9 months.

This is not a "wait and see" moment. The brands that will win in the agentic era are the ones preparing now. Here are three specific actions you can take this week.

Audit Your Product Data Feed: Pull your complete product feed and evaluate it against the criteria an AI agent would use. Is every product accurately categorized? Are your descriptions detailed and persuasive? Are your images high-quality and tagged with relevant metadata? Is your inventory data updated in real-time? This audit will take approximately four hours, and the expected outcome is that you will identify the gaps in your product data that will make you invisible to AI shopping agents. A clean, comprehensive product feed is the price of admission to the agentic commerce ecosystem. Without it, you don't exist.

Map Your Customer's Conversational Journey: Go through your top 5-10 customer inquiry types, such as "Do you ship to Canada?", "What's your return policy?", or "Which of these is best for sensitive skin?" Now, imagine a customer asking an AI agent these questions. Does your website content provide clear, concise answers that an agent can easily parse and relay? This exercise will take approximately three hours, and the expected outcome is that you will identify where your on-site content fails to meet the needs of conversational commerce. AI agents rely on the content you provide. If your answers are buried in long paragraphs or confusing jargon, the agent will recommend a competitor with clearer information.

Experiment with an On-Site Guided Shopping Agent: While a full Agentforce implementation takes time, you can start small. Use a tool like a free chatbot builder to create a simple guided shopping experience for one of your product categories. The goal is not to build a perfect AI, but to start thinking about how to structure conversations and present products in a conversational context. This experiment will take approximately two hours, and the expected outcome is that you will gain a practical understanding of the challenges and opportunities of conversational commerce. The future of e-commerce is conversational. The sooner you start learning the language, the faster you'll adapt.

Brands that embrace agentic commerce early will build a significant and durable competitive advantage. They will capture high-intent traffic from new acquisition channels while their competitors are still focused on optimizing last-generation platforms. They will build a direct relationship with customers within the AI platforms where they are spending their time, reducing reliance on traditional ad intermediaries. They will develop a deep understanding of conversational commerce, allowing them to create more personalized and effective shopping experiences.

Late adopters, on the other hand, will find themselves increasingly invisible to a growing segment of the market. They will be fighting for scraps on legacy platforms while their more agile competitors are capturing the most valuable customers on the new frontier of agentic commerce. The window to act is now.

The evidence for this shift is overwhelming and coming from all corners of the industry. Salesforce's data shows a 119% YoY increase in traffic from AI assistants. Gartner predicts that 22% of global orders this Cyber Week will be driven by intelligent agents. Brands like Pandora and Pacsun are already seeing tangible results from their early investments in agentic commerce. This is not hype; it is a market in motion.

As one beta tester for Agentforce Commerce noted, "We're no longer just optimizing for clicks and conversions. We're optimizing for conversations. It's a completely different mindset, and it's where the entire industry is heading."

Is it possible that agentic commerce is overhyped? Certainly. The vision of a seamless, AI-powered shopping experience is compelling, but the reality is likely to be messier. The integration with third-party platforms like ChatGPT is still in its early stages, and there will undoubtedly be technical hurdles and user experience challenges. Furthermore, many consumers may still prefer the control and familiarity of traditional web browsing and search.

Our take: While the full vision of agentic commerce may take a few years to mature, the underlying trend is undeniable. AI assistants are becoming the new starting point for the customer journey. Brands that ignore this shift risk being disintermediated. The immediate opportunity is not to abandon search and social, but to add agentic commerce as a third pillar of your acquisition strategy. The 119% growth in traffic is real, and it's a signal that performance marketers cannot afford to ignore.

The launch of Salesforce Agentforce Commerce is more than just a new product announcement; it's a signpost for the future of performance marketing. The battle for customers is moving from the search bar to the chat window. The winners will be the brands that understand how to make their products not just searchable, but "agent-ready." The work to prepare for this new reality begins today. The 22% of Cyber Week orders driven by AI agents is just the beginning. What you do this week will determine whether you capture your share of that growing pie.

by WB
for the AdAI Ed. Team