Salesforce launches AI commerce tools for retailers

Salesforce has released a new set of Agentforce Commerce products for retailers and business sellers, including three generally available tools: Shopper Agent, Buyer Agent and Merchant Agent.

The release also adds direct links between Salesforce's commerce software and external AI services, including ChatGPT, with Google Search and the Gemini app due to follow in the summer.

The update reflects a shift toward conversational shopping and procurement, as consumers and business buyers increasingly begin product searches through AI assistants rather than traditional website search bars. Salesforce is positioning its software as the system behind those interactions, tying product discovery and purchasing to catalogues, inventory, pricing and order management.

The strategy spans both customer-facing and back-office use cases. Shopper Agent is designed for consumer storefronts, Buyer Agent is aimed at B2B purchasing through channels such as WhatsApp and SMS, and Merchant Agent is intended for merchandising and operations teams managing product assortments and storefront rules.

External channels

A key part of the release is Salesforce's effort to connect merchants' digital properties with third-party AI platforms. Under the model it outlined, a retailer's product catalogue can feed into external AI-driven discovery tools while orders and customer records remain on the merchant's existing systems.

Nitin Mangtani, EVP and GM, Agentforce Commerce, said AI-driven traffic would play a larger role in sending shoppers to brand sites, but transactions would still largely take place on owned channels.

"Referral traffic to brand sites will be hugely influenced by AI platforms - Gemini, ChatGPT, Anthropic - and social apps like Instagram and TikTok. But commerce itself will happen predominantly on owned and operated properties: your website, your app, your messaging channels, your stores. Syndicated commerce with UCP will also play an important role long-term, driving commerce directly into external channels, and we're providing Agentic Commerce comprehensively across all channels. The brands that win will have their Shopper Agent live on their own properties for the 2026 shopping season," Mangtani said.

Salesforce cited figures from the recent holiday shopping period to support that shift, saying AI influenced 20% of global online sales, worth USD $262 billion. Retailers using their own shopping agents grew sales 59% faster than peers that had not adopted the technology, while AI-referred traffic converted at eight times the rate of social traffic.

Search and discovery

Salesforce is also folding Cimulate, the search technology business it recently acquired, into the core platform under the name Agentic Commerce Search. The tool is intended to move search beyond keywords by matching products to shopper intent, and it can be used on websites beyond Salesforce's own commerce stack.

One early customer highlighted in the launch is PacSun, which is using the OpenAI integration and the new search product to reach younger consumers on AI platforms.

"PacSun's purpose is to inspire the next generation of youth and build a community grounded in innovation and authenticity across every emerging channel. We believe the integration of Agentforce Commerce with OpenAI presents a powerful opportunity to extend our products into AI platforms like ChatGPT, transforming conversations into meaningful engagement and lasting relationships with our Gen Z and Gen Alpha customers. With Agentic Commerce Search we deliver highly relevant, seamless discovery experiences that set a new standard for modern retail," Gao said.

B2B and operations

Beyond consumer retail, Salesforce is expanding into B2B buying processes that often involve contract pricing, repeat orders and quote negotiation. Buyer Agent is built to handle ordering requests in messaging channels, while B2B commerce on the platform now supports fully headless deployment, allowing businesses to build custom front ends on the same underlying systems for pricing, accounts and catalogues.

The release also adds B2B Search, which includes synonym management, weighted attributes and predictive discovery for technical product catalogues. It is aimed at business buyers that need more precise results than a typical consumer storefront search experience.

Merchant Agent is focused on internal teams. It allows merchandisers and operators to use plain-language prompts to organise catalogues, change sorting rules and manage product ranking instead of navigating administration menus manually. Salesforce said some early users had reduced the time needed to complete tasks by 88%.

In fulfilment, Salesforce has added what it calls Agentic Order Management, with conversational controls for routing and exception handling. The company said its order management infrastructure unifies inventory across 7,000 locations and 250 million records, and the latest version introduces cost-based routing intended to help merchants choose fulfilment options that protect margins as well as delivery speed.

Storefront build-out

Another part of the release is Storefront Next, a front-end framework for B2C commerce that Salesforce said can put a production-ready storefront online in under 30 minutes. It includes a developer toolkit with more than 40 prebuilt skills and integrations, plus a framework for installing commerce applications through Business Manager.

Iceland Foods has been involved as a pilot partner on the product.

"As a team driven to work at the forefront of emerging technology, being selected as a pilot partner to help shape Storefront Next - Salesforce's new frontend platform built with performance and AI development at its core - is exactly where we want to be. It's fast to run, easy to adopt, and already delivering better than anticipated progress. This is the kind of pioneering work that truly brings out the best in our engineers," Barber said.

The broader release also includes a unified catalogue and order view across point of sale and online storefronts, along with expanded support for modern point of sale software on iOS, Android and Windows. Store staff will be able to modify or cancel orders across channels from the shop floor using the same product and order data seen by shoppers online.