There are a set number of steps retailers can take to meet to successfully transition their businesses into the agentic AI era, says Salesforce’s Nav Sanghera
For over a decade, ‘omnichannel’ has been retail’s North Star. We focused on stitching together web, mobile and physical stores to create a single view of the customer. Yet, despite years of investment, a significant gap remains. While 80% of customers now expect a consistent experience across every touchpoint, 55% report that most retailers still feel like a collection of disconnected departments.
We are now in the opening chapter of the agentic era. Over the next several years, every company in every industry will become an agentic enterprise, operating with boundless capacity, precision and speed by pairing human expertise with AI-powered agents.
This is not just an upgrade, but a fundamental shift. It’s not simply automating existing processes but creating entirely new capabilities, revenue streams and ways of working. Commerce will be driven not just by humans browsing grids, but by AI agents acting on their behalf.
The shift is already visible in the bottom line. During the 2025 holiday season, AI and autonomous agents influenced 20% of the $1.29trn (£971.7bn) in global online sales. More importantly, traffic originating from AI search channels converted nine times better than social media referrals, with total traffic volume from these channels doubling year on year.
To capture this value, retail leaders must move beyond siloed tactics and embrace a unified commerce protocol. Here are the five critical shifts to navigate.
1. From fragmented feeds to a universal language
In the agentic enterprise, if your product data isn’t structured, discoverable and semantically rich, your brand is effectively invisible to the AI agents shoppers are now using to find what they need. Standard SKUs are no longer enough to feed the models that power modern discovery.
The mandate for retailers: To be ‘agent ready’, your catalogue must feature enriched metadata – including sustainability credentials, technical compatibility and real-time availability. Your data architecture is no longer just back-office infrastructure, it is your primary storefront.
2. The death of the keyword and the birth of intent
The keyword era forced humans to speak like machines. Today, we have entered the age of natural language commerce. Shoppers no longer want to filter by ‘waterproof shoes’, they want to say: ‘Find me a sustainable outfit for a rainy spring wedding that matches the shoes I bought last month’.
The mandate for retailers: Answering this requires a deep fusion of product catalogues and real-time customer data. Retailers must move from matching words to solving human problems. The brand that understands intent wins the wallet.
3. Transactional ubiquity: Commerce as a service
Traditional ecommerce is destination-based, you drive traffic to a site and hope for a conversion. The agentic enterprise demands transactional ubiquity – the ability to complete a purchase wherever discovery happens, whether in an AI conversation, a social feed or a physical aisle.
The mandate for retailers: Commerce must become an omnipresent service. Your engine must be able to verify global inventory and apply personalised pricing in real-time across any touchpoint. Leaders must consider whether their commerce engine is a destination, or a unified service that meets customers at the moment of intent.
4. Concierge-level service for every customer
AI’s true potential lies in augmenting the human experience, not replacing it. By deploying autonomous agents grounded in data – incorporating purchase history, preferences and local context – retailers can offer luxury-grade ‘clienteling’ to the mass market.
The mandate for retailers: When an AI agent can proactively suggest a replacement for a return based on live stock and a customer’s personal schedule, the retailer transforms from a vendor into a trusted advisor. This level of personalisation is only possible when marketing, service and commerce data work harmoniously.
5. Architecture over tactics: Future-proofing the foundation
The greatest risk to modern retail is accumulating technical debt by chasing every new interface – one year it’s a specific social integration, the next it’s a virtual storefront.
The mandate for retailers: By consolidating data onto a unified platform and adhering to open protocols, you decouple your brand logic from specific channels. Strategic leadership is about getting the data foundation right once, ensuring the business is ready for every agent and every platform the future holds.
The strategic outlook
The gap between fragmented data and unified intelligence is where customer loyalty will be won or lost in 2026. As the shopping journey becomes increasingly automated, the brands that thrive will be those that treat their data as a strategic asset, moving beyond simple transactions to deliver true, agent-ready value.
Nav Sanghera is senior vice-president industrial, consumer and energy at Salesforce UK and Ireland.
