Stores With AI Shopping Agents Are Growing Sales 59% Faster.

The New Shopping Gatekeeper: Why AI Agents Are Taking Over E-Commerce.

Salesforce Just Made AI Shopping Agents the Default. Is Your Store Ready?

Agentic commerce drove $262B in AI-influenced sales last holiday season. DTC and Shopify brands without their own agent are already losing that traffic to someone else's.

20%: of global online sales were AI-influenced last holiday season — $262B in volume

59%: faster sales growth for retailers running their own shopper agents

8x: higher conversion rate for AI-referred traffic vs. traffic from social

1: The Shopping Cart Has a New Gatekeeper:

Shoppers are no longer starting their search on your homepage. On July 6, Salesforce announced general availability of Agentforce Commerce, putting three AI agents — Shopper Agent, Buyer Agent, and Merchant Agent — natively inside ChatGPT, Google Search, and soon the Gemini app.

The numbers behind the launch make the shift hard to ignore. Salesforce's analysis of 1.5 billion holiday shoppers found that AI already influenced a fifth of global online sales, and retailers running their own AI shopping agent grew sales far faster than those that stayed on the sidelines. In parts of Asia-Pacific, over four in ten customers now start product discovery inside an AI assistant rather than a search bar or a storefront.

This is not a future trend to plan for later in the year. It is happening in the current shopping cycle, and it changes who gets the sale before a customer ever lands on a product page.

2: Why This Hits DTC and Shopify Brands Hardest:

Enterprise retailers can stand up their own branded AI agent because they have the engineering teams to build it. Most DTC and Shopify sellers do not — which means when a shopper asks an AI assistant to find, compare, and check out a product, an independent brand's storefront is invisible to that conversation unless it has an agent of its own to represent it.

The brands that lose the most in this shift are the ones with the best products and the thinnest teams — the exact profile of most DTC and Shopify sellers. Cart abandonment, slow order-status replies, and generic FAQ pages already cost sales today.

Add an AI-first shopping layer on top, and a brand with no agent-ready presence effectively disappears from where its next customer is already looking.

Salesforce's own commerce lead put it plainly: brands that win the 2026 shopping season will be the ones with a shopper-facing AI agent live on their own site — not just relying on traffic from someone else's AI platform.

3: You Don't Need Salesforce's Budget to Compete:

This is exactly the gap Agent+ was built to close. You don't need an enterprise commerce platform or an engineering team to give your store its own AI agent — you need the right workflow wired into the channels your customers already use.

Agent+, Otherworlds AI's Business AI Platform, puts a branded AI agent to work on your storefront, WhatsApp, and Instagram DMs for $297/month — answering product questions, tracking orders, recovering abandoned carts, and guiding a shopper from question to checkout, all powered by Google Opal automated workflows.

For sellers who need something built around a specific catalog, checkout flow, or fulfillment system, our custom enterprise AI builds extend the same approach to fit your stack exactly.

The brands that show up in an AI-assisted shopping conversation this season are the ones who deployed an agent before the traffic shifted. The ones that wait will be competing for scraps of a search bar that fewer and fewer shoppers still use.

Give Your Store an AI Agent Before Your Competitors Do.

See how Agent+ can put a branded AI shopping agent on your storefront, WhatsApp, and Instagram for $297/month — or talk to us about a custom build for your catalog.

Visit otherworldsai.com to get started.