As Canadian retailers move from back-to-school promotions into holiday planning, the first stop in the shopping journey is increasingly not a store, a retailer’s website or a conventional search engine. It is an AI conversation.
Shoppers are increasingly turning to AI tools before visiting a retailer’s website. According to Salesforce’s State of Commerce report, the use of these tools—known as agentic search—at the beginning of the purchase journey rose 200% year over year globally. The Canadian findings suggest retailers here are preparing for the same shift. Agentic search can interpret a shopper’s needs, compare products and recommend options, although fully autonomous purchasing remains in its early stages.
Among Canadian commerce leaders, 89% said AI is raising customer expectations and 76% said those expectations are harder to meet. Implementing or expanding AI was their top priority, cited by 43%. Another 89% said large language models will be essential to product discovery within a year.
Retailers are responding by improving product-content quality (46%), optimizing content for conversational queries (42%), rewriting descriptions for natural-language discovery (38%) and submitting data feeds to AI search platforms (36%). Product information now needs to be understandable both to shoppers and to the AI systems interpreting their intent.
“Customers aren’t starting with 10 blue links anymore – they’re asking an AI what to buy,” said Caila Schwartz, head of agentic commerce shopper insights at Salesforce.
Adoption remains uneven. Thirty-four per cent of Canadian commerce organizations said they use agentic AI, while another 33% plan to deploy it within six months. Among organizations moving ahead, 12% were primarily piloting and 25% were scaling AI across functions and teams. Three-quarters of respondents said scaling across channels is not viable without AI.
The rush is colliding with a familiar commerce problem: disconnected systems. Only 30% of Canadian respondents said customer data is fully unified across sales, service, marketing and commerce. Among those with fragmented data, 44% reported slow or ineffective responses to customer issues, 38% cited high maintenance costs and 36% struggled to measure commerce investments. Unsynchronized inventory was a significant failure point for 44%, while 41% cited inconsistent pricing or promotions.
Organizations with unified data most often reported better alignment among sales, marketing and commerce teams (38%), improved AI and automation outcomes (36%), and stronger customer retention and loyalty (34%).
Back-to-school campaigns offer an early view of AI-influenced discovery before the holiday quarter. Preparing involves more than launching a chatbot: retailers need accurate product content, current pricing and inventory, connected customer data, and clear measures of whether AI improves the shopping experience.
Salesforce’s global report draws on a double-anonymous survey of 3,450 commerce professionals across 20 countries and 13 industries, conducted from April 10 to June 4, 2026. It also incorporates shopping-behaviour data from more than 1.5 billion shoppers across 37 countries and a separate survey of 4,689 consumers in eight countries.
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