'Global Commerce Trends Report' released

48% of Korean commerce firms feed product data to AI search platforms

Traditional search use falls 15% as AI channels gain ground

An image introducing Salesforce's "Global Commerce Trends Report" [Salesforce]
An image introducing Salesforce's "Global Commerce Trends Report" [Salesforce]

Salesforce has released a report showing that the share of shoppers worldwide using AI assistants has grown more than 200 percent compared with the same period a year earlier.

Salesforce published the findings Thursday in its "Global Commerce Trends Report," which draws on a survey of 3,450 commerce professionals across 20 countries and 13 industries, including South Korea.

The report offers a comprehensive analysis of how commerce organizations are adopting AI agents, how well their data and systems are integrated, and how consumers are changing the way they discover and buy products as AI becomes more widespread.

According to the report, the share of global consumers using AI assistants at the first stage of their shopping journey rose 200 percent year on year. Traffic arriving at global commerce sites via AI chat also surged, climbing between 150 percent and 428 percent year on year across every quarter covered by the analysis.

The channels through which consumers discover products are also shifting. Between last August and May, the share of consumers using traditional search engines to browse products fell 15 percent, while the share turning to new channels — including AI assistants, social media AI tools and delivery apps — rose 38 percent. The share of consumers who discovered products through a brand's own channels also slipped 7 percent over the same period.

Salesforce said AI is now influencing the entire process by which consumers narrow down purchase candidates. Because shoppers increasingly gather product information through AI conversations before visiting a brand's website, the company said, businesses will need to rethink their strategies accordingly.

South Korean companies are already moving to adapt. Some 48 percent of domestic commerce firms said they are feeding product data to AI search platforms, while 46 percent said they are working to expand the visibility of their products and brands on external platforms and channels. Another 44 percent said they have created or optimized content for conversational and question-based search, and 39 percent said they have improved the quality of their product content.

However, Salesforce said that converting AI-driven product discovery into actual purchases requires companies to first integrate their data and systems. Among domestic commerce firms that have not unified their customer data, 45 percent said they hold duplicate or inconsistent customer information.

Data and system fragmentation also emerged as a major challenge for South Korean multichannel commerce companies. Some 43 percent of respondents said they experience inconsistencies in pricing and promotions across channels, 40 percent said they cannot recognize the same customer uniformly across channels, and 39 percent said real-time inventory information is not synchronized across all channels.

Salesforce said companies need an operational foundation that integrates data and workflows across all commerce functions. Connecting product discovery, purchasing, order fulfillment and customer service on a data-driven basis is what enables businesses to deliver a consistent experience across new AI-powered customer touchpoints, it said.

Park Se-jin, president of Salesforce Korea, said AI is becoming the starting point for product discovery and purchase decisions, and that companies which secure the consumer's first touchpoint will gain the upper hand in the market. "Salesforce will use Data 360 and Agentforce Commerce to connect customer, product and inventory information in one place, helping Korean companies deepen their customer engagement across the new shopping pathways that AI is creating," Park said.


chami@heraldcorp.com