Salesforce has warned commerce leaders chasing AI opportunities that customers are moving faster than many organizations can keep up with.
Its latest State of Commerce report found that 86% of commerce professionals believe AI is raising the bar for customer expectations. Yet 61% say meeting those expectations is harder than ever.
These two stats get to the crux of the situation. The tools promising more personalized, faster, and more autonomous journeys are also making yesterday’s service standards look increasingly outdated.
Caila Schwartz, Head of Agentic Commerce Shopper Insights at Agentforce Commerce, summed up the challenge, stating:
“The rules of commerce are being rewritten in real time.”
For Salesforce, AI is no longer being framed as a future-facing experiment; instead, it is becoming a necessary response to the pressure facing commerce, service, sales, and marketing teams.
AI Agents Move Closer to the Service Front Line
Salesforce surveyed 3,450 commerce professionals across 20 countries and 13 industries between April 10 and June 4, 2026.
The vendor also analyzed B2C and B2B buyer behavior from more than 1.5 billion customers globally.
The findings point to a market already well into the AI transition, with 78% of organizations currently using AI in some form, and nearly half planning to deploy agentic AI within the next six months.
In B2C commerce, autonomous customer service resolution is among the most common AI-agent use cases, alongside AI shopping concierges that guide customers through product discovery and purchase.
This is particularly interesting because the distinction between a commerce journey and a service journey is starting to blur.
A customer looking for a product, checking stock, tracking an order, querying a promotion, or seeking a return is not thinking about the internal handoff between commerce and service; they simply expect an answer.
According to Schwartz, "the rules of commerce are being rewritten in real time.
"For years, commerce leaders have navigated a world of compounding complexity: more channels to manage, more vendors to integrate, more customer expectations to meet. And now, AI has entered that equation on both sides.”
The potential upside is obvious. AI agents could reduce customer effort by resolving routine issues quickly and providing product guidance without making buyers wait for an agent.
But the report also makes clear that AI-led service will only be as dependable as the data behind it.
The Data Problem Is Still Very Much Alive
Only 27% of commerce organizations say their customer data is fully unified across sales, service, marketing, and commerce teams.
For a sector talking increasingly about real-time personalization and autonomous resolution, that is a serious issue.
Among B2C organizations, 46% report duplicate or conflicting customer data, while 45% point to the cost of maintaining disconnected systems. In B2B, 37% say disconnected data slows responses to customer issues or makes them ineffective.
Those gaps risk turning an AI service interaction into a faster way of delivering the wrong answer.