Singapore – Agentic search has become the first step in the shopping journey for a growing number of consumers, with its use rising 200% year over year, according to Salesforce.
The report draws on surveys of 3,450 commerce professionals, 100 of whom are from Singapore. It also includes a survey of 4,690 consumers and behavioural data from more than 1.5 billion global shoppers.
More shoppers now start with a question to an AI, either in a large language model (LLM) conversation or in an AI assistant on a retailer’s own site. The behavioural data points the same way, as traffic referred from AI chats grew between 150% and 428% year over year in every quarter measured, while overall traffic grew in the single to low double digits.
Consumer responses show a similar move away from familiar channels. Between August 2025 and May 2026, the rate of shoppers discovering products through brand-owned properties fell 7% and traditional search fell 15%, while the rate of consumers choosing new channels – AI assistants, social media AI and delivery apps – grew 38%.
Commerce teams are feeling the pressure. The report found that 86% of leaders say AI is raising customer expectations, while 41% say meeting those expectations is harder than ever.
As a result, implementing or expanding AI now ranks as commerce leaders’ top priority for the year ahead. It is also their top anticipated challenge.
In Singapore, 82% of commerce leaders agree that LLMs will be essential to product discovery within the next year. Organisations are already adjusting, with improving product content quality (42%), optimising content for conversational queries (40%), submitting data feeds to AI search platforms (39%) and optimising product descriptions for natural language (38%) the most common actions.
However, the shift is playing out first in discovery, where the journey begins, even as fully autonomous purchasing remains in its early stages.
Business adoption still trails consumer behaviour. Only 28% of Singapore organisations currently use agentic AI, although 52% of non-adopters plan to deploy it within the next six months.
Meanwhile, 65% of Singapore respondents agree that scaling across channels is not viable without AI.
Among organisations in Asia Pacific (APAC) that already use agentic AI, the experimental phase appears to be ending. Just 5% of leaders say they are still primarily piloting use cases, while the largest share, 35%, are scaling AI across functions and teams, from service and IT to merchandising.
Adopters also report measurable improvements. Customer satisfaction leads the list, followed closely by personalisation, operational efficiency and employee productivity.
Even so, this push to scale AI is landing on infrastructure that was already under strain. More vendors, fragmented customer data and channels that do not communicate with one another leave teams deploying AI on top of systems that struggle to work together.
Of Singapore commerce leaders surveyed, 81% say their vendor count has grown over the past two years. Only 25% of Singapore organisations say their customer data is fully unified across sales, service, marketing and commerce.
Among those with fragmented data views, 36% admit to slow or ineffective responses to customer issues, while 32% struggle to measure the impact of their commerce investments. A further 40% say they pay a high cost to maintain disconnected systems.
Omnichannel breakdowns are near-universal, according to the report. Just 2% of Singapore multichannel organisations report no significant failure points, with inventory not synchronised in real time (46%) and inconsistent pricing and promotions (36%) the most common.
The same pattern appears in physical retail, which remains the top holiday shopping destination for 77% of consumers. Even there, 79% of shoppers use their phones while shopping in store, and 12% ask an AI assistant for purchasing advice in the aisle.
Expectations carry across channels too, as 86% of B2C respondents agree that customers expect the same personalisation in store as online.
By contrast, organisations that have moved towards data unification report clearer returns. The most commonly cited benefits are better alignment between sales, marketing and commerce teams (44%), improved customer retention and loyalty (42%), and improved AI and automation outcomes (31%).
“AI is changing commerce on two fronts at once. Businesses are using it to reinvent customer experience — smarter service, sharper personalization, faster fulfillment. But the bigger shift is happening outside their control: customers are no longer starting their search on a brand’s website or a search bar, they’re starting it in an AI chat, a social feed, or a delivery app,” said Swatantra Kumar, Regional Vice President, Salesforce.
“This isn’t a future scenario, it’s happening now. Companies selling online and offline need to show up wherever discovery is happening — and that only works if their data is unified enough for AI to represent their products and brand accurately, everywhere customers land,” Kumar added.
