Salesforce has a new AI based, omni channel retail Commerce platform, Agentforce Commerce, that brings together guided shopping, agent assisted clienteling, and intelligent order management into one unified, omni channel stack for retailers. It allows brands to sell directly on their websites and inside consumer AI assistants like ChatGPT, while still strictly controlling their data, customer experience and payment systems.
What Agentforce Commerce Is
The Salesforce Commerce, Order Management and Data Cloud form the foundation of the business of Agentforce Commerce and are offered as AI agents, which are accessed at the web, mobile, POS and third-party AI. The catalogs, inventory, pricing, promotions, and checkout operations can be syndicated into AI hosts through the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) by retailers, and final transactions can be fulfilled using the support of Stripe and the Agent Payments service offered by Google. In proprietary channels, the agents reside in the storefronts, and in-store systems and are tuned to brand tone, policies and customer information.
This creates the layer of one single layer where product discovery, ordering, and service are fulfilled using conversational AI with an understanding of context and history, hence removing the fragmented chatbots and their tools of add-on functionality.
Guided Shopping: Conversations That Convert
Guided Shopping is the flagship feature which substitutes scrolling with a chat based product discovery. Customers describe their requirements in natural language – such as a gift to a tech-savvy brother below 200 dollars or displaying eco-friendly alternatives like my last purchase – and are presented with tailored results with rich visuals, on-page carousels, and one-click checkout.
Newer Guided Shopping systems use almost twice the speed of previous versions and work with any number of languages, which allows global merchants to achieve higher conversion rates and average order value in comparison with the old browse-and-filter experience. Since the agent thinks contextually and memorizes preferences, it acts more as an informed companion as compared to a highly programmed chatbot.
Agent-Assisted Clienteling: Empowering Store Associates
These AI capabilities are further extended under agent assisted clienteling to store associates and service agents. With the help of Agentforce Actions with POS and Data Cloud integrations, employees see single-view customer information, such as purchase, browsing indicators, loyalty, and behavioral patterns, in real-time.
When interacting, the agent displays next-best products, personalized offers, and loyalty redemptions, which helps associates to personalize their recommendations and make larger baskets. This context comes with the customer whether he starts the experience online or through the assistance of an AI or in-store and the context helps eliminate redundancy and creates transitions at every touch-point.
Order Routing, Merchandising, and Payments
In addition to the front-end experience, Agentforce Commerce also adds agentic intelligence to both fulfillment and merchandising. With inventory, shipping cost, and service level agreements, Agentic Order Routing will be the best option, as it is becoming more and more cost effective in terms of logistics due to optimal fulfillment node choice to store, distribution centre, or third-party logistics. Merchandise activities of agents are dynamically modified in response to the demand, margins, and inventory, controlling recommendations, bundles, and on-site placements.
Checkouts are conducted over authorized connections to Stripe and Google Agent Payments, which lets buyers make purchases in AI channels or on their own websites in a low-friction flow. This full-completion combination of chat with billing procedure to delivery turns AI traffic into reachable cash conversions and not amusements.
Omni-Channel AI Reach With Brand Control
One of the major differences is between the reach and control. Through ACP, retailers can present their catalog and their check-out to other external AI software like ChatGPT and implement brand guidelines, pricing, and compliance through a central layer. Simultaneously, on owned properties retailers are able to create completely branded agentic experiences that are built on proprietary user interfaces, tone, and customer journeys.
Such a holistic strategy gains more and more significance as the process of AI-mediated shopping grows. Preliminary statistics of Agentforce implementations indicate that artificial intelligence-based shopping upstream is growing more than 100 percent annually, and intelligent agents are expected to touch over fifth of world orders during high seasons like Cyber Week. The existing retailers, stuck in their old fragmented legacy stacks, will not be able to follow up this channel migration.
What This Means for Modern Retailers
In the case of retailers, Agentforce Commerce can be fruitfully viewed as an AI-native commerce layer that:
- Turns search and browsing into guided, conversational shopping that lifts conversion.
- Gives associates superpowers via agent-assisted clienteling tied to a unified customer profile.
- Automates order routing and merchandising decisions using real-time data and policies.
- Extends commerce into consumer AI assistants without surrendering brand control or payments.
In the case of Agentforce Commerce, the next generation of teams must focus on the readiness of data (store and service staff, quality data, and catalog-quality, and accurate inventory data), change management, and how to incorporate guided experiences in the current customer experience. When successfully implemented, Agentforce is no longer just another AI add-on, but a direction on which strategies may be realized in the future where AI agents, not browser tabs, are more likely to shape the way customers explore, compare and buy.
