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Cyber Week alone will spend $311 billion worldwide, $75 billion in the US and account for nearly a quarter of holiday shopping. In addition, AI is expected to play a major role during this year’s holiday season, contributing to 19% of Cyber Week’s estimated $61 billion sales.
Global online sales fell slightly YoY in October, but rose 8% in the first week of November, indicating that activity is picking up around the holidays. Interestingly, the two categories that show the highest growth are cosmetics and functional shoes, each of which would be the most personal purchase.
Salesforce’s predictions are based on an analysis of data from the Salesforce Shopping Index: 1.5 billion global shoppers, 1.6 trillion page views, and more than 200 million unique SKUs on the Salesforce Customer 360 platform.
How AI provides assistance. AI will augment the digital shopping experience, not only with personalized product recommendations but also with AI agents, effectively shopping for the consumer. Twenty-four percent of consumers are happy with that. AI agents can also deal (voice or text) with order questions, changes and delivery requests. At the Salesforce World Tour in New York City this week, there were demonstrations of how a customer can interact, by voice, with a Saks Fifth Avenue AI agent to change an order and speed up delivery in the context of a natural conversation.
AI agents are also expected to support faster customer service (30 percent of consumers would be happy to use AI agents if their service issues were resolved more quickly).
“For retailers using AI agents, especially in their customer service channels, they are seeing engagement increase at twice the rate of retailers using traditional chatbots or other types of service channels,” Caila Schwartz told us. Schwartz is director of consumer insights and strategy, marketing and consumer products, at Salesforce. “Agents are able to handle a high case volume, are efficient and able to meet the client’s needs.”
Michael Affronti, SVP and GM, Commerce Cloud, sees additional benefits: “From a customer perspective that’s where a lot of our customers are surprised and optimistic — not only will we cut costs on the service center side, because we don’t need as many people answering the phones to ‘Where’s my order?’ calls during Cyber Week. If people are happy with the experience, we can drive loyalty – then they talk about the size of the basket, we use agents not just to deviate but to grow. “
Dig deeper: Salesforce introduces Agentforce
Mobile will play a big role. Undoubtedly, due to the huge advancements in mobile shopping and shopping apps and the mobile web, mobile orders will make up 70% of sales during Cyber Week. This is a global figure, so it covers mainly the leading markets.
Why do we care. Salesforce vacation information, available from such a large data set, is always worth tracking. This season’s predictions are being released against the backdrop of Salesforce’s major commitment to what it calls an “operational” transformation – the use of Agentforce AI agents across commerce, service, sales and marketing. Will customers accept these agents or will they continue to pine for human contact. It depends, of course, on how well the agents work.
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