AI chats are becoming the new starting point for online shopping

The traditional model of online retail, which assumes customers begin their journey on search engines, marketplaces, or brand websites, is becoming obsolete. A Salesforce report reveals that an increasing number of shoppers are now initiating their shopping experience with AI systems, such as ChatGPT-style assistants, embedded AI tools on retailers' websites, or conversational interfaces in other platforms.

This trend of "agentic search" as the first step in the shopping journey has surged by 200 percent year-on-year, according to the report's findings based on a survey of 3,450 commerce professionals across 20 countries and 13 industries, including 100 respondents from Singapore. The data also comes from a consumer survey of 4,689 shoppers and behavioral data from over 1.5 billion shoppers globally.

For Southeast Asian retailers, this shift from owned channels to AI-driven discovery is not merely an additional marketing channel; it raises a more fundamental question about ensuring accurate product, price, inventory, and brand information representation across all discovery platforms. Traffic from AI chats has surged between 150 percent and 428 percent year-on-year in every measured quarter, while overall traffic has grown only in single to low double digits.

Consumer behavior aligns with this trend, with the rate of shoppers discovering products through brand-owned properties falling by 7 percent between August 2025 and May 2026, while traditional search dropped by 15 percent. Meanwhile, the use of newer discovery channels, including AI assistants, social media AI, and delivery apps, has grown by 38 percent over the same period.

This matters in Southeast Asia due to the region's highly fragmented commerce landscape, where shoppers may move between marketplaces, social media platforms, delivery apps, physical stores, and brand websites before making a purchase. AI can streamline this discovery process into a single conversation, but it also means the first recommendation may occur outside the retailer's direct control.

Singapore commerce leaders recognize this shift, with 82 percent of respondents stating that large language models will be essential for product discovery within the next year. Many are adjusting their strategies by improving product content quality, optimizing content for conversational queries, submitting data feeds to AI search platforms, and rewriting product descriptions for natural language.

In essence, retailers are striving to make their catalogues more understandable to machines. However, while adoption is still early, the pressure is mounting. Only 28 percent of Singapore organizations surveyed currently use agentic AI, while 52 percent plan to deploy it within the next six months. The gap between consumer behavior and corporate readiness is where the pressure is building.

Eighty-six percent of commerce leaders believe AI is raising customer expectations, and 41 percent say meeting those expectations is harder than ever. Implementing or expanding AI has become both the top priority for the year ahead and the top anticipated challenge for commerce leaders.