Salesforce (CRM) issued a preview of the upcoming Cyber Week shopping rush. The cloud tech giant noted that consumer AI channels like ChatGPT fueled a 119% surge in AI-assistant–driven shopping traffic to e-commerce sites year-over-year.
AI and agents are forecast to influence $73 billion in global online sales during Cyber Week, which is about 22% of all orders during the time frame. In total, AI and agents are projected to drive 21% of all global holiday orders this year, which accounts for $263 billion in sales.
Overall, Cyber Week sales are expected to rise 6% year-over-year to reach $334 billion worldwide and be up 3% to $78 billion in the United States. The highest discounted categories in the U.S. during Cyber Week are expected to be general apparel (average discount rate of 37%), health and beauty (average discount rate of 35%), and home products (average discount rate of 23%).
This holiday season, investors will be hearing a lot about the use of agentic AI in the retail sector due to the improved conversion rates being seen, reduced customer service costs, lowered churn rates, improved inventory management, and instant checkout protocols. On Wednesday, reports indicated that Perplexity is partnering with PayPal (PYPL) to provide a free agentic shopping tool that allows users to search for and purchase items from over 5,000 merchants. The new app will be available for free download next week.
Amazon (AMZN), Walmart (WMT), Google (GOOG), Alibaba (BABA), Shopify (SHOP), Etsy (ETSY), and Wayfair (W) are some of the retailers at the forefront of deploying agentic AI and shopping assistants. Of course, as agentic AI in retail explodes, it supports the upside case for chip makers and enabling tech companies such as Nvidia (NVDA), AMD (AMD), Salesforce (CRM), and Microsoft (MSFT).
Related ETFs include VanEck Retail ETF (RTH), ProShares Online Retail ETF (ONLN), Amplify Online Retail ETF (IBUY), Consumer Discretionary Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLY), and Invesco Dynamic Retail ETF (PMR).