Accelerate Growth with Agentforce Commerce Innovation

We are at the point where AI doesn't just suggest, it acts. And Agentforce Commerce is turning this vision into revenue by increasing loyalty and conversion rates. And we're just scratching the surface. I'm Carey Chow, joined by EVP GM of AgentForce Commerce, Nitin Mangtani. Nitin, thank you so much for joining us here.

Thank you for having me. Yeah, that's great. Great to have a conversation with you.

Yeah. Oh, Nitin, as an industry leader, you know, you're oftentimes having conversations that not a lot of us are privy to. So I'm really curious, like, when you're developing industry solutions, what is the single biggest barrier to growth for brands in today's multichannel commerce landscape?

Yeah. And, you know, I must say that obviously I meet a lot of CEOs and CIOs and chief digital officers. Equally important, I'm a shopper first. So a lot of my insights are actually shopping, you know, whether I'm shopping on a website or I visit a store, that actually gives me a very different perspective and landscape to how consumer behavior is and what delights consumers. And to me, shopping is Obviously, there's part of shopping which is transactional, but a good portion of shopping is all around inspiration and fun. And I think the hard part for most brands is how do you balance that, right? So you want the creativity, you want the, you know, the wow factor, but then you want to bring the science to that wow factor. And that's where, you know, Salesforce comes to the picture. We're really bringing our Agentic platform to shopping but not losing the fun part of the shopping, which is around discovery and finding new and interesting things.

That's a great point because accessibility to different items, shopping, it's so easy, right? Like, and you can just like get the quote unquote cheapest version of something, right? So it's so important for brands to have that wow factor because there is so much competition. I want to talk about this United Commerce, like why it's the foundation and what are the key pillars of commerce success?

Yeah, if you think about consumer behavior, they don't think about channel.

Yeah.

They think about a brand. I want to buy a new blazer from Suitsupply. I want to buy a new pair of Hoka shoes. Now I can go to a store, a Hoka store, and try out some shoes and purchase, or I might be on my mobile phone and scrolling in the evening and looking at the pair of sneakers which I might like, but I might like, wait a second, I want to try it before I buy. And how do you kind of really bridge those two channels so seamlessly where it doesn't feel like an effort, both for the consumer but also the associate? And that's where the unified commerce comes into the picture on bringing both these channels together.

Good. That's also— I'm curious about now the agentic aspect of this, right? Because how is Agentforce the brains behind what we're talking about? And I want you to kind of keep it real with me here, Nitin, because like, Are customers really ready to just trust and make purchases exclusively with AI agents?

You know, it's funny, in 2006, 2007, I was at Google in the early days of mobile and people are asking the same questions. Are people going to buy on mobile?

Yeah.

Fast forward today, that's not a question anymore. We spend majority of our times on mobile phones because back then, remember, those are small phones, they were not the smartphones, and they had very little real estate.

Sure.

And I think agent e-commerce is actually way ahead of the curve. You know, if you look at our customers— Shark Ninja, Pandora, Williams-Sonoma, even Equinox, right? It's all around discovering products and buying them. And it could be both product as well as service. So I think we are in a journey which is actually a very fast-paced journey. And the whole agent journey is very fast-paced, right? 2 years ago, nobody had ChatGPT and Gemini and Anthropic on their phones. Today, everybody has. Same thing is happening with shopping. Once the consumer behavior shifts, it shifts for all aspects. It doesn't matter whether you're looking for a recommendation for, you know, workout routine or you're looking for some healthcare advice or education. People are used to using agent tech as a channel for discovering products.

You know, that's such a great point about using the mobile because there are times I was like old school. I'm like, I'm still using my laptop or my desktop to make the purchases. And people are like, no, the consumer behavior has changed. We're all using our phones. You mentioned syndicating the brand experience to LLMs, right? Large language models. What do you mean by like, why is that so important? How does syndicating that brand experience ultimately result in more revenue?

It's not the new thing, first of all. The concept of commerce happening in what I call it owned and operated properties, it's the properties that you own, your physical store, your website, and back in the days it was mail order business. And then the commerce that happens outside your four walls, that's wholesale marketplaces, search engines, social media. So that concept is not new. And especially the referral traffic. So commerce obviously predominantly happens on your owned and operated properties, but the referral traffic comes from social search and now it's through LLMs because when people are in ChatGPT or Anthropic or Gemini, they're asking questions saying, I'm looking for sneakers which are lightweight, you know, which is good for running. And if you are not representing your brand appropriately, in those channels, then you're missing out. So what we have built is some really amazing technology where we can take any brand with one click, we can syndicate their entire product catalog, but we can also enrich the product catalog as we are syndicating it. So it's semantically very rich and it gives you much better representation in those avenues like ChatGPT and Gemini. And we signed a partnership with both OpenAI as well as Google around syndicated commerce.

It's incredible to me and what an opportunity because it just seems like that would take so many manual hours that you're just completely almost eliminating by having that unification. It makes me think of like, that's one step. What's the Agentic Commerce like nirvana state for brands?

It's actually very simple. So what's AGI? For commerce, let's think about in those terms, right? The AGI for commerce would be the equivalent of that in a physical world will be pick your favorite brand, right? Like whether you go to Coach or Dior or, you know, Michael Kors or Off-White, pick your favorite brand, right? And let's say you go to that store often. The associate really knows you. That associate even has your cell number. He or she can text you and like, "I have some really good blazers coming in. I think you should try it out with the spring weather here." And that experience feels so personalized. It's concierge-driven, it's true one-to-one. So when you go to a store, they don't point you to a wall of 200 shoes. They bring 3 pairs of shoes, highly curated to you, 'cause the associate, she knows you very well. They know their past purchase history, They know your likes and they can bring that. And we want to recreate that experience in the digital world. So instead of that experience being available to only a small percentage of customers, only in certain hours during the day, we want to democratize that experience and make it available to billions of shoppers 24/7.

Yeah, anytime.

Anytime.

I might be shopping at a certain time, right?

You might be at a bar, you might be at your home. You might be on a couch or you might be taking a lunch break and browsing through something.

Yeah.

And if you want to have a conversation, we have Agentforce who can essentially help you buy the right product.

Yeah. Just real briefly, like in a sentence or two, just you mentioned SharkNinja and some other customers are already using Agentforce to tremendous impact. But what's truly the greatest impact, the single greatest impact Agentforce Commerce can have for businesses?

Every time you take friction away from commerce, even if you go back to the invention of credit cards or digital wallets like Apple Pay, commerce, the funnel of the commerce becomes bigger. And that's what the value of Agentforce Commerce is. It reduces friction, increases conversion rate, and thereby increases the funnel for commerce.

I love that. Get rid of friction. We don't like friction up in here.

Make it simple. Make it easy.

Yes, exactly. M-I-S, make it simple. Higher conversion, lower cost, total brand control. Mitten, thank you so much for your insights and joining us here on Salesforce+.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

To learn more about Agentforce Commerce innovations and everything they need to turn conversations into conversions, scan the QR code on your screen. How does AgentForce Commerce make it easy for organizations to create unified commerce success, delivering personalized agentic experiences across every customer touchpoint? I'm Carey Chow, joined by Gordon Nevins, AgentForce Commerce CMO, who's going to break down what makes unified commerce so valuable. First of all, Gordon, thank you for joining us today.

It's my pleasure, Carey.

As the CMO of AgentForce Commerce, Gordon, you're, you're constantly talking with industry leaders about the latest trends, pain points, solutions. What are they saying?

Well, I think everyone's still super excited about agents. We've kind of moved, though, from pilots and projects to applying agents to deliver business value and solve problems. How do we increase conversion? How do we get faster time to value? How do we get lower TCO? And so we're seeing this shift now, I think, as these tools get deployed in organizations. I think the other thing that's super interesting is now it's not only developers that have access to these tools, but how do, you know, shoppers use agents and Agentic AI? How do merchants and all of our marketing employees use them as well? So there's a bunch of trends and I think we've got to help our customers figure out how to move out of this pilot stage and just deliver value and solve their business problems. Right?

Like action, like get those insights into actions. So let's talk about agent-first commerce and how we're doing that, right? What excites you most about our new commerce innovations? And you're already smiling like, well, what is it going to deliver for customers?

I think that's— I'm so excited. About a year ago, we said we're going to double our investment in commerce and we are now seeing the fruits of that labor, whether it's the integration to ChatGPT and helping customers get their catalog synchronized to LLMs like ChatGPT or Gemini, whether that— we have some new search capabilities. So now where we are all used to typing in keyword-based search, we're now moving to intent-based search. So I can type in things like outfit fit for Coachella and get results.

Yes.

You know, or, you know, new merchandising capabilities which help our— which give insights to the merchants to help them move faster in their daily routines. And then even more kind of back office things like what happens after the buy button. If one of my distribution centers has a problem, how can I do agentic order routing to get the order serviced to you from either the fastest data center or maybe the lowest cost data center? So there's Agentic, agentic innovation everywhere in our platform. And I think it's really going to help the shopper find what she wants faster. It's going to help our merchants go faster. I'm super excited about all of it.

I'm curious, what was the outfit you got for Coachella? We talk about AI, right? But before a brand can take on AI or layer on AI, if you will, like they've got to solve fragmentation, right? The disconnect is always what we're hearing from companies. What does unified commerce actually mean, right? Like what makes it so powerful? And I would love an example of this.

Sure. You know, it's probably simpler than most people think, but because our stores grew up separately from our e-commerce, some people talk about this concept of unified commerce and how do we bring them all together. So if you're shopping for boots and you put something in your wishlist in your online store, how does the store associate when you walk into the store know that's on your wish list? So this you can see by delivering this concept of unified commerce, the store associate as well as the e-commerce site can understand the customer the same way, understand an order the same way, inventory availability the same way. So it's really bringing those two ideas together. A great example of this is one of our customers, Herman Miller. And, you know, it's an iconic brand. It's very intentional and inspirational at the same time. So you're sitting in an Eames chair in the showroom in New York here, or maybe you're having this experience, you know, on their website. They're delivering the same amazing brand experience, whether regardless of what channel you're shopping in. And one of the things that they really tried to break down the silos on was like, oh, this is a store shopper. Oh, this is a web shopper. Well, it's just one customer at the end of the day. And so we're really working with them to kind of push the boundaries on how do you have that great experience for the shopper no matter where she is interacting with your brand. If you go into their physical store locations, they have this modern POS capability now where you're not tethered behind the cash wrap. You can walk around the store, you can demo the fit of the chair. And have an amazing experience for the shopper.

Yeah, truly. And I love that we were able to show like a little snippet of that Herman Miller shopping experience and that point of sale experience, that POS experience that you mentioned. And it is truly impactful, like from our standpoint, right? Like as customers, it just makes it, it takes it to the next level. And that's what we're all about. If you can, I'd love another. I'm greedy because I want another example, right? I want to talk about SharkNinja, household appliance icon. Everybody knows SharkNinja, but how did they use Agent for Shopper Agent Live on their site, like, to find gifts? I know you've got a great example and I'd love to hear more about this.

They have been such a fantastic partner with us in Agentic Commerce and they have got the agent live on their site. As you know, they are very innovation first company. They are delivering new innovation, new products all the time. So how do you help the shopper then find the right product for them? So what blender do they want, or maybe it's a vacuum cleaner. And so our agent helps with product discovery and helps the shopper find what they're looking for much more quickly by just doing some basic qualification and answering questions and then mapping that to the inventory. And it can handle service you know, inquiries as well. So it's like, it's really interesting to see, you know, how far they've gone with AgentForce because it's this kind of blend. It's not just discovery and finding the right product, but it's also the service use cases at the same time.

So cool to me about that, like the discovery process, because there's, I don't know how many times, Gordon, I'm like, I'm not, I don't know what I want, right? I'm on here, I'm like, oh, I saw something and then, But then you got to strike when the iron's hot, right? And I'll be like, you know what, I'm out of here. I didn't find what I want. But the fact that we've got that Edgentic technology to point us in that right direction, huge difference.

Yeah, it's the right product. It's at the right time. And, you know, how do you have an experience on your website that is the same as your best store associate?

Yeah.

Like when you walk into a store and that store's like, Carrie, you know, we got that blue blazer for you. We know you're this size. Et cetera, right? And how do we deliver that kind of experience digitally through an agent now? So that's very exciting.

And one of the things we were talking like off camera before, but if like this is any time, right? Like we're not— it's 24/7. So I mean, yeah, there was an example you told me about like people just shopping at odd times in the hour. But like because of this agentic technology we're offering, like it's such a huge opportunity for—

And I think we have more data than ever, right? So, you know, when your shoppers are visiting your site and the agents agents don't sleep, right? You know, they don't go home. So if you are a brand that sees a lot of traffic after midnight, uh, you know, or on certain days and times, you know, the agents can be there to help you scale. And so I think that's an important benefit as well.

It's huge. Incredible. Uh, thank you so much, Gordon, for sharing your insights. Really appreciate, uh, talking about how Salesforce drives unified commerce success.

My pleasure.

Uh, to learn more about how trailblazing furniture designer Miller Knoll uses AgentForest Commerce to design a unified personalized retail experience, go ahead and scan the QR code on your screen.

At Pandora, we help folks around the world tell their story. You could spend an hour in store with one of our wonderful store associates putting together a bracelet, talking about your family, your friends, your hobbies, all the moments and memories that you hold dear. All that richness of conversation is at the heart of the customers' experience of Pandora.

We've perfected the experience in physical stores.

But as our business moves online, you lose the specialness of that in-store experience.

And so what we really want to do is take that magic from offline and put it into our online channels. And that's where we'll gain competitive advantage. But we do not have the ability online to have a dialogue, at least up until now.

We want to challenge ourselves to do something much richer, and now we can do that working with Salesforce.

What if we could create the best online sales associate with Agentforce?

Pandora is the world's largest jewelry brand.

We are in over 100 countries. We sell 3 pieces of jewelry every second. We had around 865 million visits to our stores and online. As we've scaled the digital storefront, Commerce Cloud has become critical to deliver on that growth trajectory.

The composability that we've now got with Commerce Cloud is more function, more feature, more quickly, more stable.

This is really what allows us to quickly reinvent the online shopping experience.

That commerce platform gives us the foundation, and now we think about the future, we think about the agentic future, and that's really the rocket fuel for this next stage. The core of our agentic program is selling and service. When we first switched on the service agent, within the first few days we saw a 60% improvement in deflection rate. It's not just vaporware, it is having real impact on our customer experience. And now collaborating on the selling agent, we've got the opportunity to build something really super special.

We can now build agents by actually asking questions, capturing your context, mirroring that magic of the physical store and then show you what products we have to offer that fits with your context, driving customer experience to the next level. Conversational AI is changing the game here. We will not have seen anything like it before.

This is the internet again. This is electricity. It's that level of change. And folks who don't get that, good luck to them, but I don't think they're going to get very far.

This is a one-in-a-generation opportunity. For all of us.

How can you convert browsers to buyers with Agentic Search? Let's break it down. How Agentic Search understands deep shop— shopper intent to deliver instant relevant results and converting browsers into buyers through an intelligent conversational search experience. Kerry Chow joined by John Andrews, CEO and co-founder of Simulate, which was just recently acquired by Salesforce. John, thanks so much for joining us here on Salesforce+.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me here. Very— I'm very excited to be here at Salesforce and yeah, excited to talk with you today.

Yeah. I mean, we've lived with keyword-based search for quite a while now, right? Like, why is agentics search the next necessary evolution for retail?

Yeah, it's a great question. Keyword search has served us well for 25 years. It, you know, Google has trained us to use keyword search. The problem with that is that it requires the shopper or the user to think about, you know, describing what may be the best way to get a decent result as opposed to just saying what they want. Right. And describing their intent. What What we're changing to is a more kind of intent-based experience where the shopper can describe exactly what it is that they're looking for, what's important to them, and the words that actually matter to them, and just provides a meaningfully better experience. And we have the technology now to be able to do that. So keyword search done its job, but it's time to go away.

It's wild to me, though, that we do have— I am still an old-school keyword search guy, but then when I do get that Agentic Search, it is such an easier experience for me. As you mentioned, John, like Salesforce did recently acquire Simulate, but I want to know how does Simulate's intent-aware context engine— I want to make sure I get that right— intent-aware context engine, how does that change the way a shopper interacts with a brand?

Yeah, now it's a— so the way to think about it, right, is what we do is we build a model and it's a, it's a CommerceGPT, right? It is what it says it is. It is a GPT model that understands commerce and understands products extremely well. And what, what we do is we build this model with a combination of our customers' data, right, their product catalog data, their browse history data for how their customers interact on their kind of their retail shops. But then we also create an enormous amount of synthetic data, right, simulated shopper experiences that give us much, much more data and an amount of data to be able to build this GPT model that now understands so that a customer can say, you know, rather than saying, you know, we were just with one of our customers that is a furniture company. Right. And so rather than saying white sofa, right, I can actually now go in and say I'm looking for a white sofa that is stain resistant and, you know, plush and fluffy.

Right.

And then just describe things that now this this Commerce GPT understands the intent and the context of what that customer is actually looking for.

It's incredible that, that intent-to-wear context engine, but conversion is truly that holy grail, right, for retailers. So, so how does intelligent discovery specifically turn a casual browser into a buyer?

Yeah.

So if you think about, if you think about, you know, conversion, you want to understand You want to understand that context and intent. When you think about search, it's really two things that are happening. If somebody puts in a query, they put in their prompt, they put in, you know, whatever. The two things that happen is recall. So of a product catalog of 1,000 products or 1 million products, what are the items that we want to bring back that are the right items that could be in the result set that matter to the customer? And then the second is ranking or relevancy. Right. How do we then order the things? One of the ways that we think about this and is kind of important in the underlying science of how we think about it is more in terms of assortment optimization. Right. So if I, you know, if I search for— if somebody searches for black dress, you know, we could just bring back 50 black dresses, but we might want to like mix in a few burgundy dresses or navy dresses into how we think about to help the customer kind of discover more products. And what we find is that actually leads to higher conversion in terms of the customer being, you know, seeing items that they may not have thought about. But we understand based on what other customers are doing and that journey and that context and that intent to then to lead to higher conversions, that being the holy grail at the end of the day.

Yeah, that makes sense to me because just purely as a shopper, you know, I've mentioned this before, sometimes I don't know exactly what I want, right? I might have an idea, but then if you put that for me. I'm like, oh, it's actually that. That's the thing I was looking for. If the AI is doing the heavy lifting of discovery, what does this mean for the merchants and the brand managers?

Yeah. So the merchants, the merchants have had a job, and particularly digital merchants, they've had a job of basically putting their fingers in the dike of keyword search for the past 25 years. Right. They have to put in a bunch of rules for boost and bury they need to put in different redirects for synonyms or spell corrections, right? You do not have to do that anymore, right? You need to let the AI do its job and learn and continue to understand it. It understands that context. We have one customer who was moving off of a competitor's product. It was more kind of keyword search based and they had 1,700 rules. And when they moved, you can't operate a website, you can't operate a storefront with 1,800 rules, right? They just start stepping on each other and overriding each other. It's very confusing and it's a bad experience for the customers. And when they went on our platform, they had 7 rules, right? And those were more like legal requirements, right? Now they built up a few more for like promotional rules that they want to do, but this frees up the merchant to actually focus more on the strategic initiatives. Understanding like, hey, how can I better optimize this experience for the customer with the right products? How can I think about personalization in a deeper level? What are the promotions that I want to run to like highlight the products that we, you know, are really putting the energy of our merchandising efforts behind? They can do that as opposed to simply putting their fingers in the dike.

Everybody's going to be happier. Like, I don't want to deal with those 1,700 rules, right? Versus like—

and you can't. You can't deal with it.

Exactly.

So much.

Exactly. You mentioned a lot of exciting things, but I really want to just drive this value-add point home. Like, how is the acquisition of Simulate truly going to make Agentforce so much more powerful?

Yeah, so this is one of the things that Vivek, my co-founder, and I were super excited about coming into Salesforce and like being acquired into Salesforce is because of the Agentforce strategy. If you think about, and particularly from a commerce and a retail perspective, if you think about agentic workflows, right, and somebody shopping, let's just take Shopper Agent as an example, right? And you want a conversational experience. You want something that can interact with you to kind of understand your intent. The most important elements of that is understanding the products and understanding at a very deep level how customers talk about those products, how they describe them. So that when you're interacting with a customer, you can bring back the appropriate products no matter how eloquent the, the, the agent sounds. If you're not telling, showing them the right products, it's going to be a bad experience. Right. So the big thing that we're doing is feeding into AgentForce, feeding into the shopper agent, feeding into merchandise, you know, the merchant agent to be able to make sure that the customer gets, sees the right products. And at the end of the day, we feel like that is the most important part of the experience. And it's going to really kind of set fuel to the fire of like bringing AgentForce to, to all of our customers.

Yeah, putting the gas on it. I love it. John, thank you so much for breaking down Agentic Search and truly what it can mean for all these organizations.

Yeah, my pleasure.

To learn more about AgentForce Commerce innovations and why it gives retailers and B2Bs everything they need to turn conversations into conversions, Scan the QR code on your screen.