Salesforce: AI will drive $61 billion in online Cyber Week sales

Cyber Week alone will see some $311 billion in spending worldwide, $75 billion in the U.S. and account for almost a quarter of holiday purchases, according to Salesforce. What’s more, AI is expected to play a big role in this year’s holiday spree, assisting in 19% of Cyber Week sales valued at $61 billion.

Global online sales dipped slightly YoY in October, but rose 8% in the first week of November, indicating that activity is picking up for the holidays. Interestingly, the two categories showing highest growth are makeup and active footwear, each of which would once have been very much in-person purchases.

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 the assists. AI will augment the digital shopping experience, not just through tailored product recommendations but also with AI agents, effectively doing the consumer’s shopping for them. Twenty-four percent of consumers are happy with that. AI agents can also deal (by voice or text) with order inquiries, 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% of consumers will be pleased to use AI agents if their service issues are resolved more quickly).

“For retailers that are using AI agents, particularly within their customer service channels, they’re seeing chat engagement grow at two times the rate of retailers that are using traditional chatbots or other kinds of service channels,” Caila Schwartz told us. Schwartz is director of consumer insights and strategy, retail and consumer goods, at Salesforce. “Agents are able to take on a higher case volume, are more efficient and incredibly more able to serve the needs of the customer.”

Michael Affronti, SVP and GM, Commerce Cloud, sees additional advantages: “From a customer experience perspective that’s where a lot of our clients are surprised and very optimistic — not only can we lower costs on the service center side, because we don’t need as many people answering phones for ‘Where’s my order?’ calls during Cyber Week. If people are actually excited about the experience, we can drive loyalty — then they talk about driving basket size, using the agents not just to deflect but to grow.”

Dig deeper: Salesforce launches Agentforce

Mobile will play a larger role. Doubtless, due to the immense improvements in shopping and checkout experiences on mobile apps and the mobile web, mobile orders will make up 70% of sales during Cyber Week. This is a worldwide statistic, so it incorporates markets that are mostly mobile-first.

Why we care. Salesforce holiday insights, derived from such a large data set, are always worth tracking. This season’s predictions are being released against the backdrop of Salesforce’s big commitment to what it calls the “agentic” revolution — the use of Agentforce AI agents across commerce, service, sales and marketing. Will customers embrace these agents or continue to pine for the human touch. It depends, doubtless, on how well the agents perform.