Salesforce ‘s latest Cyber Week 2025 data sheds new light on the health of global commerce, but more importantly on the growing technology gap between retailers. Although global consumer spending increased by 7 per cent year-on-year to reach $336.6 billion, the key insight lies deeper. This year’s shopping season became the first real test for so-called agent-based businesses. The results are clear: companies using autonomous AI agents, such as Pandora and Shark Ninja, saw sales grow 32 per cent faster than competitors relying on traditional methods.
Artificial intelligence has ceased to be just an add-on to marketing, becoming a critical part of the sales infrastructure. According to an analysis of the behaviour of 1.5 billion consumers, AI and agents directly influenced 20 per cent of all global orders, generating $67 billion in revenue. These tools have proven indispensable not only in recommendations, but more importantly in customer service. In the face of rising enquiry volumes, the number of interactions handled by agents increased by 55 per cent on a weekly basis. Importantly, these systems were not limited to passively answering queries, but autonomously performed complex operations such as initiating returns or updating logistics data.
Piotr Łobaczewski, Regional Sales Director at Salesforce, highlights a significant change in the IT architecture of CEE companies. We are seeing a shift away from simple automation towards models that combine online and offline data into a single customer profile. This integration allows AI agents to make real-time business decisions, which, during peak periods like Black Friday, determines margin maintenance and customer loyalty.
Cyber Week 2025 also revealed a fundamental shift in the way products are searched. The dominance of the mobile channel, which accounted for 70 per cent of orders, coincides with the dusk of traditional search engines in favour of conversational AI. Consumers are increasingly asking bots for recommendations, rather than browsing product listings themselves. For the AI and e-commerce industry, the lesson is clear: brands that do not provide AI agents with structured metadata about prices and stock levels will become invisible to the digital consumer. Commerce is entering an era where sales are determined not only by the availability of goods, but above all by the quality of the data feeding the algorithms.
