Salesforce makes Agentforce Commerce generally available with ChatGPT integration

Salesforce has made its Agentforce Commerce suite of AI shopping agents generally available, with Shopper Agent, Buyer Agent, and Merchant Agent now live and natively integrated into ChatGPT, ahead of a Google Search and Gemini app integration arriving later this summer.

What's new

Salesforce says "the agents are now generally available: Shopper Agent, Buyer Agent, and Merchant Agent — with native integration into ChatGPT; Google Search, including AI Mode; and the Gemini app arriving this summer." The ChatGPT integration lets retailers sync their product catalog to ChatGPT directly from Salesforce's Business Manager, without third-party tools or custom development, so shoppers can discover and buy products through a conversational AI assistant rather than only through a retailer's own site or app.

Salesforce is pairing the release with holiday-season data to make its case for urgency: the company says AI influenced 20% of global online sales during the recent holiday season, worth $262 billion, and that retailers running their own shopper agents grew sales 59% faster than retailers that didn't. It also cites AI-referred traffic converting at eight times the rate of traffic from social platforms. Nitin Mangtani, EVP and GM of Agentforce Commerce, framed the strategic bet behind the release: "Referral traffic to brand sites will be hugely influenced by AI platforms — Gemini, ChatGPT, Anthropic — and social apps like Instagram and TikTok. But commerce will happen predominantly on owned and operated properties: your website, your app, your messaging channels, your stores."

Context

The release reflects a broader shift Salesforce is betting on: product discovery increasingly starting inside AI chat assistants rather than a traditional search bar, while the actual purchase still needs to happen on a retailer's own commerce infrastructure. Agentforce Commerce is Salesforce's answer to that split — plugging its agents into the AI assistants where shopping research now starts, while keeping checkout and fulfillment on Salesforce-run storefronts. It lands ahead of peak holiday shopping season, when the commercial stakes of getting agentic shopping right are highest for Salesforce's retail customers.

Why it matters

As consumers increasingly start product research inside ChatGPT, Gemini, or other AI assistants instead of a search engine, retailers face a real risk of losing visibility into — and control over — the top of their sales funnel. By shipping agents that plug directly into ChatGPT (with Google and Gemini integrations following), Salesforce is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer that lets retailers show up inside those AI assistants without ceding the actual transaction to a third party, a land-grab that Google, OpenAI, and commerce platforms like Shopify are all contesting simultaneously.