Dive Brief:
- Consumers embraced AI during the holiday season, with the technology driving 20% of retail sales and $262 billion in revenue, according to Salesforce retail data released Monday.
- The technology was particularly popular for customer service. Customers used companies’ AI and agentic support options more than twice as much during the holiday rush than in the prior two months.
- Agentic AI usage spiked at the tail end of the season, with the number of AI-powered conversations rising 66% in December over November. Interactions during the week of Christmas and Boxing Day were up 12% year over year.
Dive Insight:
Consumers’ use of AI continued to climb during the holiday season as they become more comfortable with the technology.
The share of both global and U.S. traffic from third-party AI search channels, including ChatGPT and Perplexity, doubled compared to last year, according to Salesforce. Additionally, more consumers let AI agents take action on their behalf, with the technology handling 142% more tasks during the holiday season than they had in the prior two months.
Some of the common tasks identified by Salesforce include updating delivery addresses and initiating returns.
“This wasn't just a bigger holiday season than last year; it was a more efficient, intelligent one,” Caila Schwartz, director of consumer insights at Salesforce, said in a prepared statement.
AI may be growing in popularity, but companies need to take care to not rush implementation.
Max Ball, principal analyst at Forrester, predicts that as many as one-third of brands will roll out AI in self-service and fail because they introduced the technology before they were ready. Trying to move too fast with self-service can run the risk of failing to resolve problems and harming customer relationships.
That doesn’t mean that companies should ignore AI altogether. Shoppers are using third-party tools to assist with product research, which ultimately leads to a different customer journey and potentially a very different on-site experience.
As a result, CX leaders now need to account for customer journeys that start with a third-party AI tool rather than on a website, according to Terra Higginson, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group. This includes reconsidering how this changes what customers may need when they arrive at a brand website.
