How AI Agents Are Already Transforming Retail | Michelle Grant, Salesforce

In this episode of Retailgentic, Scot Wingo is joined by Michelle Grant, Director of Strategy & Insights for Retail and Consumer Goods at Salesforce. Michelle brings powerful insights from Salesforce’s massive retail data sets, surveys, and first-hand industry experience.

They dive deep into:

🧠 How Gen Z is driving the adoption of AI shopping agents
📊 Data from Salesforce’s Connected Shoppers Report
🤖 Where AI agents are showing up in real-world retail—from customer service to marketing and inventory
📈 What brands and retailers must do to stay relevant in the agentic future
💬 Why websites aren’t going away—but will need to evolve fast

If you want to understand the real-world impact of generative and agentic AI in commerce, this episode is a must-watch.

0:00 - Intro and Michelle’s background 
2:00 - What Michelle does at Salesforce 
5:45 - Salesforce’s data sources: Commerce Cloud + surveys 
8:00 - GenAI traffic trends (Q1 2025 data) 
10:30 - AI agent traffic from ChatGPT & Gemini 
12:00 - Social vs. search vs. agentic behavior 
14:10 - Connected Shoppers Report overview 
15:00 - Gen Z adoption of AI agents 
18:20 - What consumers want AI agents to do (customer service, returns, loyalty) 
22:00 - Retailer adoption of agentic tools 
26:00 - The future of retail websites 
30:00 - Hyper-personalization and AI memory 
35:00 - Final thoughts on retail strategy in the AI era

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