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 fastIf 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📰 Make sure to subscribe to the Retailgentic Substack: https://www.retailgentic.com📺 Watch episodes on YouTube: youtube.com/@retailgentic🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple, etc.