The way Australians find, compare and buy things is quietly shifting away from the search bar and the storefront, and towards a conversation with a machine. Instead of typing a product name into Google or scrolling a retailer’s catalogue, a growing share of shoppers now open an AI assistant and simply ask it what to buy. That behavioural change sits at the heart of new research from Salesforce, which argues that the modern shopping journey no longer starts with a search but with a question.
According to Salesforce research reported by Dynamic Business, a striking 91 per cent of Australian commerce leaders say artificial intelligence is already reshaping what their customers expect. That is not a forecast about some distant future. It is a description of what merchants say is happening on their own sites and in their own service queues right now, as consumers arrive with expectations shaped by chatbots that can summarise, recommend and personalise in seconds.
From search box to conversation
For two decades, the dominant mental model of online retail has been the funnel: a customer searches, browses a list of options, filters by price or rating, then clicks through to buy. AI assistants collapse much of that process. A shopper can now describe a need in plain language, ask for a shortlist tailored to their budget, and receive a recommendation without ever visiting a category page. The retailer, in many cases, only enters the picture at the very end, if at all.
That is a profound change for anyone who sells online. It means the moment of influence, the point at which a brand can shape a decision, is moving upstream and out of the retailer’s control. If the AI does the comparing, then being discoverable, structured and machine-readable matters more than a slick homepage. Salesforce frames this as the rise of agentic commerce, where software agents act on a shopper’s behalf, and it argues that the businesses winning attention will be those whose data and product information are ready to be surfaced by those agents.
Enthusiasm, meet unreadiness
The more uncomfortable finding is the gap between recognition and readiness. Australian commerce leaders overwhelmingly accept that AI is changing customer expectations, yet relatively few say they feel prepared to meet those expectations. That mismatch is the real story. It is one thing to agree that the ground is moving, and quite another to have the data foundations, the integrations and the governance in place to respond.
There are good reasons for the hesitation. Feeding a customer-facing AI agent requires clean, unified product and customer data, which many mid-sized retailers simply do not have. It also raises thorny questions about accuracy, because an assistant that confidently recommends the wrong product, misquotes a price or invents a returns policy can damage trust faster than any slow website ever did. Add the privacy considerations that come with personalising at scale, and it becomes clear why enthusiasm outpaces execution.
Two ways to read the shift
Optimists see a genuine opportunity. If a small Australian brand structures its catalogue well and plugs into the assistants consumers are already using, it can compete for a recommendation on the strength of its product rather than its marketing budget. Agentic commerce could, in that reading, level a playing field that has long favoured whoever could spend the most on paid search and advertising. Better service is part of the pitch too, since an AI agent that handles routine questions frees human staff for the complicated cases that actually need them.
Sceptics counter that handing the customer relationship to a third-party AI is a Faustian bargain. If shoppers increasingly trust a general assistant to choose for them, retailers risk becoming interchangeable suppliers behind an opaque recommendation engine they do not own and cannot audit. The same dynamic that once made businesses dependent on search rankings could repeat itself, only this time the intermediary is a conversational model whose reasoning is far harder to see. Control over the customer, the argument goes, is exactly what merchants should be reluctant to surrender.
What it means for Australia
For the Australian market specifically, the stakes are sharpened by scale. This is a comparatively small economy with a heavy concentration of retail spending among a handful of large players, and a long tail of small and medium businesses that lack big technology teams. If agentic commerce rewards those with unified data and mature systems, the risk is that the advantage flows to the incumbents and the global platforms, widening the gap rather than closing it. The optimistic scenario, in which a nimble local brand punches above its weight, only holds if smaller merchants can access the tools without needing an enterprise budget.
There is also a distinctly Australian consumer angle. Shoppers here have grown notably price-conscious through a stretch of cost-of-living pressure, and an assistant that reliably surfaces the best value could accelerate the shift in behaviour rather than slow it. That puts pressure on retailers to get their pricing, availability and product data right, because an AI agent will expose inconsistencies that a human browsing a website might have forgiven. Regulators and consumer advocates will be watching too, given the questions agentic shopping raises about transparency, data handling and whether recommendations are genuinely in the customer’s interest or quietly influenced by commercial arrangements.
What’s next
The near-term task for most Australian businesses is unglamorous but decisive: get the data house in order. That means unifying product catalogues, cleaning up inventory and pricing feeds, and making sure the information an AI agent might draw on is accurate and current. Beyond the plumbing, leaders will need to decide how far they are willing to let external assistants mediate their customer relationships, and where they want to build their own AI-powered experiences instead.
The signal from this research is not that AI will eventually change retail. It is that the change is already underway, that Australian commerce leaders can see it plainly, and that most of them are not yet ready. Closing that gap between awareness and capability is likely to define which local retailers thrive over the next few years and which find themselves relegated to being just another option an assistant reads out.
Sources: Dynamic Business.
