Ahead of the 2025 holiday shopping season, retailers are relaunching ecommerce sites, watching web traffic attributed to artificial intelligence and generally trying to understand how shoppers will use AI in the months ahead.
At Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, retailers including Williams-Sonoma, Pandora and SharkNinja shared some of their latest efforts to serve their online customers. AI figured prominently in their thinking. And new survey results show who the most AI-savvy shoppers might be.
What new survey data says about how holiday shoppers will use AI
New survey data published by Deloitte frames young, Gen Z shoppers as the most enthusiastic about generative AI for a range of holiday shopping use cases. While 33% of all U.S. consumers surveyed indicated in their responses that they plan to use AI for holiday shopping in 2025, the share of Gen Z shoppers planning to do so was 43%.
Shoppers showed signs of rising comfort with generative AI, too. 26% of those surveyed said their comfort levels were higher than they were six months earlier.
Deloitte surveyed 4,270 U.S. consumers in the report, which also identified how shoppers intended to leverage generative AI tools. For instance, 56% said they would leverage AI for comparing prices and finding deals. 47% want to use it to summarize reviews. And 33% want to use it for generating their shopping lists.
That intent represents a great deal of trust on the part of consumers as new options, such as agentic AI and checkout features from OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and others test the water among more users.
Williams-Sonoma, Pandora and SharkNinja share features at Dreamforce
At Dreamforce, some of Salesforce’s ecommerce platform clients shared the latest features they have added heading into the holiday season. All three highlighted how they are using AI.
Williams-Sonoma, for example, is developing interior design agents, AI agents that are geared toward advising customers about home furnishings choices in the context of room layouts and other parameters.
Pandora, the Denmark-based jewelry retailer known for its bracelets and charms, participated in Dreamforce’s opening keynote presentation, sharing details about its shopper-facing agent, Gemma, that was built with Salesforce’s Agentforce Commerce (formerly Commerce Cloud).
Meanwhile, SharkNinja relaunched its direct-to-consumer ecommerce site to include Salesforce-built AI agents for customer support.
Williams-Sonoma Inc. operates its namesake brand, Williams Sonoma, as well as West Elm and Pottery Barn. It ranks No. 23 in the Top 2000 Database, which ranks North America’s largest online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales and more.
Pandora ranks No. 63 in the Europe Database, Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest online retailers in the region.
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