At consumer electronics brand Dell, traffic from agentic artificial intelligence (AI) sources has grown in recent months, but with qualifiers.

Breanna Fowler, head of global consumer revenue programs at Dell, told Digital Commerce 360 that for now, she is still “unimpressed” with agentic AI.

There has been an uptick in traffic from agentic AI, she said, but “nothing to the point that is earth-shaking or completely shattering for me just yet. I’m still one of those people that’s unimpressed by what agentic shopping is actually doing versus what it maybe has the potential in the future to possibly do.”

Dell ranks No. 16 in the Top 2000 Database. The database tracks North America’s largest online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales and more.

The 2026 edition of Digital Commerce 360’s State of American Ecommerce Report features a new set of rankings focused on AI. The AI Commerce rankings indicate the foremost beneficiaries of AI-driven discovery in online retail. And they do not perfectly align with the overall highest-ranking performers by web sales in the Top 2000.

In that set of rankings, Dell is No. 5. It’s one of four retailers that were not among the largest 10 among the Top 2000 but were among the largest 10 in the AI Commerce rankings.

The shifts in position are “noteworthy in meaningful ways, not only because they show which brands may be positioned to grow sales volumes as AI platforms recommend them, but also because they characterize merchandise categories that appear to outperform in AI discovery channels,” according to the report.

Dell still testing how to integrate agentic AI

Fowler said Dell has built a preliminary strategy for how Dell handles AI agents browsing the retailer’s site.

“There’s a lot of work we’re doing there,” Fowler told Digital Commerce 360. “A lot that’s in testing and in proof-of-concept phases on how we think integrating with LLMs on agentic shopping is going to be right to do. And I would say there’s probably even some differences between what our IT leadership thinks the future is going to be versus what I’m convinced will and won’t happen. This isn’t necessarily the first time new technology has come out in the market that has changed the way people shop.”

Fowler cited DoorDash and Uber Eats changing how consumers purchase online from restaurants. Now, those companies and Instacart are also providing last-mile delivery for retailers. Fowler also said emerging AI technology could have a comparable effect to that of aggregation sites for travel purchases.

She said she has a “practical expectation” for large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI. Fowler said that she sees agentic AI becoming a tool for aggregation — “another way to pool results and refer traffic.”

“But I don’t think that agentic shopping is going to be en masse the way that people suddenly are buying goods,” she added. “I just — I’m a bit of a skeptic there.”

Search becoming increasingly common use case for agentic AI

With or without an LLM and agentic commerce in the mix, she said, ecommerce sites “can do the most good for their customers” through a “really great search experience.”

Both retailers and technology companies are increasingly integrating agentic AI into search experiences.

In March, ecommerce platform providers Salesforce and Shopify each enhanced their approaches to agentic AI-powered search. Salesforce deployed technology from Cimulate, which it acquired. Meanwhile, search provider Algolia announced enhancements to its AI integration with Shopify. Shopify has also made its brands shoppable inside OpenAI’s ChatGPT, using the agentic AI platform as a discovery channel.

“If I can’t find your products easily and effortlessly, no amount of content and configurator capabilities — nobody really gives a crap about that stuff,” Fowler said. “If they can’t find it, they’re gonna leave. They’re gonna get frustrated. They’re gonna go.”

Fowler’s skepticism doesn’t stop her from monitoring agentic AI traffic to Dell’s ecommerce site. She said she hasn’t noticed “anything that’s behaviorally consistent yet” regarding traffic to Dell’s website from agentic AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude.

Configurable products such as computers still take “a fair amount of shipping and exploration and learning,” she said. That’s the type of behavior Fowler sees when consumers browse Dell’s site.

“They don’t just go and click buy,” Fowler said. “In the third-party electronics space, they don’t fundamentally come to the site to learn and browse. They come to buy. And that’s true whether they’re coming from an LLM, Google, what have you, that it’s just a different behavior. And so I’m finding more that the type of product a customer is looking for dictates behavior more so than the referral source of the traffic.”

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