Ecommerce technology provider Salesforce has been piloting a program in which it offers its merchants an integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
This is part of a growing trend among retailers and technology providers to join more artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platforms as additional channels to make sales. Gordon Evans, chief marketing officer of Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud, shared how Salesforce is approaching its integration with ChatGPT so far — and what that could mean for selling through other large language models (LLMs) and other AI-powered platforms.
Salesforce’s pilot program with OpenAI has enrolled “dozens of retailers,” he told Digital Commerce 360. Two of them are apparel brands Crocs and Pacsun.
The integration centers around syndication, he said, allowing Salesforce merchants to ensure their products show up in discovery on ChatGPT.
In North America, 78 of the Top 2000 online retailers use Salesforce as their ecommerce platform, according to Digital Commerce 360 data. In 2025, those 78 online retailers combined for more than $192.60 billion in web sales. The Top 2000 is Digital Commerce 360’s database ranking North America’s largest online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales.
How Salesforce is working with OpenAI toward agentic commerce
“The idea is that we have syndication between the merchant’s product catalog and ChatGPT so that it makes the merchant’s product catalog more discoverable, more accurate and generally delivering better results for the shopper,” Evans told Digital Commerce 360.
It seeks to help shoppers find what they’re looking for more quickly while creating a “better overall experience” with retail brands. One challenge, he noted, is ensuring the integration accurately represents a merchant’s product catalog, brand content, pricing and promotions. It also differs from a “more general search of the internet, which may turn up reseller content,” he added.
So far, the way the Salesforce integration with ChatGPT works is that users can write to the LLM about products they’re looking for and why. ChatGPT would then recommend products it identifies as compatible with the user’s stated intent.
ChatGPT will then display products that presumably interest the consumer. If so, the consumer can click on those products, and ChatGPT will direct consumers to a merchant’s retail site, where a consumer can then complete the transaction.
Evans said Salesforce is mapping the fields, or attributes, from a merchant’s product catalog to ChatGPT.
“It’s more about integration between the product catalog and the synchronization of that than showing up in an app,” he said.
Evans added that once the feature becomes generally available, any merchant using Salesforce’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) commerce product will have this capability.
‘Context-aware’ vs. ‘keyword’ search
Evans said Salesforce is “approaching the same opportunity from a different point of view” following its acquisition of Cimulate.
Cimulate is an AI-powered product discovery startup. After announcing a definitive agreement to acquire it in February, Salesforce completed the acquisition in March.
Once a shopper goes to a merchant’s site, Evans said, the site now offers what Salesforce describes as “context-aware search capability.” In other words, it factors in more than individual keywords in a search.
Gordon gave an example of a consumer needing clothes for Coachella. On a retailer’s site that offers this capability, she can ask, “What should I wear to Coachella?”
“The intent-aware search can understand that you’re probably looking for boots and whatever, a sundress,” Evans said. “But a keyword-based search would return null result.”
He said Salesforce sees an opportunity in using this capability “to help improve the shopper experience, whether they’re coming from an organic search or an LLM like ChatGPT.”
Part of this comes from the Cimulate technology, which that company calls CommerceGPT, interpreting natural language. Evans said it can infer intent and then provide relevant results based on all the traffic it models. It looks at a merchant’s existing catalog and existing search behavior and then model it, simulating thousands or tens of thousands of times, he said.
That makes it so that any retailer “could have search data essentially just like Amazon would, where you’ve got thousands of different kinds of queries and intent expressions that you can then use to better understand what your customers are shopping for when they hit their site.”
And when new trends happen, Cimulate’s CommerceGPT LLM can detect and respond to them “much more quickly than a merchant having to listen on social channels and then update a product catalog,” Evans added.
Salesforce’s broader approach to agentic commerce
“The partnership we have today with ChatGPT is around the product catalog syndication, so the checkout would happen on the merchant’s site,” Evans said.
But he noted that Salesforce also feels it’s its job to listen to its retailers as well as where those retailers’ customers are. That could be on mobile devices broadly or on specific apps, he said.
“Our responsibility is to make those tools available so that our retailers can connect to their shoppers wherever that might be,” Evans said. “Now it’s on ChatGPT or in [Google] Gemini. A few years ago it was TikTok Shop.”
He noted that Pacsun is using the integration to “reach their Gen Z and Gen Alpha shoppers and be in those places where their shoppers are spending time.”
Evans also told Digital Commerce 360 that Salesforce will work with partners such as Perplexity, Anthropic’s Claude or Gemini “to deliver agentic commerce as far as they are willing.”
“If they can go farther than product-catalog integration and our customers want us to do that, we will go there,” he said. “If that’s checkout, great; if that’s somehow related to orders or somehow related to demand, we will definitely go and partner as deeply as we can with each of those different companies.”
He added that the agentic commerce is still in its infancy. Its implications are still broad and “might be not just for the shopper experience but for the merchant experience. How do you make the merchant’s life easier in terms of understanding trends and remerchandising your storefront based on data or suggestions that your agent could make?”
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