New Salesforce research reveals
Salesforce has released UAE findings from its fourth edition of the State of Commerce report, revealing a market moving quickly to adapt as shoppers increasingly start their purchase journeys with a question to an AI assistant rather than a traditional search engine.
Globally, the report found that agentic search as the first step in the shopping journey grew 200 per cent year over year, with traffic referred from AI chats climbing between 150 and 428 per cent across every quarter measured.
Buying decisions
UAE businesses are already acting to stay visible where buying decisions now begin. 62 per cent have created or optimized content for conversational and question-based queries, 61 per cent have improved product content quality, and another 61 per cent have worked to increase their presence across third-party sources.
58 per cent have submitted data feeds directly to AI search platforms, while 37 per cent have optimized product descriptions for natural language and 31 per cent now monitor how their brands appear in AI-generated responses.
“The UAE has always understood that technology only matters when it improves how people live and work. What I see in these numbers is execution catching up to that ambition, and that is when real transformation happens,” stated Mohammed Alkhotani, SVP and GM, Salesforce, Middle East.
