UAE commerce leaders are restructuring how they reach customers as AI-driven search displaces traditional search engines at the top of the purchase funnel, according to Salesforce’s fourth edition of its State of Commerce report.
Globally, the research found that agentic search as the first step in a shopping journey grew 200 per cent year over year, with traffic referred from AI chat platforms rising between 150 and 428 per cent across every quarter measured. For UAE businesses, implementing or expanding AI capabilities now ranks as their top priority for the year ahead, above expanding their customer base, adapting to shifting buyer behaviour, and improving data quality.
Adaptation is already underway. According to the report, 62 per cent of UAE businesses have created or optimised 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.
Meanwhile, 58 per cent have submitted data feeds directly to AI search platforms, 37 per cent have optimised 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 this research shows is a market that gets it. Our commerce leaders are not waiting to see what AI search becomes. They are already reshaping how customers find them, and they are doing the harder work of connecting their data, so the experience actually delivers. The ambition in this country has never been the question. What I see in these numbers is execution catching up to that ambition, and that is when real transformation happens,” Mohammed Alkhotani, SVP and GM, Salesforce, Middle East said in a statement.
The data suggests that foundational work on data unification is delivering returns. Among UAE organisations that have unified their customer data, 48 per cent report improved outcomes from AI and automation, 47 per cent report better alignment across sales, marketing, and commerce teams, and 46 per cent have achieved more consistent pricing.
Conversion rates and customer retention have improved at 43 per cent of these organisations, and 41 per cent resolve customer issues faster.
The report also identifies where UAE omnichannel experiences are failing. For B2B organisations, ordering channels siloed across multiple systems is the most common breakdown, cited by 44 per cent.
Inventory data that is not synchronised in real time affects 37 per cent of businesses, while 35 per cent cannot consistently recognise customer information across channels. Inconsistent pricing and promotions affect 33 per cent. Just 1 per cent of UAE multichannel organisations report no significant breakdowns at all.
