The IT Nerd

As Canadians head into back-to-school shopping season, the way they discover and buy products is facing an upheaval. AI search is driving entirely new consumer behaviours that retailers need to understand now to prepare for their most important quarter: the holiday rush.

Salesforce’s State of Commerce report, found that the use of agentic search as the first step in the shopping journey has grown 200% YoY.  Key Canadian findings include:

• The New Shopping Discovery Standard – 89% of Canadian commerce professionals agree that AI and LLMs will be essential to product discovery within the next year
• Surging Customer Expectations – 89% of Canadian commerce professionals say AI is raising customer expectations
• Future-Proofing with Agentic AI – To stay ahead, 67% of Canadian commerce professionals are taking action: 34% are already using agentic AI, and another 33% plan to adopt it within the next six months. 

“Customers aren’t starting with 10 blue links anymore — they’re asking an AI what to buy, and by the time they reach your site, they’ve already formed an opinion. If you aren’t part of that first conversation, you’re invisible before the journey even begins.” — Caila Schwartz, Director of Industry Insights, Salesforce

You can read the report here: https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/agentic-search-growth/

Salesforce has released its 2026 Agentic Enterprise Index, which analyzes global AI usage data to uncover how businesses are deploying, using, and getting value out of AI agents. 

The index shows enterprise adoption is scaling up, with the average number of AI agents activated per enterprise nearly tripling year-over-year. Based on data from 734 million completed AI tasks, businesses are shifting from basic AI chatbots to complex, multi-step automated workflows that deliver tangible ROI.

The findings come as 27.8% of large Canadian enterprises are actively adopting AI, according to Statistics Canada, raising the question of what effective agent deployment looks like in practice. Salesforce’s data provides key insights for Canadian organizations looking to move from AI experimentation to measurable business impact.

Insights from the report include:

• Agent Versatility: The unique skill set of an average agent grew from 2 distinct business actions to 6 by the end of 2025, turning agents into cross-functional partners for enterprises.
• Faster Time-to-Value: Average agent deployment time dropped 53% to just 2 days, showing companies are moving past long pilot phases.
• Industry Rollouts: Consumer sectors have scaled AI agents quickly during demand spikes (during peak shopping season, the average retail agent drove 4x the sales for companies compared to those without one and was able to act on 9 skills), while highly regulated industries, such as Financial Services, led in agent sophistication.

You can read the report here: https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/agentic-enterprise-index-insights-2026/

Something that I missed in my coverage yesterday is that Salesforce has acquired Fin. Here’s the details:

Fin’s core offering, its AI Agent, resolves complex customer queries end-to-end, across every channel, including live chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, phone, and Slack. The AI Agent is powered by the company’s proprietary AI model, Apex, that is purpose-built for customer support and has demonstrated industry-leading resolution rates that outperform top commercially available frontier models.

 Anoop Dawar, Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) of Deepgram had this to say:

“This isn’t a one-off. In a single month we’ve seen Fin acquired, SpaceX pay $60 billion for Cursor, and OpenAI stand up a $10 billion deployment company – three very different bets on the same scarce thing: teams that can make AI agents work reliably in the real world, not just in a demo. That capability has quietly become the most valuable asset in software, because these are probabilistic systems that drift and have to be measured and monitored continuously to stay accurate. And it gets hardest in voice – real-time, unforgiving, no second take – which is exactly where the next phase of this race will be won.”

The deal is scheduled to close during Salesforce’s fiscal year 2027 and Salesforce will not impact Salesforce’s capital return program.

Salesforce today announced a landmark partnership, becoming an Official Tournament Supporter of the FIFA World Cup 2026 in North America and Europe and the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2027 in North America and the host country Brazil. The multi-tournament partnership brings together the most-watched sporting events on the planet with Agentforce 360, the complete portfolio of Salesforce AI solutions that power the Agentic Enterprise — built on Slack, the work operating system where AI is multiplayer, right in the flow of work where your people already are.

FIFA World Cup 26™ will kick off across Mexico, Canada and the United States this summer and will be the largest tournament in FIFA history with 48 teams and an expected global audience of more than 5 billion. Salesforce technology will play a central role in how the tournament operates, engages fans, and coordinates with host cities. 

A Partnership Built for the AI Era

The partnership reflects a shared belief that the future of global events depends on intelligent, connected operations — a true Agentic Enterprise model. Done by bringing together AI agents, connected apps, trusted data, and people in Slack — the multiplayer operating system for AI — to reimagine what’s possible not just for the tournaments, but for the millions of fans, partners, and host communities who experience them.

How Salesforce Will Power the Tournaments

FIFA World Cup 26™ 
FIFA World Cup 26™ will deploy Slack to coordinate workforce management across the 16 host cities in Mexico, Canada and the United States. Slack will serve as an operational surface for workforce, apps, and AI-powered workflows to work together in real time.

FIFA Women’s World Cup 2027™ 
For the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2027™ in Brazil, both Slack and Agentforce 360 Platform will power fan engagement across FIFA’s digital platforms, delivering always-on fan experiences. Autonomous agents will reason over tournament data to provide human-level support, empowering fans with personalized omni-channel interactions.

Stakeholder Communications
Both tournaments will use the Salesforce ecosystem — including Agentforce Service, Sales, and Marketing — to manage relationships and communications with host cities, suppliers, and stakeholders. By integrating Agentforce 360 and Slack, tournament coordination, stakeholder communications, and fan engagement is brought directly into the flow of work. This unified foundation enables the organization to automate interactions, drive revenue growth, and maximize operational efficiency.

Here are findings from the State of Service: AI Agents Edition. The report is based on a survey of 3,075 customer service professionals globally, including 150 respondents from Canada.

A year ago, service organizations were debating how AI agents might deliver, especially in Canada where the market has historically lagged in adoption. This year’s findings show adoption is up, with Customer Satisfaction and Average Handle Time tied for the #1 improved metric, ahead of traditional operational metrics like service rep productivity, customer retention, and first response time.

Top Canadian takeaways we believe will resonate with your audience:

• Agentic AI adoption is accelerating across service organizations: 55% of Canadian service organizations currently use agentic AI.
• Customer trust and transparency remain critical: 78% of organizations allow customers to request a human rep during an AI interaction, while 50% disclose when customers are interacting with AI.
• Organizations are seeing fast time-to-value from AI agents: 65% of organizations report seeing value from AI service agents within 31–60 days, while another 20% see value within 30 days.
• Expanded Agentic AI Use: 73% of Canadian service professionals say their organizations would benefit from expanding their AI agent use. 
• A Budget Priority: In fact, 60% of Canadian service professionals say “customer-facing AI” is their top AI budget priority in the next 6 months.
  • 36% are increasing their AI budget significantly this year 

You can read the report here: http://salesforce.com/news/stories/ai-service-agents-improve-customer-satisfaction

For most enterprises, the promise of AI-driven service is currently blocked by a “middleware mess”—a patchwork of disconnected voice tools and CRM data that forces customers to repeat themselves and agents to hunt for information.

Today, Salesforce is closing this intelligence gap with the launch of Agentforce Contact Center. This is the industry’s first agentic platform to treat voice, digital channels, AI, and CRM as a single, unified nervous system built directly into the Salesforce core.

Why this is the new industry standard for the Agentic Enterprise:

• Native, Not Bolted-On: Unlike legacy CCaaS competitors that require complex integrations, we’ve embedded native telephony and unified routing directly into the CRM.
• One “Unified Brain”: AI and human agents operate from the same real-time customer history. When a case scales from AI to human, the handoff is seamless with full transcript context.

You can read more here: https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/agentforce-contact-center-announcement/

With mounting concerns that AI is producing more ‘workslop’ than ROI, the pressure is on for Canadian businesses to turn AI into revenue and productivity gains in 2026. 

Salesforce’s 7th Edition State of Sales Report reveals AI and AI agents rank as the #1 growth tactic for 2026 shaping Canada’s sales industry. Based on a survey of 4,050 sales professionals – including 250 respondents in Canada – the report finds that top performers are 1.7x more likely to use AI agents than struggling teams. Not only this, nearly 9 in 10 global sellers plan to use AI agents by 2027 to close a growing capacity gap.

Key Canadian findings include:

• 49% of sales representatives view cold outreach as the worst part of their job, and 47% say they lack the bandwidth to do it.
• Only 18% of Canadian sales reps’ workweek is dedicated to prospecting clients – one of the primary, revenue-driving functions of sales teams.
• 88% of Canadian sellers using AI agents say this technology is critical for meeting business demands.

Salesforce is predicting a strong Cyber Week (Thursday, Nov. 27 through Monday, Dec. 1)., showing digital traffic and sales have been higher over the last seven weeks in comparison to 2024. This is based on data from over 1.5 billion global shoppers across 1.5 trillion page views – including Canada.

Consumers’ feelings towards AI-powered shopping are quickly changing (48% of AI users would trust an agent to make a purchase on their behalf), putting AI agents center stage this shopping season and driving an anticipated $73 billion globally during Cyber Week. 

In Canada, we have seen:

• Cyber Week digital sales are expected to reach $3.72B USD, with 2% YoY growth.
• Early-season momentum is strong: from Oct. 1 to Nov. 15, Canadian Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) is up 2% YoY, and digital traffic is up 3% YoY.

You can read the post on this here. 

Here’s a new update from Dreamforce 2025 —where Salesforce unveiled Agentforce 360, the world’s first platform designed to connect humans and AI agents in one trusted system.

The core message from Dreamforce is that AI’s real potential lies in deeply interwoven LLMs and enterprise software. Salesforce announced a series of partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic and more, putting it at the heart of delivering secure, interoperable AI at scale and strengthening the backbone of the $6T agent economy.

Noteworthy highlights from Dreamforce below (all fresh updates since our email on Tuesday):

• Expanded Google Partnership – Salesforce and Google announced an expansion of their strategic partnership, introducing a new wave of AI innovations designed to transform the enterprise. This collaboration brings Google’s cutting-edge Gemini models to the new Agentforce 360 Platform. The expanded partnership places employee productivity at the forefront, integrating Agentforce 360 with Google Workspace for sales and IT service and expanding the Salesforce Gemini integration, already available in Gmail, to more Google Workspace tools.
• Stripe Partnership – Salesforce announced a collaboration with Stripe and OpenAI to build an Instant Checkout integration, guided by the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), allowing thousands of merchants using Agentforce Commerce to harness the power of conversational AI for a faster path to purchase and create seamless, intelligent shopping experiences that unlock new avenues of growth.
• Salesforce and AWS announced how they are accelerating AI transformation for Agentic Enterprises across four core pillars — unified data, secure and interoperable AI agents, modernized contact centers, and streamlined customer procurement of AI solutions through AWS Marketplace.  This makes it easier, safer, and faster for customers like Toyota Motor North America and others, to harness powerful technologies without compromising security or trust.

As we kick off the first day of Dreamforce, the world’s largest technology event, Salesforce is unveiling big headlines that will be relevant for Canadian business leaders.

At a time where enterprise AI adoption is accelerating, new data from IDC and Salesforce shows that 67% of Canadian and American CEOs believe implementing AI agents is critical to staying competitive. These advances in agentic AI give Canadian leaders a way to outpace competitors and tackle challenges like low productivity and ongoing trade tensions.

News highlights: 

• Agentforce 360: Salesforce has launched the Agentic Enterprise with an integrated platform that enables businesses to deploy agents that are grounded in governed, trusted data; work across teams and workflows; collaborate with humans and other agents directly in Slack.

Brands Canadians use daily are already seeing major transformation – from Reddit cutting resolution times from 8.9 minutes to 1.4 minutes (84% reduction) to OpenTable resolving 70% of diner and restaurant inquiries autonomously. 

• OpenAI Partnership: Salesforce is coming to ChatGPT for the first time, starting with Sales and Commerce. Sales reps can ask ChatGPT to share a customer’s sales records and visualizations of their latest earnings reports. With Commerce, vendors can complete purchases, embed product catalogs, and turn natural language inquiries into sales directly within ChatGPT.
• Anthropic Partnership: Claude will be a foundational model to power AI agents and applications within the Agentforce 360 Platform, ensuring highly regulated industries can use Claude securely. Claude will also run in Slack, with future plans for Salesforce apps to run in Claude.