The IT Nerd

Salesforce’s Agentforce 3 is a major upgrade to its digital labour platform that gives companies the visibility and control to scale AI agents without compromise.

Agentforce 3 | New Innovations:

• Optimized observability with a New Agentforce Command Center that provides a complete observability solution for optimizing AI agents, enabling leaders to manage, track, and scale how AI agent activity enhances human productivity. 
• Seamless agent interoperability with built-in support for open standards like Model Context Protocol (MCP), and through the expanded AgentExchange, customers can now access plug-and-play services from over 20 partners, including Box, PayPal and WRITER. 
• Enhanced secure, enterprise-ready performance for 100+ new industry-specific AI actions and support for natively-hosted LLMs such as Anthropic. 

With a new Command Center for complete observability, built-in support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) for plug-and-play interoperability, and over 100 new prebuilt industry actions to speed time to value, Agentforce 3 helps companies scale what works, fix what doesn’t, and unlock the full potential of agentic AI — with clarity, control, and speed.

Why it Matters: AI agent adoption is surging. According to a soon-to-be-released Slack Workflow Index, AI agent usage is up 233% in six months, and over that same period, 8,000 customers have signed up to deploy Agentforce. But until now, agent platforms have lacked the tooling, governance, and observability needed to scale enterprise-wide. Agentforce 3 closes this gap — delivering the complete visibility, secure tool integration, and enterprise-grade controls organizations need to make agent velocity their competitive advantage.

At the same time, New Salesforce research ‘A Pulse on Agentic AI in Canada‘, shows Canadians are frustrated with their current customer service experience 

• Top frustrations include unhelpful/non-existent self-service (59%) 
• Too many transfers across departments/people (55%)
• Spending too much time getting what they need (45%)

Canadians Are Hopeful AI agents Can Help | More than 1 in 3 Canadians are willing to interact with an AI agent if it reduces hold times and eliminates having to wait for a customer service representative – which signals that Canadians value quick fixes, convenience, and efficiency.

Canadian IT security leaders are signalling a clear need for change, with 85% saying their current practices must evolve to keep pace with modern threats. According to Salesforce’s new State of IT Security report, many are turning to emerging technologies like agentic AI—solutions such as Agentforce—to support operations and strengthen defenses.

While 99% believe AI agents can improve at least one area of security, many remain cautious. Over half (61%) lack full confidence in deploying these tools with the right guardrails, and 56% say their data foundation isn’t ready to support agentic AI.

Still, adoption is growing. More than 41% of IT security teams in Canada are already using AI agents in day-to-day operations, with usage expected to rise. Encouragingly, 86% of security, privacy, and compliance leaders see AI agents as a source of new security opportunities.

As 78% of Canadian leaders predict AI-driven threats will soon outpace traditional defenses, getting data governance right is becoming a top priority for organizations looking to adopt AI securely and strategically.

You can read the report here.

Q1 Canadian retail insights from Salesforce’s 2025 Shopping Index are out. This analyzes activity from over 1.5 billion global shoppers across 67+ countries. Canadian consumers are becoming more cautious amid ongoing economic uncertainty, with digital commerce sales declining 3% year-over-year—down from 3% growth in Q1 2024. The average spend per visit dropped to $2.57, and the conversion rate softened to 1.9%, reflecting more selective purchasing behavior.

“The Q1 2025 retail results paint a picture of a cautious Canadian consumer. High prices, economic uncertainty, and shifting priorities are all contributing to a more deliberate approach to online shopping,” says Caila Schwartz, Director of Consumer Insights and Strategy for Retail and Consumer Goods at Salesforce. “Canadian consumers are increasingly seeking out discounts and prioritizing value, while retailers are responding with targeted promotions and an emphasis on mobile-friendly experiences.”

Despite flat overall traffic, shopping habits shifted by device. Desktop traffic grew 15%, while mobile traffic declined 4%. Still, mobile remains dominant, accounting for 70% of online traffic and 66% of orders, with mobile order volume growing 6% YoY.

Order volumes fell 5%, and average order value dropped to $99.25 (down 4% YoY). Retailers leaned into promotions, with the average discount rate increasing to 16%. However, elevated cart abandonment—88% on mobile vs. 80% on desktop—shows ongoing friction in the mobile checkout process.

Search and social continued to play a major role: site search accounted for just 7% of traffic but drove 17% of orders, while 10% of traffic (and 12% of mobile traffic) came via social media.

Retailers looking to grow in Canada will need to focus on value, mobile optimization, and personalized digital experiences to meet evolving shopper expectations.

Salesforce’s latest Connected Shoppers Report highlights how retailers are feeling pressure as costs mount, customer expectations rise, and technology gets increasingly complex.

Canadian retailers are turning to AI agents to improve customer experiences and beat the competition. In fact, 60% of Canadian retailers say AI agents will be essential to compete within a year. A seamless shopping experience is critical for retailers as they face economic uncertainty and more complex shopping behaviour. With more unified data, AI agents can provide more personalized and real-time responses – improving efficiency and shopper experience.

Further findings include:

Shoppers show readiness for the AI era

• 35% of Canadian shoppers have used AI for product discovery.
• Canadian shoppers are interested in using AI agents for:

• (72%) optimizing loyalty points 
• (67%) answering questions for faster customer service
• 63% of Gen Z global shoppers are interested in agents purchasing items on their behalf.

Retailers see AI agents as a way forward

• 65% of Canadian retailers say they’re increasing AI investment this year.
• As AI agent adoption continues, customer service emerges as retail’s top agent use case followed by merchant assistance and marketing.
• Over three quarters (81%) of Canadian retailers say inefficient processes and technology drain store associate productivity.

Methodology

Data in this report is from two double-anonymous surveys conducted November 27 through December 26, 2024. The surveys generated responses from 8,350 shoppers and 1,700 retail industry decision-makers across 21 countries in North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, including 500 shoppers and 100 retail decision-makers in Canada.

According to Salesforce’s new State of IT research, 79% of Canadian software development leaders believe AI agents will become as essential to app development as traditional development tools.

With Canada’s productivity problem continuing to stall, agentic AI such as Salesforce’s digital Labor platform Agentforce can be the path forward for software developers to be more efficient so they can focus less on simple, tedious tasks like writing code and debugging, and more on strategic, high-impact projects.

AI agents are poised to be the backbone of future development processes, allowing developers to focus more on strategic innovation.

The survey identified key challenges that are holding software developers back from building and deploying AI agents:

• 76% of Canadian software development leaders say their infrastructure needs updates and 51% say their testing processes aren’t fully prepared to build and deploy AI agents.
• 75% of Canadian software development leaders believe AI knowledge will soon be a baseline skill for their team, but only 62% say they’ve introduced employee training on AI.

You can read the research here.

Methodology

• This data is based on a Salesforce global survey of 2,000 software development leaders worldwide, which included 200 IT leaders in Canada. Canadian data one-pager: here.

 Today, Salesforce and Google announced a new expanded partnership, integrating Google’s Gemini with Agentforce, Salesforce’s agentic platform.

With a $2 trillion market opportunity, autonomous agents continue to be released at a rapid rate and businesses need an agentic strategy to keep up. In fact, 63% of Canadian SMB leaders say keeping pace with changing technology is challenging.

This partnership fills the gap customers are experiencing by providing choice, flexibility, and tailored AI solutions to meet specific needs, rather than being locked into a single model provider. 

Key integrations

• Speed and Scale – Agentforce agents will be able to reference up-to-the-minute trusted data and credible citations through Gemini’s multi-modal capabilities – such as real-time insights from Google Search to handle more complex tasks. 
• Improved customer support – Salesforce Service Cloud integrates with Google Customer Engagement Suite, bringing enhanced AI-enabled contact centre capabilities.
•  This includes Real-time voice translation, intelligent agent-to-agent handoffs and personalized agent recommendations.
• Salesforce’s Agentforce, Data Cloud, and Customer 360 Apps will run on Google Cloud infrastructure, with access to new regions and simplified procurement through the Google Cloud Marketplace.

You can find full announcement details here to learn more about this partnership. 

Following up on this post and this post, here are the final Cyber Week findings for 2024 from Salesforce.

Cyber Week Results | Key Findings for Canada + US + Global: 

Cyber Week: 

• Digital sales across Cyber Week for Canadian retailers reached $5.1 billion CAD in 2024
• Digital sales reached $76 billion in the United States (up 7% YoY) and $314.9 billion globally (up 6% YoY).

Black Friday:

• The Black Friday online sales estimate for Canada is $309M CAD 
• Globally online sales reached $74.4 billion (up 5% YoY) and $17.5 billion (up 7% YoY) in the United States. 

Cyber Monday: 

• Global online sales reached $12.8 billion in the United States (up 3% YoY) and $49.7 billion globally (up 2% YoY).
• The Canadian average discount rate during Cyber Week was 22% (down 7% YoY).
• In contrast, the global average discount rate was 26% and the U.S. discount rate was 28%, both down 1% YoY.
• The Average Order Value in Canada increased ever so slightly to $102 CAD up from $101 CAD last year.

Additional Global Findings

• AI and agents play a big part in Cyber Week: Retailers doubled down on the use of AI, including agents, to power shopping experiences this season.
• $60 billion of global online sales were influenced by AI and agents for product recommendations, targeted offers, and conversational customer service support.
• Retailers used generative AI and agents 18% more during Cyber Week than the previous week, likely to drive efficiency and personalization for customers.
• Mobile conversion picks up the pace: As consumers of all ages grow increasingly comfortable with mobile shopping and the mobile buying experience gets easier, the gap between mobile traffic and mobile orders is narrowing. This trend underscores a growing consumer willingness to make significant and high-value purchases directly from their smartphones.
• More than 80% of both U.S. and global ecommerce traffic originated from a mobile device during Cyber Week
• Exactly as predicted, mobile orders drove 70% of U.S. and global sales, up from 67% in 2023.
• In total, mobile accounted for $220 billion in sales globally and $53.3 billion in the United States.
• Mobile wallet usage also increased 16% globally during the week.
• Social commerce plays critical role for retailers
• Retailers implementing social commerce strategies saw 19% of their Cyber Week sales generated through platforms like TikTok Shop and Instagram.
• Mixed bag of discounts drove mixed bag of results: Despite the threat of growing consumer appeal and low prices offered by Chinese marketplaces like Temu, Shein, and AliExpress, Western retailers did not offer significant discounts to compete.
• Verticals with the highest global average discount rates included:
• Makeup (40%)
• General apparel (34%)
• Skincare (33%)
• Verticals with the highest U.S. average discount rates included:

Salesforce’s global press release can be found here if you want to go into the weeds on this.

Salesforce has followed up with their results from Black Friday. If you missed the first part of this, you can view it here.

Black Friday Results | Key Findings for Canada + Global: 

• Canadian online Black Friday sales were down 6% YoY.
• Globally, online Black Friday sales grew 5% YoY, garnering $74.4 billion in online sales. 
• Discounts in Canada fell 11% YoY, down to 21% average discount.
• In contrast, global discounts fell 3% YoY, at 27%. 
• Salesforce estimates Cyber Week sales in Canada will be down 6% YoY in total growth.
• Global sales are expected to drive $51 billion, up from $48.4 billion globally in 2023.

Stay tuned for a follow up for Cyber Monday.

Here’s Salesforce’s latest holiday findings, based on the global shopping data from more than 1.5 billion consumers across Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud, as well as a link to their holiday insights hub.

Key Findings (Canada, US and Global):

• Early Cyber Week data shows that consumers planned and waited for Cyber Week deals.
• US Thanksgiving finished strong with global online sales growing 6% YoY to $33.6B.
• 30% of all Thursday sales in Canada were captured between the hours of 6pm and 10pm eastern
• Global discounts remain steady globally on US Thanksgiving, but down in Canada:
• The average global discount rate was 26% (flat% YoY), 28% in the US (flat YoY), and 21% in Canada (-11% YoY).
• Social shopping grows:
• Social channels referred 12% of all ecommerce traffic in Canada
• Mobile traffic and orders peaked for the week:
• Yesterday, mobile drove 72% of global online orders (up 3% YoY) and 80% of all online traffic (up 1% YoY).
• 59% of online orders in Canada were from mobile (up 2% YoY).
• AI makes an impact for global retailers:
• Early holiday shopping season data showed that 1 in 5 holiday purchases are being influenced by consumers engaging with AI and agents.

Global Findings: 

• Global sales are expected to reach $71.5B globally today.
• For Black Friday, the majority of consumers will turn to online shopping during the hours 9 AM and 3 PM EST, with 42% of all online Black Friday shopping happening during this timeframe.
• Global average selling price increased by only 2% YoY on US Thanksgiving, marking one of the smallest increases we’ve seen since 2022.
• Social shopping grows:
• For retailers that have adopted in-app social buying capabilities such as TikTok Shop or checkout via Instagram, about 19% of their US Thanksgiving day sales globally came from these social commerce apps.
• Global top performing verticals by sales growth:
• Home Dining, Art, and Decor (+39%)
• Makeup (+22%)
• Health & beauty (+21%)
• Top global categories by average discount rate are currently:
• Makeup (40%)
• Home Dining, Art, and Decor (36%)
• Skincare (35%)