UAE shoppers turn to AI assistants, leaving retailers racing to adapt

Shoppers across the UAE are changing how they find and buy things, and the businesses trying to reach them are scrambling to keep up.

Conversational AI assistants have quietly displaced traditional search engines as the starting point for many purchase decisions. That shift is now forcing retailers and commerce operators to rethink strategies from the ground up, according to Salesforce’s fourth edition State of Commerce report.

The numbers are striking. Globally, agentic search as a starting point for online shopping surged 200% year-on-year. Referral traffic from AI chat platforms climbed between 150% and 428% across reporting periods. Those figures have pushed UAE organisations past the pilot stage and into concrete applications aimed at real customer engagement.

Expanding AI capabilities now ranks as the top strategic priority for commerce leaders in the region, ahead of growing the customer base, meeting evolving buyer expectations, strengthening cross-channel operations, and improving data management.

Mohammed Alkhotani, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Salesforce Middle East, described a clear shift in mindset: businesses are moving away from exploratory experiments toward practical implementations designed to improve both customer interaction and commercial outcomes.

What changed on the ground is visible in how companies are preparing their content and data. The report found that 62% of UAE businesses have created or refined content specifically for conversational and question-based searches. An identical proportion have upgraded product information to perform better in AI-generated results. Another 61% have broadened their presence across third-party content platforms to increase visibility.

The adjustments go deeper still. Fifty-eight percent of organisations have begun submitting structured data feeds directly to AI search platforms. Thirty-seven percent have rewritten product descriptions to align with natural-language queries. A smaller but growing segment, 31%, now actively monitor how their brands appear in AI-generated responses, treating that representation as a measurable business metric rather than an afterthought.

Data quality sits at the foundation of all of it. Among UAE organisations that have consolidated customer data across business functions, 48% reported stronger results from AI and automation projects. Forty-seven percent found that integrated data improved collaboration between sales, marketing and commerce teams. The benefits extended further: 46% achieved more reliable pricing and contract management, 43% saw higher conversion rates and improved customer loyalty, and 41% reported faster resolution of customer problems when working from unified data.

By contrast, operational fragmentation continues to undermine many businesses even as AI investment rises. Forty-four percent of UAE organisations cite fragmented ordering systems across multiple sales channels as their most significant barrier. Thirty-seven percent struggle with inventory that does not synchronise in real time. Thirty-five percent report inconsistencies in customer information across different sales platforms, and the same proportion face varying returns and exchange processes by channel. Thirty-three percent deal with pricing and promotional differences between channels. Only 1% of multichannel organisations reported no meaningful operational disruptions at all.

That last figure is the sharpest edge of the report’s findings. Businesses are racing to deploy AI capabilities while many still operate on fragmented systems that prevent them from delivering the seamless experiences those tools are meant to enable. The technology is advancing faster than the infrastructure beneath it.

The open question for UAE commerce leaders is whether they can close that gap before the window of competitive advantage narrows further.