Three major holiday-readiness reports landed within days of each other this week, and they do not agree on the most basic question marketing leaders need answered before Q4 budgets lock: how much are shoppers actually using AI.
Salesforce’s 2026 holiday predictions, drawn from its own commerce data, put AI assistant usage at 50% of shoppers at some point in their buying journey, a 67% year-over-year jump, with AI chat predicted to drive 20% of all holiday ecommerce traffic. Attentive’s consumer pulse survey puts the number even higher: 67% of shoppers used an AI chatbot to shop in the past three months, rising to 80% among Gen Z, and 68% of AI users overspent their budget versus 25% of non-AI shoppers. Basis, by contrast, found only 40% of consumers are even open to using AI this season, and 42% of that group will not let AI complete a purchase on their behalf.
Why it matters: these are not competing opinions, they are different measurements. Salesforce counts assistant-touched journeys across its own commerce network, Attentive counts self-reported chatbot use, and Basis measures willingness to transact autonomously. A leader who reads only one report walks away with false precision about a number that shifts 27 points depending on what counts as “using AI,” the same gap the industry is trying to close with a shared AI visibility standard.
The original insight: the safest planning assumption is not a single adoption percentage but the shape all three reports agree on, that AI-assisted discovery is now mainstream while AI-completed purchase stays rare. Build campaigns to be visible inside AI answers and semantic search (Salesforce found 38% of engagement already involves semantic queries to brand-owned agents), but do not budget as if AI checkout is scaling at the same pace, the same caution behind why marketing teams already struggle to track AI’s real cost elsewhere in the stack.
Source: Salesforce
