UAE Commerce Chiefs Bet Big on AI as Customer Discovery Tool Shifts

Artificial intelligence has become the top investment priority for commerce leaders across the United Arab Emirates, according to Salesforce’s fourth edition State of Commerce report. The shift is being driven by a fundamental change in how consumers discover and evaluate products, with conversational AI assistants increasingly displacing traditional search engines as the starting point for online shopping.

The financial signals are hard to ignore. Globally, agentic search as an entry point for e-commerce transactions surged 200 percent year-on-year. Referral traffic from AI chat platforms climbed between 150 and 428 percent across reporting periods. For retailers and commerce operators, these figures mark AI’s rapid emergence as a new customer acquisition channel, one that is redrawing competitive boundaries at speed.

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UAE commerce organisations are responding by recalibrating both their digital strategies and content infrastructure. Sixty-two percent of businesses have created or refined content for conversational and question-based searches. An equal share have upgraded product information quality to perform better within AI-driven discovery systems. Meanwhile, 61 percent have expanded their presence across third-party content sources to improve visibility in AI-generated results, 58 percent have begun submitting structured data feeds directly to AI search platforms, and 37 percent have optimised product descriptions for natural-language queries. A smaller segment, 31 percent, is actively monitoring how their brands appear in AI-generated responses.

Stronger data foundations are proving essential for converting AI investment into measurable commercial returns. Among UAE organisations that have unified customer data across functions, 48 percent reported stronger results from AI and automation initiatives. Nearly 47 percent said integrated data improved collaboration between sales, marketing and commerce teams. The operational benefits extend further: 46 percent reported more consistent pricing and contract management, 43 percent saw higher conversion rates and improved customer loyalty, and 41 percent said unified data enabled faster resolution of customer issues.

Mohammed Alkhotani, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Salesforce Middle East, noted that businesses in the UAE are moving beyond experimental AI deployments toward practical applications that enhance customer engagement and commercial performance. The findings show that commerce leaders have ranked expanding AI capabilities above other strategic priorities, including growing their customer base, responding to evolving buyer expectations, strengthening omnichannel operations and improving data management.

Operational fragmentation, though, remains a significant drag on performance. Forty-four percent of UAE organisations identified fragmented ordering systems across multiple sales channels as their biggest operational challenge. A lack of synchronised real-time inventory affected 37 percent of businesses. Thirty-five percent reported difficulties maintaining consistent customer information across channels, the same proportion struggled with inconsistent returns and exchange processes, and 33 percent cited pricing and promotional inconsistencies between channels. Only 1 percent of multichannel organisations reported no significant operational breakdowns at all.

The data points to a dual investment imperative taking shape across the UAE market. Beyond deploying AI technologies, businesses must simultaneously build the data infrastructure and operational capabilities those systems depend on. The question facing commerce operators now is whether their foundational investments can keep pace with the speed at which AI is reshaping how consumers find, evaluate and buy.