The 2025 holiday shopping season broke new records, according to Salesforce, reaching $1.29 trillion in global sales and marking a clear move toward AI-driven agentic shopping. A durable consumer base pushed global online sales up 7% year over year, with U.S. online sales hitting $294 billion, a 4% increase over 2024. Brands that implemented their own AI agents outperformed those that did not by a wide margin. Despite elevated prices, consumers stayed active, relying heavily on mobile devices and AI agents to uncover the best offers. Below are three key insights and what they signal for marketing leaders in the coming months, including the next holiday shopping period. 1. Agentic commerce has arrived, from chat to back-end operations This season’s results showed that AI agents have evolved far beyond simple customer service bots to become core revenue engines and enablers of more efficient operations. AI agents influenced 20% of global retail sales, and visits originating from AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity demonstrated extremely strong purchase intent, converting at nine times the rate of social media traffic. Moreover, companies that rolled out their own agents — including Pandora and SharkNinja — saw a 59% higher growth rate than those that did not. As Caila Schwartz, director of consumer insights at Salesforce, noted, “Agents didn’t just drive $262 billion in sales through high-intent discovery. They became the operational heroes of the season.” AI agents have shifted from being passive sources of information to active players across the entire commerce lifecycle. During the holiday…