ChatGPT Is Running Retail Now and Choosing What Sells

This week on Funnel Frontier: Consumers aren’t picking brands and products anymore. AI is. Here’s how to make sure it picks you.
 

This week:

• ChatGPT is running retail now and deciding what sells
• Salesforce buys Spindle AI to supercharge Agentforce

Stat of the Week

Businesses using generative AI in their CRM are 83% more likely to exceed sales goals. CRM.org

ChatGPT is running retail now and choosing what sells

Amazon still rules. Google’s still a giant. But here’s the plot twist:

17% of U.S. online shoppers say they’ll start holiday shopping on AI platforms like ChatGPT or Perplexity.

That’s more than blogs, review sites, or even some brand websites.

And it’s not just a novelty click. In October 2025, ChatGPT drove 14.4 million U.S. retail referrals, up 8x from a year prior.

For some retailers, AI-driven referrals now make up a quarter of all external traffic.

But here’s where it gets weird: Half of consumers still say they wouldn’t trust AI to complete a full transaction on their behalf. So why are they shopping with it?

They’re not trusting AI to buy. But they are trusting it to decide what’s worth buying. And that means your brand has to win the algorithm before it wins the cart.

Third-party agents: friend, foe, or freight train?

Bain and Co. outlines three emerging agent types:

• Retailer-owned agents (like Amazon’s Rufus or Home Depot’s Magic Apron)
• Retailer-controlled off-site agents (like Amazon’s “Buy for Me” bot)
• Third-party agents (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini)

Guess which one poses the biggest disintermediation risk? You got it—ChatGPT. These third-party agents crawl, compare, summarize, and send shoppers to the best deal… which might not be your site.

Discovery used to be a battle of ads. Now it’s a battle of answers. If your product isn’t in the top five results of a prompt like “best robot vacuum for pet hair,” you don’t exist.

And if that same AI agent completes the transaction? Congrats—you’re now the world’s most efficient drop-shipper.

What to do before your brand gets botted into oblivion

In agentic retail, you’re not marketing to humans anymore—you’re marketing to their bots. Here’s how to stay on the list:

• Win where agents lose. AI can’t fake exclusivity. Offer loyalty perks, bundled services, expert support, or fulfillment advantages that make your brand non-interchangeable.
• Feed the AI. Use schema markup. Structure product info, prices, reviews, and inventory so AI can find and rank you fast.
• Build your agent, or partner with one. Retailers with traffic and trust should invest in on-site assistants. Everyone else? It’s partnership time. Walmart, Etsy, and Ikea are already playing ball inside ChatGPT.
• Rebuild retail media. Prompts don’t click on banner ads. Test formats that show up in natural-language answers and agent recommendations.

If agents are the new storefront, your brand has two choices: get featured, or get forgotten. Train the algorithm, own the experience, and make damn sure the bots know why you’re worth buying from.

The Week @ CRM.org

Open Source CRM. Total control, zero license fees. The trade-off? You’re also tech support now.

Small Business CRM. Only 25% of small businesses use CRM so far, so why not “get in early” and realize an advantage? Our 2025 favorites for SMBs.

🌸 Weekly Bloom 🌸 

Alex Honnold on Overcoming Fear. Visualize and rehearse. With enough preparation, you too can live in a van and climb deadly rocks. 

Salesforce buys Spindle AI to supercharge Agentforce

You can’t build the “agentic enterprise” on vibes and dashboards alone. Salesforce just snapped up Spindle AI—a stealthy analytics startup built by veterans from Tableau and JPMorgan’s AI incubator—to put brains behind its Agentforce brawn.

Spindle’s specialty? Multi-agent analytics. Think of it as AI for your AI. Their platform charts KPIs, runs simulations, forecasts ROI, and lets agents reason their way through business scenarios before they happen.

That’s a big leap from “hey chatbot, reset my password.”

Why this matters for Agentforce

Salesforce has spent 2025 hoarding AI infrastructure like a dragon guarding its data lake. First, it bought Convergence.ai for adaptive workflows. Then Informatica to keep its data clean. Now Spindle joins the roster to make all those agents smarter, faster, and self-aware(ish).

Here’s what this unlocks:

• Agent observability: Watch how agents make decisions and where they flail.
• Agent self-improvement: Let them learn from results, not just rules.
• Scenario modeling: Simulate pricing tweaks or service changes before rolling them out.
• Forecasting: Stop guessing what AI will do to your pipeline and start measuring it.

The real flex? These agents won’t just follow instructions—they’ll tell you what they did, why they did it, and what they’ll do next.

What this means for Salesforce users (and the rest of us)

Spindle doesn’t just give Salesforce more AI muscle. It gives their agents a memory, a gut instinct, and a receipts folder. That means: no more black-box bot decisions. Now they can model scenarios, forecast impact, and explain why they did what they did before leadership even asks.

If you’re in the Salesforce orbit, this is your sign to stop thinking of Agentforce as another Einstein widget. It’s not “AI assist.” It’s AI ops.

And if you’re not on Salesforce? Pay attention anyway. This is where CRM AI is headed—toward autonomous agents that can simulate outcomes, tweak strategy mid-flight, and actually back it up with data. 

If your stack still treats AI like a smarter search bar, congrats, you’re paving the road to irrelevance.

Galactic Gourmet

CRM blips from around the web

HubSpot Adds 41K Customers in a Year Thanks to Multi-Hub Strategy. HubSpot’s customer count jumped 21% YoY to 241,000, fueled by demand for its bundled Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs. The strategy is helping the company land bigger deals and move further upmarket.

98% Notice When Brands Rebrand—What Builds or Breaks Trust. A Clutch report finds nearly all consumers notice rebrands, but only trust them if they feel authentic. Unclear or frequent changes erode trust, while transparent updates build stronger brand loyalty.

Commercial Display Market to Hit $92.3B by 2034. Driven by demand for smart signage and immersive CX, the global commercial display market is projected to more than double over the next decade. Retail, hospitality, and healthcare lead the growth curve.

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