Agentic Commerce: How AI Changed Digital Commerce Christmas 2025

The 2025 festive period wasn’t just another peak trading window. It provided one of the clearest signals yet that AI is actively changing how people discover, evaluate and buy online.

Retailers recorded a record $1.29 trillion in global holiday spending between 1 November and 31 December 2025, up 7% year over year, despite ongoing economic pressure, according to data from Salesforce. While strong consumer demand was a headline story, a more subtle shift was happening beneath the surface.

AI was no longer an experiment running alongside ecommerce. It was becoming part of the buying journey itself.

AI’s growing role in the path to purchase

Globally, AI-assisted and AI-influenced shopping journeys accounted for around 20% of holiday retail spend, approximately $262 billion during the peak season alone.

This shift wasn’t driven by novelty features or futuristic use cases. Instead, shoppers increasingly used AI for practical, everyday tasks such as:

• comparing products

• shortlisting options

• checking prices and availability

• validating decisions before purchasing

In short, AI quietly embedded itself into how customers shop, rather than sitting at the edges of the experience.

We’ve previously explored how this marks the emergence of agentic commerce, the next phase of digital transformation.

Christmas 2025 showed that this shift is no longer theoretical.

From “search and browse” to AI-led discovery and higher conversion

One of the most important changes during the 2025 seasonal period wasn’t just how much people spent, but where ecommerce traffic came from.

Retailers saw a noticeable increase in visits originating from AI tools such as conversational assistants and recommendation engines. Crucially, this traffic didn’t just arrive, it tended to convert at higher rates than many traditional digital channels, as highlighted in analysis from Adobe.

The reason is relatively straightforward.

Shoppers arriving via AI-assisted discovery tend to be:

• better informed

• closer to making a decision

• already influenced by AI-driven research and recommendations

Much of the decision-making effort has already happened before the session begins.

Higher conversion rates, in this context, are driven by stronger intent and greater confidence, not by simpler or more predictable journeys. If the on-site experience confirms what the shopper expects, conversion can happen quickly. If it doesn’t, abandonment can be just as fast.

This dynamic represents an important step towards agentic commerce, where AI doesn’t just assist shoppers, but increasingly helps do the shopping on their behalf.

It also aligns with what we’ve already outlined in Agentic Commerce: the next big eCommerce shift, where AI moves beyond recommendations towards more active

participation in the buying process.

What does this mean for UK retailers?

While much of the available data is global, there’s little reason to believe the UK is an outlier.

UK consumers are already:

• highly digital-first

• comfortable with self-service

• accustomed to fast, frictionless ecommerce experiences

AI is simply becoming the next layer in that evolution.

For UK ecommerce and digital teams, the implication is clear: traffic is no longer just human-led, linear or entirely predictable. Higher-intent journeys create opportunity, but they also reduce tolerance for friction and error.

Early signals of a deeper shift

As AI-driven traffic grows, retailers need to look beyond conversion rates and begin asking harder questions.

For example:

• Is product data accurate, structured and discoverable enough for AI-led discovery?

• Are digital journeys resilient when behaviour doesn’t follow expected paths?

• Can performance and CX teams distinguish genuine customer friction from automated or AI-influenced noise?

AI doesn’t remove the need for monitoring and visibility, it raises the bar.

In our follow-up article, What Agentic Commerce means for your eCommerce strategy (and how to prepare), we explore how retailers can start addressing these challenges — from data foundations to journey resilience.

Looking ahead to 2026

Christmas 2025 showed that agentic commerce is moving from concept to consideration.

AI is already:

• influencing buying decisions

• reshaping traffic patterns

• changing what “good digital CX” looks like

For retailers heading into 2026, the key question isn’t if AI will impact ecommerce,

it’s how prepared your digital experience is for what comes next.

In Part 2 of this series, we’ll explore how AI-assisted shoppers and emerging AI agents actually interact with ecommerce sites, and what that means for on-site behaviour, browsers, protocols like MCP, and the future of monitoring.

Want to prepare for AI-driven and agentic commerce?

Talk to thinkTRIBE to learn how real-world journey monitoring and performance insight can help you stay ahead as AI reshapes ecommerce.

Related reading on Agentic Commerce

• Digital transformation and the rise of agentic commerce

• Agentic Commerce: hype or the next big eCommerce shift?

• How to prepare your eCommerce store for AI-driven shopping