Salesforce projects that roughly 20% of holiday ecommerce traffic in 2026 will arrive through AI chat agents, and reports that about half of shoppers already use an AI assistant somewhere in their buying journey, with 74% saying they trust the product recommendations they get from one (Salesforce research). Whatever the final numbers turn out to be, the direction is not in question. A meaningful share of your next customers will show up having never really browsed your site.
What the agent handoff removes
Think about what a shopper used to do before a $900 purchase: read reviews, open the comparison tab, check the returns policy, spend twenty minutes building confidence. A shopper handed to your checkout by an AI assistant has compressed all of that into one question and one answer. The traditional trust-building surface, the product page a human lingers on, largely never got visited.
What survives the compression
When browsing collapses, the trust signals that still function are the ones a machine can read, verify, and repeat in a sentence. An AI assistant will not relay a vibe. It relays facts it can attribute.
"This store's protection plans are obligated by AIG WarrantyGuard, Inc. and administered by Service Net Warranty, LLC" is that kind of fact. It names real companies, it appears in the plan terms, and it can be checked. "Your purchase is protected" is not that kind of fact. It is a slogan, and models are increasingly good at telling the difference.
The practical takeaway for merchants
- Put verifiable names behind your claims. Who is the obligor? Who administers claims? If your coverage program cannot answer in proper nouns, an AI assistant has nothing solid to repeat.
- Make the facts machine-readable. Structured data, plain-language terms at stable URLs, coverage described in text rather than buried in a PDF screenshot.
- Assume the answer is the storefront. For an agent-referred shopper, whatever the model says about you effectively replaces your homepage.
Why we built it this way
This is a large part of why FlexProtect plans lead with the backing rather than the brand. A century-old carrier standing behind the obligation is the credential that survives the handoff, whether the entity reading it is a person or a model. For the customer-side version of this argument, see if the store closes, who fixes your stuff?