Caila Schwartz on Salesforce’s Holiday Forecast: Agentic Discovery, Loyalty, and “Discount Chicken”
Director of Strategy and Consumer Insights at Salesforce, Caila Schwartz, joins the pod to unpack how AI agents are reshaping discovery, loyalty, and holiday retail behavior worldwide.
Caila Schwartz is the Director of Strategy and Consumer Insights at Salesforce, where she leads global retail research and forecasting across Salesforce’s Commerce, Marketing, and Service Clouds, now including Agentforce. Her work uses billions of anonymized data points from Salesforce platforms to predict consumer trends, map evolving shopper behavior, and surface the next big shifts in digital commerce.
She’s been with Salesforce for over a decade (joining via the Demandware acquisition in 2016) and is one of the industry’s most data-driven voices in holiday retail forecasting.
Listen/Watch Our Interview:
This week on Retailgentic, Scot chats with Caila about the future of holiday shopping in the age of AI. From Agentforce at Dreamforce to the surprising ways shoppers are using ChatGPT, Perplexity, and TikTok to find gifts, Caila reveals what Salesforce’s latest Q3 data says about discovery, conversion, and loyalty as we head into Cyber Week.
They discuss:
$263B in AI-influenced sales: Salesforce predicts that AI will touch 21% of all global holiday revenue this year.
Discovery as the theme of the season: Consumers are shifting from traditional search to agentic discovery across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, TikTok, and Instagram.
Cross-generational adoption: Even Baby Boomers are turning to AI search, up from 0% in May to 2–3% by August.
Highly-qualified traffic: Referrals from LLMs convert 700% better than social media and 200% better than any other channel.
Discount chicken 2.0: Last year’s biggest discount day wasn’t Cyber Monday, it was the Tuesday after.
Loyalty consolidation: Shoppers are clustering purchases to extract more value from loyalty programs, and loyal shoppers are spending 20% more.
Gen Z goes analog: Younger consumers are returning to brick-and-mortar retail, but with AI agents in their pocket guiding every aisle.
As Salesforce’s data shows, this holiday season isn’t just about buying, it’s about discovering differently. Agentic tools are redefining when, where, and how decisions happen. And that, says Caila, is just the beginning of commerce’s next era.
👉 Connect with Manil: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caila-schwartz/
👉 Learn more about Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/
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