Global retail is headed for a robust 2025 holiday season, with Salesforce projecting record November–December digital sales of $1.25 trillion, a 4 per cent year-over-year (YoY) rise. US digital sales are forecast to hit $288 billion, up 2 per cent. The growth is strongly tied to the rapid adoption of AI and agent-driven shopping journeys, which are expected to contribute $263 billion in global holiday orders — 21 per cent of total sales.

Salesforce’s analysis, based on data from 1.5 billion global shoppers across Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, and Agentforce, shows AI-driven and agent-referred traffic is transforming how consumers shop.

AI-assisted traffic jumped 119 per cent YoY in H1 2025, with conversion rates more than 700 per cent higher than social media traffic and 200 per cent higher than traditional channels like search and direct, Salesforce said in a release.

Salesforce projects record $1.25 trillion global digital holiday sales with AI driving $263 billion of orders.
AI traffic surged 119 per cent YoY with 700 per cent higher conversions than social media.
Resale market to hit $64 billion, 77 per cent shoppers to wait for Cyber Week.
Gen Z to spend 3x more in stores.
Retailers urged to adopt AI-first, optimise for generative search, and streamline support.

AI tools are increasingly being used for product discovery, with 17 per cent of consumers using AI assistants or LLMs for searches in the past year, and trust in these recommendations surging to 86 per cent from 46 per cent in May. Retailers are being urged to embrace generative engine optimisation (GEO) — or AI optimisation (AIO) — to ensure product listings and promotions are discoverable in AI-driven search results.

Salesforce highlights thriftiness and sustainability as major drivers this season, with $64 billion in holiday sales projected from the resale market. Forty-six per cent of consumers plan to gift second-hand items, mainly to save money amid trade and tariff uncertainty. Seventy-seven per cent of shoppers are expected to hold off on major purchases until Cyber Week, reinforcing its importance.

Despite surging digital sales, physical retail remains crucial, especially for Gen Z. Three in four Gen Z shoppers plan to shop in stores, and for every $1 they spend online, they are projected to spend $3 in physical stores. Retailers are being encouraged to create seamless omnichannel experiences to capture this generation both online and offline.

Retailers are likely to scale back discounts, with 2 per cent fewer orders expected to include promo codes due to rising supply chain costs. Meanwhile, AI-powered customer service is set to grow 39 per cent this season, helping reduce routine interactions and driving a 2.5 per cent decline in overall service cases. This will free human agents to focus on more complex issues.

Salesforce advises retailers to adopt an AI-first mindset to capture their share of the forecast growth. Integrating AI across product discovery, promotions, and customer support will be key to maximising conversion rates and enhancing the shopping journey from browsing to checkout.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (HU)

To mark the end of 2025, I was going to write about the amazing work of Francesca Bria and her colleagues who have created the fascinating and very informative website The authoritarian stack – How tech billionaires are building a post-democratic America and why Europe is next. The site outlines five domains of privatised sovereignty – data, defence, space, energy and money. In other words, the foundations of democratic power.

Bria suggests these domains “form the architecture of privatised sovereignty – a technological regime where power flows through laws, infrastructure and automated platforms”.

It’s a perfect explanation to the question I posed in my first article of 2025 for Computer Weekly, about who exactly were the people surrounding Donald Trump at his inauguration – and what do they want?

I was going to follow my analysis of The authoritarian stack with a counter-proposal referencing Bria and her colleagues on an alternative view of what the future could hold – titled, A European alternative for digital sovereignty.

According to Martin Hullin, director of the digitalisation and the common good programme at German non-profit foundation Bertelsmann Stiftung, this report maps a way forward, “Recognising that complete self-sufficiency is neither feasible nor desirable, the initiative calls instead for a shared effort to bolster strategic capabilities and cultivate beneficial international partnerships. It also seeks to demonstrate that digital sovereignty is not about isolation but about advancing a shared vision of the common good”.

Hullin invites us to “consider how this mapping and its recommendations can help spark innovations that are both competitive and compassionate… to build a future in which digitalisation serves not as a source of division but as a force for the common good.”

A way out of the mess

These are very important things. They are things you need to understand. They shine a light on a positive and meaningful way out of the mess we are in. They are things you should definitely read if you want to know what’s really going on in the world.

But then my worldview turned right on its head when I came across an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaking to US talk show host Jimmy Kimmel. Midway through the interview Altman states, “I cannot imagine having gone through… figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT.”

Imagine that – people somehow raising a newborn child without ChatGPT?

As a human who has actually had a baby, I can reassure all you anxious readers that not only has it been possible for us to do this, we’ve been doing it for centuries without the help of Sam Altman and ChatGPT.

Obviously before ChatGPT we understood that it takes “a village to raise a child” – our families, friends, communities, neighbours, teachers, civil society and amazingly our own innate instincts as well, or what we generally call “parents”. Now thank God all we will need is ChatGPT – how amazingly efficient. Er – thanks so much, Sam?

Incredibly Altman makes this statement while at the same time being comfortable with the contradictory statement he made in an earlier OpenAI podcast suggesting that people “have a very high degree of trust in ChatGPT, which is interesting because, like, AI hallucinates. It should be the tech that you don’t trust that much”.

So which is it Mr Altman? Should I trust something as important as raising my baby to you or not?

Of course, of note and utterly predictable is the help Altman actually asked ChatGPT for in relation to his baby. Turns out it’s all about competitive advantage. He met another tech bro at a party who had a child the same age as his own. His colleague mentioned that his child was crawling at six months. Altman’s, on the other hand, was not.

When the AI bubble bursts – and it will – it will take us all with it. That’s not a future I’d wish for any child and it’s why we should be more worried about the impact of ChatGPT on our children than its ability to raise them

Fuelled with anxiety and envy at such extraordinary baby prowess, Altman raced home to ask ChatGPT if something was wrong and whether he should take his six-month old to the doctor to check his progress.

Here is what his machine told him: “Of course it’s normal, of course you don’t need to go to the doctor. You know parents do all these sorts of things. And, by the way, this is personalised – ChatGPT gets to know you. And, you know, you’re the CEO of OpenAI. You probably are around all these high-achieving people. Maybe you don’t want to project that onto your kid? And you should maybe just relax and he’ll be fine.”

A bro reassurance machine

Yup – that’s exactly the kind of reassurance I’d have been looking for when I was knee deep in nappies and formula. I’d really want to have been reassured that I’m doing fine ranking against my high-achieving colleagues, because really that’s what was top of my mind when I was a sleep-deprived, exhausted new mum trying to figure out how to get a buggy and all those baby supplies into the car on my own. Not to mention how would I push a shopping trolley around while also simultaneously managing the buggy? Clearly ChatGPT is more of a bro reassurance machine than Baby and child could ever have been.

But the most interesting thing about the Jimmy Kimmel interview was the audience reaction. As Altman makes his ridiculous statement, there is a ripple of quiet laughter, as if they are saying, “He is surely not claiming that ChatGPT can raise a child?” Then the laughter deepens as the audience begins to understand the ludicrous nature of that statement and that Altman actually believes it.

It’s a sound I’m hoping to hear lots more of in 2026 – the sound of venture capitalists, angel investors, technology journalists, mainstream journalists and responsible governments calling out the madness of the last three years and the insane claims from the broligarchy about the impact of AI.

It’s the sound of tech leaders taking responsibility for their impact on society, politics, democracy, our planet, our futures. Because when the AI bubble bursts – and it will – it will take us all with it. That’s not a future I’d wish for any child and it’s why we should be more worried about the impact of ChatGPT on our children than its ability to raise them. What it’s going to do to their future should be keeping us awake at night.

So here’s to a market correction in 2026 – and not only a market correction but one where we return to placing our trust for a brighter and sustainable future in the village that has served us so well for centuries, rather than the crazed and destructive visions of those underpinning The authoritarian stack. Surely our children deserve a more enlightened stewardship than that offered by AI?

My Christmas wish is that we have the wisdom to understand what AI can and cannot do – where it is useful and where it is destructive – so that we can protect our children from doomscrolling through the world under the stewardship of men whose political and doctrinal influences range from national conservatism, techno accelerationism, crypto-sovereignty, online radicalisation and tech militarism. It’s all there in the Stack, so you could read that or you could just gather your children close this Christmas and start thinking about and working towards a better vision for the world in 2026 for our deeply human children most of all.