Understanding Customer Journey Analytics in 2025

Skating to where the puck is going has always been tough for brands & retailers. Humans are messy & we change our minds often.  Now, with the surge of AI tools like ChatGPT & Perplexity, building a consumer-obsessed business has become more challenging. In 2025, nearly 40% of consumers (and the majority of #GenZ) let AI agents decide what products they see and buy, flipping the script on traditional brand-owned shopping channels. Are you ready for the age when your customer belongs to the agent, not your website? We’ve entered the era of infinite channels and the always-on shopper. Commerce is being driven by a moshpit of AI agents that mediate many customer journeys—from product search to purchase—largely outside brands’ direct control. Most retailers are still building for the past, optimizing search tools that only matter when shoppers find their way to your digital properties (.com, app, etc.). But that traffic is evaporating. The old model is dying fast, replaced by a new reality where AI agents decide what customers see, buy, and from whom. This is your wake-up call. AI is rapidly rewriting the rules of commerce. Traditional traffic pipelines have dried up. “Traffic” today is made up of both humans and agents, flowing through an infinite number of channels. If your products aren’t ready to be discovered, chosen, and purchased by AI agents—are you even trying? 😁 For Brands and Retailers: ➡️ Owning the customer journey is tougher than ever. Your fight for site clicks is obsolete. Products must now be surfaced in AI-powered results and agentic checkout experiences on 3rd-party platforms. ➡️ SEO is losing relevance. Optimize for AI discovery: create solution-focused and rich product data (not just keywords) optimized for AI agents, not just search engines. ➡️ Personalization is table stakes. AI agents understand customer context and needs better than ever, offering hyper-targeted product suggestions and streamlining the shopping experience more effectively than traditional tools. Brands that adapt to AI-driven shopping will see higher conversion rates & be positioned to capture this increase in sales volume. Data Points: 1️⃣ 39% of shoppers (and over 50% of #GenZ) already use AI agents (like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Amazon’s Buy for Me, Google AI Mode) for product discovery. (🙏🏼 Salesforce)  2️⃣ Nearly 3 in 5 consumers have replaced traditional search engines with gen AI for product recommendations, led by Millennials & Gen Z. (🙏🏼 Capgemini) The race is on to build the future! I’m thrilled to see Cimulate AI led by my buddy John Andrews, Profound led by my future buddies Dylan Babbs & James Cadwallader, & Scot Wingo led by ReFiBuy.ai tackling this head on. For my brand & retailer community, talk to me: Are your products ready to be chosen by the customer of the future - a moshpit of AI agents?

Is the era of the Google search results page fading for discovery? The data suggests a rapid shift is underway. We're seeing a seismic shift in how information is discovered - moving rapidly from keyword searches yielding lists of links towards a conversational AI delivering direct answers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, etc.). This isn't a slow evolution; it's happening fast. Consider this: Adobe Analytics recently reported a 1200% YoY increase in traffic from gen AI sources to US retail websites. While this is retail data, view it as a leading indicator. This behavioral change - seeing answers, not just links - will ripple across all customer journeys, B2C and B2B alike. I've heard from multiple B2B startups that they are getting more inbound from ChatGPT than Google Search. What does this mean for the customer journey? * Discovery & Search: Buyers won't just browse websites. They'll increasingly ask AI models for comparisons, summaries, and recommendations. * From Answer to Action: This isn't just about information retrieval. With AI agents like OpenAI's Operator, Google's Project Mariner, and Amazon's "Buy with Me", we're seeing the potential for AI to move directly from discovery to research to purchase. The Implications: * For Marketers: The traditional customer journey playbook needs a significant update. How do you ensure your solution is surfaced, understood, and trusted by the AI? Getting discovered in an answer-first world requires new strategies, likely involving structured data on both 1st party and 3rd party sites taking advantage of protocols like the emerging Model Context Protocol (MCP) to effectively communicate to the models. * For Founders: There's an opportunity to build the next generation digital experience platform. We need solutions purpose-built for this new reality across Customer Experience technology categories - consider that in a post AI world the next customer may by AI, which means leveraging conversational interfaces, agent capabilities, and protocols like MCP. It isn't just about new features; it's about rethinking the entire go-to-market motion in an AI-world.

📈 New Adobe data just dropped: generative AI traffic to retail sites surged 4,700% year-over-year in July 2025. But it's not the growth, while impressive, that has me thinking...it's what happens next. Here's what caught my attention and what I think marketing leaders need to pay attention to: AI-referred shoppers spend 32% more time on sites, view 10% more pages, and bounce 27% less. These aren't casual browsers. They're research-driven consumers who arrive knowing exactly what they're looking for. Three things brands need to start thinking about, because the shift in consumer behavior in the Agentic Web is happening fast: - We're optimizing for the wrong thing. 73% of AI users cite LLMs as their primary research source. Keywords won't cut it anymore. Brands need to be the authoritative source that AI systems reference when customers ask questions. - The attribution models are broken. AI traffic converts 23% less but generates 84% more revenue per visit than six months ago. These customers research through AI, then convert elsewhere. How are we tracking that journey? - The infrastructure shift is real. Consumer Electronics and Tech lead in AI visit share because complex purchases benefit most from AI research. But every category will follow. The question isn't if—it's when. For brands who have built great visibility in the current digital economy and are wondering what is happening to their metrics, It feels like the early days of digital all over again, equal parts terrifying and exhilarating. We're not just adding another channel. We're witnessing the emergence of the Agentic Era where AI agents become the new front door to discovery. The brands that recognize this shift and adapt their content, measurement, and customer journey strategies now will own the next decade. Read the full insights from our team at Adobe Digital Insights: https://lnkd.in/g2mGVGud What are you seeing in your data? How are you preparing for this shift? #MarketingStrategy #GenerativeAI #CustomerJourney #DigitalTransformation #AEO #GEO #AISearch #AdobeLLMOptimizer