SharkNinja is in the middle of changing the ecommerce platform for its home appliance sales to run on Salesforce, and one of the features it’s excited about is artificial intelligence (AI) agents — which the software provider calls Agentforce.
Among the priorities in its platform change, SharkNinja wants to create “a much richer experience,” said Calvin Anderson, senior vice president of global digital experience. SharkNinja doesn’t have any physical storefronts — though it sells wholesale through other retailers — and its “best-foot-forward consumer touchpoint” is its social media presence, Anderson told Digital Commerce 360.
“My objective is to really represent our brands and categories well,” Anderson said. “Any D2C business directly competes almost globally against a player like Amazon who can deliver in one to two days and sometimes an hour time slot. We’ve really got to earn the right to gain the customer’s attention, especially in a world where SEO is moving so heavily to AI and those little blue links are getting further and further down the page.”
SharkNinja formed when separate brands Shark (known for its vacuum cleaners) and Ninja (known for its blenders) merged in 2015. It then went public on the New York Stock Exchange in July 2023. The two brands currently sell on separate ecommerce websites with a toggle that connects them.
In North America, 76 of the Top 2000 online retailers use Salesforce as their ecommerce platform, according to Digital Commerce 360 data. In 2024, those 76 online retailers combined for more than $136.116 billion in web sales. The Top 2000 is Digital Commerce 360’s database ranking North America’s largest online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales.
How SharkNinja plans to use Salesforce’s AI agents
SharkNinja is still in beta using Salesforce’s Agentforce, and the feature is therefore not live on the retailer’s ecommerce websites yet. It will launch when SharkNinja does social commerce early this fall, Anderson said. He did not share what platform SharkNinja currently uses for its ecommerce websites.
For now, it’s piloting the AI agent, which he noted functions differently from coding software to perform a task.
“You’re literally speaking to it like you would coach or train someone,” Anderson said. “It could be a world where we’re asking for it to start with recipe recommendations and then product and recipe pairing.”
From there, he said, it might still fail to take in dietary considerations into account, so the SharkNinja team would have to remind it about those restrictions.
“The intention is that you have a very real-world experience,” he said. “It’s just lots and lots of testing to see how it performs and then seeing what cues we can put in to help it make that a more wholesome, thoughtful, inquisitive agent that is responding back to the consumer.”
Anderson said SharkNinja is only using AI agents for their chatbot-like feature at the moment.
Still, “It’s certainly more than a standard [chatbot], just like ChatGPT is just wildly different than a Google search was. It is finally worth giving your attention to AI and chat on a website. That is the primary consumer experience.”
Priming an ecommerce website to incorporate AI agents
Anderson noted that in the Salesforce platform, the way ecommerce teams build data infrastructure is designed so the Agentforce AI can find whatever it needs.
“It won’t blow your mind to know that the data structure has to be enhanced a little bit so that the agent doesn’t have to guess things,” he said. “So if you assume that people are going to be shopping for home questions, it needs to be clear that these are the products that service the living areas as opposed to a beauty product.”
There are also other layers and dimensions that teams have to program into the data foundations for the AI to work. Whereas search engines help answer “all these bespoke and unique questions,” websites no longer show up on the first half of the page on Google, he cited as an example. Instead, Google and other search engines try to answer questions before sending users to a website.
That’s moving brands to a world in which they have to hunt “for that consumer zeitgeist of what is a conversation consumers want to have.”
Anderson said he’s excited to see all the questions consumers ask Agentforce and whether SharkNinja is effectively able to answer them out of the gate when the feature goes live. Before that, the best SharkNinka had was a survey, “which is kind of a blunt object,” he said.
“I anticipate actually answering both of those questions by using Agentforce to understand what people are asking and maybe what we’re not answering well, and to publish hyper quickly and dynamically content that answers that in not only programming the agent to be better next time, but also to put that content into our website so that other AI engines can search and find it for us,” Anderson said.
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