This article was based on the interview with Salesforce’s Nitin Mangtani on how AI is evolving on-site search by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
For as long as we’ve had e-commerce, we’ve had the on-site search box. It sits there, a humble and often frustrating gateway to a brand’s entire catalog. We, as marketing and commerce leaders, have spent countless hours optimizing it, creating synonym lists, and building labyrinthine merchandising rules to guide customers toward a purchase. We’ve A/B tested its placement, its placeholder text, and the color of its button. Yet, for all that effort, it has remained a fundamentally blunt instrument. The experience is often a “fire and forget” transaction where the customer types a few keywords, gets a grid of products, and is left to their own devices. The dreaded “zero results found” page remains one of the most common—and most costly—points of failure in the digital customer journey.
But what if that transactional, often-broken utility could become the most intelligent, personalized, and conversational part of your brand experience? The shift we are witnessing is not an incremental improvement; it is a complete reimagining of digital interaction. Fueled by advancements in generative and agentic AI, we are moving from a world of rigid keyword matching to one of conversational discovery. In a recent conversation, I spoke with Nitin Mangtani, GM and EVP of Agentforce Commerce at Salesforce, to explore this paradigm shift. His perspective, shaped by years at the forefront of commerce technology, illuminates why this evolution from search to discovery isn’t just a new feature, but a fundamental change in how brands must engage with their customers to drive growth and loyalty.
