Checkout.com research finds rising demand for AI-driven shopping
New research from Checkout.com points to rising consumer demand for AI-driven, or "agentic," shopping alongside significant trust and control concerns, according to coverage in Retail Times. As reported, 23% of UK consumers expect at least 10% of their purchases to be AI-driven within a year, versus 33% globally, and 61% of UK merchants agree consumers will adopt agent-led shopping faster than merchants are prepared for. The same coverage reports notable UK trust concerns: 41% of consumers say they trust no organization to operate an AI shopping agent, and 37% say they will never delegate purchases to AI (versus 24% globally), even as 64% say they would be comfortable letting an agent complete a purchase, with a reported delegation threshold of around GBP 156. These figures are as reported by the cited coverage; Checkout.com's published research has separately described an emerging "trust threshold" for AI-delegated spending.
What happened
New research from Checkout.com points to rising consumer demand for AI-driven, or "agentic," shopping alongside significant trust and control concerns, according to coverage in Retail Times. As reported, 23% of UK consumers expect at least 10% of their purchases to be AI-driven within a year, versus 33% globally, and 61% of UK merchants agree consumers will adopt agent-led shopping faster than merchants are prepared for. The same coverage reports elevated UK trust concerns: 41% of consumers say they trust no organization to operate an AI shopping agent, and 37% say they will never delegate purchases to AI, versus 24% globally. At the same time, 64% say they would be comfortable letting an AI agent complete a purchase, with a reported delegation threshold of around GBP 156 per purchase before additional approvals.
Editorial analysis
Industry pattern: early appetite for agentic commerce commonly coexists with granular demands for permissioning, cancellation flows and liability frameworks. The reported figures fit a familiar adoption curve in which functional comfort (letting an agent buy) outpaces institutional trust (fully delegating without safeguards). For retailers, payments providers and platforms, that implies two design constraints: explicit user controls and approval thresholds, and clear accountability and attribution for automated purchases.
What to watch
Watch merchant adoption of explicit permissioning APIs, the emergence of standardized liability or insurance models for agentic transactions, and whether later research shows trust gaps narrowing as concrete safeguards (easy cancellation, spending limits, identity verification) appear in merchant implementations.
Source note
The specific percentages and the GBP 156 threshold are as reported by the cited coverage and were not independently verified for this audit. Checkout.com's separately published agentic-commerce research has described an emerging "trust threshold" for AI-delegated spending, consistent with the broad finding here even where individual figures differ across reports.
Scoring Rationale
Practitioner-relevant consumer research on agentic commerce, useful for payments and retail teams designing trust and control features. It is vendor-sponsored survey research whose specific figures could not be independently verified in this audit, and it is notable rather than sector-changing, so the score is solid but modest.
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