AI Shopping is taking off, but trust issues remain

Consumers may be embracing artificial intelligence for shopping, but most are not yet prepared to let an AI agent control the final and most sensitive part of the journey: payment.

AI Shopping is taking off, but trust issues remain

Only 23% of US consumers trust generative AI to handle payment transactions on their behalf, according to new research from Visa, highlighting the gap between enthusiasm for AI assistants and willingness to give them financial authority.

That contrasts sharply with broader adoption. Visa’s Trust Index found that 72% of consumers have already used an AI assistant, suggesting familiarity with the technology is no longer the principal obstacle to agentic commerce.

The challenge is trust.

Shopping with AI is easier than paying with it

Agentic commerce promises to move AI beyond recommending products towards independently completing tasks. An agent could search for a flight, compare fares against a traveller’s preferences and ultimately book and pay for the journey.

But there is an important distinction between asking AI what to buy and allowing it to spend money.

Payments introduce questions around authentication, consent, liability, fraud and what happens when an autonomous agent makes the wrong decision. Consumers need to understand not merely what their agent can do, but what it has been authorised to do.

Visa’s findings suggest the established payments industry could have an advantage here. Some 61% of respondents said they would trust Visa to handle AI-powered transactions, rising to 68% among 18-to-34-year-olds and 71% among frequent AI users.

Payment brands could become the trust layer

That distinction has potentially significant implications for the emerging agentic commerce ecosystem.

Consumers may use an AI platform to discover products and negotiate the shopping journey while still expecting an established payment provider to sit behind the transaction.

In other words, the AI agent may become the interface without necessarily becoming the trusted financial layer.

Visa and its rivals are already positioning themselves accordingly. Through Visa Intelligent Commerce, the card network is developing infrastructure intended to support authenticated, permissioned agent-initiated payments, including identity verification, authentication and consumer controls.

The objective is to translate existing payment credentials and protections into a world where software, rather than a human, increasingly presses the virtual buy button.

Agentic payments need more than clever AI

The transition resembles previous changes in digital commerce, but with an important difference. E-commerce and mobile commerce changed where consumers paid; agentic commerce could change who – or what – makes the purchasing decision.

That raises the stakes considerably.

Visa’s survey, conducted by Harris Poll among 2,065 US adults, indicates that consumers are interested in AI without yet granting it unrestricted financial trust.

For payments companies, that may represent an opportunity rather than an obstacle.

The battle for agentic commerce will not be won simply by building the smartest shopping agent. It may be won by whoever convinces consumers that an AI can be trusted with their wallet.