Consumers Like AI for Product Discovery, But Don’t Fully Trust It for Purchases – Digital Transactions

As artificial intelligence continues to make gains in consumers’ purchasing decisions, most are not quite ready to fully trust an AI agent to make a purchase on their behalf, with just 35% globally wanting human approval before an AI completes a purchase, finds a new report from RTB House.

Released Monday, the report from Poland-based RTB House, which surveyed 1,840 consumers from the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Japan, also found that trust in AI purchases comes with an assurance of a return window.

Within the United States, younger consumers are more apt to trust delegating an AI agent to buy for them up to $250 with a seven-day return window than older shoppers. RTB House found that just 22% of Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), and 29% of Generation X (1965-1980) would trust AI to do that safely. That increases to 42% for Millennials (1981-1996) and 35% for Gen Z (since 1997). That comes with a caveat of  having a seven-day return window on these transactions.

Some consumers are willing to employ an AI agent for transactions, but with guardrails, RTB House says. The guardrails stipulation is agnostic of age, too, with the age groups closely aligned on shopping protections.

Payment companies realize that trust is vital to establishing AI purchasing actions. A recent survey from PayPal Holdings Inc. and Commerce, a unit of Automattic, found that 66% of U.S. respondents want agentic commerce to have security levels “equal to or better than existing payment methods.” Earlier in June, Visa Inc. said it would work with OpenAI, developer of ChatGPT, on credentialing and security infrastructure for agentic commerce.

The usable value in AI commerce now is discovery and research, the RTB House report suggests. Fifty-nine percent of U.S. consumers say AI helps them discover brands they were previously unaware of. But brand discovery also can lengthen the purchasing-review time, with 42% saying AI increases the time they need to make a final purchase decision.

Boomers and Gen X consumers are more likely to use AI for brand discovery, at 62% each, followed by Millennials at 59% and Gen Z at 52%.