AI Moves Into Brazil’s Everyday Shopping Journey

Brazil has become one of the clearest tests of what happens when digital shopping ceases to occupy a separate corner of commerce and becomes indispensable to everyday interactions.

The country’s consumers now average 67 digital shopping days per month, a measure that counts separate shopping activities across devices rather than literal calendar days, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence playbook “Global Digital Shopping Index: Brazil Playbook – The New Brazilian Shopper,” a collaboration with Visa Acceptance Solutions published in August. That can include discovering products, comparing prices and making purchases, which means one person can record several digital shopping activities on the same day.

For Gustavo Carvalho, vice president of Value Added Services at Visa Brazil, the figure captures a market in which consumers routinely cross boundaries between digital and physical commerce.

“Digital shopping in Brazil is no longer a channel; it’s a daily behavior,” Carvalho told PYMNTS.

Consumers are engaging digitally “across multiple moments of the shopping journey, from the discovery to comparison to purchase,” Carvalho said.

The joint research from PYMNTS Intelligence and Visa found that 65% of Brazilian shoppers said knowing that their preferred payment method is accepted influences where they shop. Brazil’s mix includes credit, debit and contactless cards alongside Pix, the country’s widely used real-time payment system.

For merchants, that creates a straightforward commercial constraint. A consumer who cannot use a preferred method can choose another seller, whether the transaction originates online, on a phone or inside a store.

Cards, Pix and other methods therefore “need to live together,” particularly as the route from product search to purchase becomes less predictable, Carvalho said.

The smartphone illustrates the point. During their latest in-store purchase, 57% of Brazilian shoppers used a mobile device for at least one shopping-related task, with comparison shopping among the most common uses, the playbook showed. Shoppers standing in front of merchandise can simultaneously check another retailer’s price, read reviews, seek product information and confirm available payment methods.

“The phone is now part of the in-store experience,” Carvalho said.

Merchants should assume “the consumer is digitally assisted while being physically present,” he added.

That makes the distinction between an eCommerce customer and a store customer less useful for those same merchants. Carvalho pointed to visible pricing, accessible product information, payment acceptance and mobile product locators as practical ways of serving shoppers who use the phone across channels.

AI Enters the Shopping Journey

Brazil’s digital habits are also providing fertile ground for artificial intelligence-assisted shopping. More than half of Brazilian online shoppers used AI during their most recent purchase journey, the research revealed.

Consumers are using tools such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini alongside conventional search to compare information, identify products and evaluate offers, Carvalho said.

“The storefront is no longer only the store, the website or the merchant,” he said. “More and more, [there] will be an AI answer” that motivates transactions, and AI serves as a “front door” to shopping.

The merchant side is less developed. Only 15% of Brazilian merchants have structured product information so AI agents can read it, while 21% can identify when a sale originated from an AI platform, the playbook found. The disparity raises a practical problem. Consumers can begin shopping through AI before merchants have made their catalogs, inventory, prices and availability accessible to those systems.

“If an AI cannot read a merchant product catalog, the price, the availability data, that merchant risks becoming invisible for the AI agents,” Carvalho said.

Consumer acceptance also has a boundary. Carvalho said 61% of consumers would allow agents to search and compare products, while only 11% would grant an AI agent full access. Brazilian shoppers remain more comfortable assigning tasks such as product research than surrendering control of payment credentials or the final transaction.

“The consumers are ready to delegate efforts,” Carvalho said. “But they still want clear boundaries when money and payment credentials are involved.”

Carvalho cited approval requirements, spending limits, transparency and the ability to reverse transactions among the controls consumers want. That places payments at a sensitive point in the development of agentic commerce. AI can narrow choices and remove shopping chores, but authorization remains a separate question.

Visa’s role centers on payment infrastructure rather than the shopping recommendation itself, Carvalho said. Authentication and tokenization are tools relevant to AI-mediated transactions, and Visa and the broader payments industry are working on frameworks intended to establish consent and transaction controls as AI moves closer to purchase.

Watch the full interview with Visa’s Gustavo Carvalho to learn more about:

• Why Brazil offers an early view of how AI-assisted commerce may develop.
• How merchants can prepare product catalogs and inventory systems for AI agents.
• What consent, reversibility and authentication could mean when agents begin completing purchases.

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