Companies Trust AI’s Advice but Not Its Actions

Companies are using artificial intelligence across more of their operations than ever while trusting it less to act on its own.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Wholesale Writes the AI Playbook: How Goods Firms Are Scaling Intelligence Across the Enterprise” found that every wholesale firm, 90% of retailers and 85% of construction firms limit AI agents to look-up access only, meaning the agent can retrieve information but cannot act on it. Not one company in any sub-industry fully allows autonomous AI action today.

The report was based on a May survey of 60 senior technology executives at enterprises in the United States with at least $1 billion in annual revenue.

The restriction is not a sign that AI deployment has stalled. Wholesale firms, the most mature AI adopters in the goods economy, used AI across 35 of the 75 tasks tracked in the survey, reaching majority use in 6 of 8 business functions. Their two most-adopted tasks, contract and proposal generation and security monitoring and threat detection, both at 75%, spanned sales and risk rather than clustering in a single function. Retail and construction firms used AI across roughly 31 tasks each, concentrating in marketing and sales. The picture is of companies that have embedded AI broadly for research, analysis and document generation, and drawn a line before execution.

Firms Limit AI Agents to Look-Up Access Across Every Sub-Industry

The pattern held even where the data suggested companies have the infrastructure to go further. The PYMNTS Intelligence report found that 100% of wholesale firms would grant look-up access only, the most uniform posture of any sub-industry despite wholesale having the broadest AI deployment. Only retail granted any execution rights at all, and just 5%, with human approval. Construction’s deviation ran the other way, as 15% gave an agent no access whatsoever. The wholesale number was notable because wholesale firms were simultaneously the most likely to see semi-autonomous AI as their five-year goal.

That gap between current posture and future ambition is where the constraint lives. Enterprises deploying AI agents at scale face the risk of agents acting without a traceable identity, operating outside approved boundaries or exposing sensitive data. That context explains why goods firms drawing a line at look-up access is a governance decision, not a capability one.

No Goods Firm Plans Fully Autonomous AI Even in Five Years

Within five years, the ambition shifts. The PYMNTS Intelligence report found that 85% of wholesale firms, 60% of retailers and 55% of construction and manufacturing firms said their primary five-year goal is semi-autonomous AI with human oversight. Not one goods firm in any sub-industry named fully autonomous AI as its primary vision.

The ceiling is consistent. AI may act, but humans will retain the ability to intervene. Wholesale pushes hardest to that line; retail and construction lean more toward augmenting human decisions.

The gap between today’s look-up-only posture and tomorrow’s semi-autonomous vision described a business process problem, not a model problem. PYMNTS Intelligence previously found that 98% of product leaders said they are not at all ready to grant core-system access to fully autonomous agents, and that trust is a larger barrier to adoption than the technology itself. The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Time to Cash™: A New Measure of Business Resilience found that companies using AI agents capable of autonomous action have automated up to 95% of their accounts receivable work, compared to 38% at firms without that capability.

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