70% of Consumers Say Yes to AI Agents for Shopping

The most revealing signal in the latest PYMNTS Intelligence research is not that consumers are experimenting with agentic AI.

It is that they are already drawing firm boundaries around where autonomy ends and financial trust begins.

That tension sits at the center of the findings contained in “From Assistive to Agentic AI: Consumers Wade Into Autonomous Commerce,” the January 2026 installment of the Agentic AI Report Series.

The data and the sentiments come from a survey of 2,299 U.S. adults. The report tracks consumer interest across 54 personal use cases and shows a population increasingly comfortable letting artificial intelligence sense, decide and act on their behalf.

But as AI systems move closer to payments, consumer confidence shifts away from novelty and toward familiar financial guardrails.

The headline finding is not adoption alone. It is a conditional adoption. Consumers want agentic AI to reduce friction in daily life, manage complexity and handle recurring decisions.

At the same time, they insist on controls, reversibility and recognizable payment credentials once money is involved. The report makes clear that agentic commerce will scale only if it meets what PYMNTS Intelligence describes as “payments-grade” trust. That includes transparency, clear authorization and the ability to intervene.

Three data points capture how this balance is forming:

71% of consumers express interest in using agentic artificial intelligence for health and wellness management, and 70% show interest in using the technology for travel planning. These are high-stakes, coordination-heavy activities where proactive execution creates clear value.

69% of consumers are interested in delegating subscription management, grocery shopping and meal planning to agentic AI, while 66% show interest in AI bill management. These use cases point to demand for friction reduction in recurring financial tasks.

49% of interested consumers would allow an agentic AI assistant to complete both routine purchases and larger, research-driven purchases, signaling openness to full transaction execution under the right conditions.

Beyond the headline numbers, the report surfaces a structural shift with implications for banks, networks and merchants. As consumers become accustomed to AI-native interfaces, many begin to prefer an end-to-end journey inside those environments.

More than half of dedicated AI platform users favor completing purchases within the AI interface rather than handing off to a merchant site. That positions AI platforms as potential gatekeepers of discovery and conversion.

Yet when trust is measured, consumers still anchor responsibility elsewhere. Across segments, banks, digital wallets and card networks rank as the most trusted providers of agentic assistants.

Among consumers who do not regularly use AI tools, trust in generative AI platforms as the provider of an agentic assistant is negligible, at just 3%.

Even among AI-native users, trust is distributed rather than exclusive. This points to a partnership model in which AI handles intelligence and orchestration while regulated payment players retain the trust and liability layer.

The report also highlights a practical design mandate. Consumers are not rejecting autonomy. They are insisting that it be interruptible. Interest rises sharply when systems allow users to preview actions, approve transactions, undo decisions and escalate to human review.

Data governance matters just as much. A meaningful minority of consumers refuse to grant broad access to purchase histories or personal data, even when AI is embedded in the experience. That reality favors tiered permission models rather than all-or-nothing data strategies.

Taken together, the findings suggest that agentic commerce is moving from concept to execution, but on consumer terms. The opportunity is large, particularly for recurring purchases and complex coordination tasks. The constraint is equally clear. AI systems that touch money must inherit the rules, protections and familiarity of the payments ecosystem. Adoption will follow trust.

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