UK shoppers want AI buying help but distrust paid results

TL;DR:

  • 64% of UK consumers are interested in agentic shopping tools, but only 21% use AI for shopping today.
  • 46% believe brands should not be able to pay for preference in AI results, and 55% want sponsored content clearly labelled.
  • Top concerns are AI buying without approval (43%) and bank-account security (39%).

UK consumers are warming to the idea of AI doing their shopping — but they want to keep their hands on the controls. A survey by Commerce and PayPal, conducted by Logica Research across 1,000 UK shoppers (and 2,000 more in the US and Australia), found 64% interested in agentic shopping tools that can research products, compare options and buy on a shopper’s behalf. Yet adoption lags intent: just 21% use AI for shopping today, even as 70% want it to help in future.

Trust is the gating factor

The appeal is largely about money: shoppers want AI to find the best price (31%), surface every promotion (28%) and flag cheaper options elsewhere (23%). But the barriers are about control and security. Some 43% worry about AI buying without their approval, 39% about bank-account breaches, and 32% about purchasing the wrong product. Expectations are high too — 83% want AI shopping tools to match or beat existing payment security.

The sharpest finding is about fairness. Over half (55%) say sponsored content and ads must be clearly identifiable, and 46% believe brands and retailers should not be able to pay to be favoured by AI shopping tools. That puts consumer sentiment on a collision course with the retail-media business models that fund much of online commerce — and it dovetails with the regulatory questions raised in recent Resultsense coverage of retailers seeking an AI-ad exemption from EU disclosure rules.

Looking forward

For UK retailers, the survey is both an invitation and a warning. The demand for AI-assisted bargain-hunting is real, but it is conditional on transparency: shoppers will hand over the task, not their trust. Any agentic experience that quietly surfaces paid placements risks a backlash precisely among the consumers most eager to adopt it. The winners are likely to be those who make the AI’s reasoning — and any commercial influence on it — visible, keeping the human firmly at the checkout.

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