74% of Shoppers Would Trust an AI Agent Over Their Best Friend to Buy for Them, Accenture Finds
Shoppers are readier to hand purchases to AI agents than most merchants think. Accenture surveyed 25,590 consumers across 16 countries for its “Talk to My AI Agent” report and found that 74% would trust a personal AI agent more than their best friend to make a purchase for them. The report came out in June, but coverage took off this week as write-ups landed across Asia-Pacific business press and retail trade media.
What happened
Accenture’s Consumer Pulse research measures how much autonomy shoppers will give AI agents. The short answer: more than you’d guess.
- 74% would let an agent handle routine tasks like negotiating deals, resolving complaints, renewing subscriptions, and reordering products.
- 32% would let an agent decide what to buy within set limits such as budget and preferred brands, with the shopper approving before payment.
- 9% would already let an agent complete purchases entirely on its own.
- 56% would tell their agent which brands to consider. At the same time, 37% of otherwise loyal consumers would let an agent switch brands for a better fit.
- 71% expect generative AI to influence at least half of their spending decisions within 12 months.
Among weekly generative AI users, the report says, AI has already overtaken physical stores as the main way people discover new products. AI News adds two numbers on spending: 26% of active AI users bought pricier items than they otherwise would have, and 26% grew their basket size.
Accenture’s advice to brands is blunt: make product data “structured, machine-readable and verifiable”, including pricing, availability, and policies, because that’s what agents check before recommending anything.
Why it matters
This is the demand side of the agentic commerce story. Shopify is building the infrastructure and Wall Street is pricing it in; Accenture’s data says consumers will actually use it. When a third of loyal customers admit an AI agent could talk them into switching brands, discovery stops being about who shouts loudest. It becomes a question of whose data answers cleanest.
What this means for Shopify merchants
Read Accenture’s advice again: agents check pricing, availability, and policies before they recommend. In that world availability works as a filter rather than a soft signal. An agent shopping for a customer won’t recommend a product it can verify is out of stock, and it won’t linger on a storefront where stock status is murky.
So collection page hygiene turns into a competitive issue. If your bestsellers sell out and stay parked at the top of your collections, you’re leading with your worst answer. Keeping in-stock products up top and sold-out ones at the bottom, without deleting anything and torching your SEO, is the kind of verifiable tidiness agents will reward. Pushy automates it, dropping out-of-stock products to the bottom of every collection the moment inventory hits zero.
“What agents can verify, they will recommend. What consumers find meaningful, they will remember,” Accenture writes in the report.
The bottom line
Most shoppers say they’d trust an AI agent with a purchase sooner than their best friend. Whether that’s flattering to the friends or alarming about the agents is a separate argument. Either way, the purchases go to stores whose availability data holds up when something checks it.