Key Takeaways
- On June 11, 2026, two agentic commerce surveys from Checkout.com and Ecommpay were reported on the same day. While 73.4% of consumers expect agent-led shopping to become common, only 13.9% want an AI agent to complete purchases on their behalf — a deep gap between expectation and delegation
- In the Checkout.com survey, 72% of merchants believe consumers will move faster than most merchants are prepared for. Consumers would allow an average of £177 per purchase without additional approval, below the £200 merchants assume, and named spending caps, instant revocation and easy cancellation as non-negotiables
- The Ecommpay survey pinpoints where trust collapses: the moment of payment. Pre-purchase AI use such as price comparison is already mainstream, yet 50.1% refuse to share card details. The payment infrastructure announced by Visa and Mastercard a day earlier is designed to close exactly this gap
Two Surveys, One Day, the Same Divide
New research from Checkout.com has found a growing gap between emerging consumer demand and the trust, control and infrastructure needed to support agentic commerce.
homeofdirectcommerce.comOn June 11, 2026, two studies on agentic commerce — where AI agents discover products and complete purchases on a person's behalf — were reported on the same day. One is Home of Direct Commerce's coverage of the Checkout.com report "Agentic Commerce 2026: The State of Consumer Demand and Merchant Readiness". The other is SecurityBrief UK's coverage of a five-country European study by payment service provider Ecommpay.
Two different companies, surveying different markets with different methods, arrived at nearly the same picture. Consumers expect AI-led shopping to become normal and have already started using it in the earlier stages of buying. But the moment money moves, trust drops sharply. And merchants are misreading the specific controls consumers demand. This article cross-references the two surveys to map, in numbers, how far agentic commerce has come and where it stalls.
Consumers Are More Cautious — and Faster — Than Merchants Assume: The Checkout.com Survey
The most striking finding in Checkout.com's new report, which surveyed consumers in six markets and merchants in the UK and US, concerns the pace of the shift. A third of consumers (33%) expect at least 10% of their purchases to be AI-driven within a year. Merchants feel even more urgency: 72% agree that consumers will adopt agent-led shopping faster than most merchants are prepared for. The supply side already senses it is being outpaced by demand.
Demand, however, is not unconditional. In the same survey, 24% of consumers say they will never delegate purchases to AI, and 27% trust no organisation to operate an AI shopping agent. Inside the expectation gap sits a second, nested trust gap.
There is also a mismatch on money. Across the six markets, consumers would allow an AI shopping agent to spend an average of £177 per purchase without additional approval. Merchants in the UK and US assumed the figure would be £200. The difference is just over 10%, but the direction matters: merchants are estimating consumers' purse strings as looser than they actually are.
So what would make consumers hand over their wallet? The top answers were spending caps (30%), instant revocation of permissions (29%), and easy cancellation (28%). Merchants broadly agree on this point — 75% say giving customers real-time ability to revoke permissions will be critical to adoption. The motivations for delegating are saving time (25%) and never missing a better deal (20%). Convenience pulls; control reassures.
Break the data down by category and the misalignment widens. Consumers are most willing to delegate groceries (41%) and household supplies (31%) — low-risk, repeatable purchases. Financial services rank last at 15%. Merchants expect the opposite: that agentic commerce will take hold first in complex, high-consideration decisions such as financial products. Demand and supply hold diametrically opposed views on where adoption starts — a point worth noting for anyone choosing which category to enter.
Brand loyalty is also in play. Well over half of consumers (57%) would let an AI shopping agent switch brands if it found better value. Today only 3% of transactions involve AI agents according to UK and US merchants, yet 89% of merchants are actively preparing. Rory O'Neill, CMO at Checkout.com, summed up the implications.
While adoption is ramping up, the infrastructure behind it is still developing. Consumers need confidence that AI agents will operate within clear controls around security, refunds, permissions and spend limits. Until those foundations are in place, trust will remain one of the biggest barriers to adoption.Source: Rory O'Neill (CMO, Checkout.com)
The 50.1% Who Won't Share Card Details: Ecommpay Locates the Wall at the Point of Payment
Where Checkout.com's research sketches the overall expectation gap, Ecommpay's white paper pinpoints exactly where trust breaks. Based on a survey of 1,750 consumers in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, plus merchant interviews, 59.2% of consumers are aware of using agents for online purchases and 73.4% expect agentic shopping to become common. Awareness and expectation are both high. Even so, only 13.9% want an agent to complete purchases with their approval.
The reason for the drop-off becomes clear in the usage data. More than half of consumers (53.3%) use AI agents to compare prices, and 47.1% use them to find discounts or better deals — pre-purchase stages are already well penetrated. Another 17.8% let agents fill the basket but complete checkout themselves. And 50.1% would not trust an AI agent with their card details. Consumers will delegate searching and comparing, but they will not let go of the moment of payment. That is the core of the Ecommpay findings.
Roy Blokker, Head of Strategic Sales at Ecommpay, puts the structure plainly.
Our research suggests that the biggest barrier to agentic commerce adoption is not consumer awareness or merchant interest; it's trust at the point of payment.
The data also hints at a way through. Some 24.2% of consumers would allow an agent to complete purchases in the £50-100 (or €50-100) range. They refuse unlimited delegation but accept capped, low-value autonomy — a finding that maps neatly onto Checkout.com's result that spending caps are a non-negotiable.
Merchant interviews surfaced a different species of anxiety. When a transaction involving an autonomous agent goes wrong, who bears the liability? How are chargebacks — card payment dispute claims — and other disputes handled? Dispute resolution is already a heavy burden in conventional e-commerce, and inserting an AI into the chain of authority makes proving who authorised what one step harder. The white paper also cites research from the Diversity and Inclusion Working Group of the UK Payments Association: 42% of the most vulnerable respondents have been unable to complete a banking or payment task because an AI-powered or digital tool did not work. As agent-led commerce spreads, designing for customers who struggle with digital interfaces becomes both a regulatory and a reputational obligation.
The Shared Picture That Emerges From Both Surveys
| Item | Checkout.com survey | Ecommpay survey |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Consumers in six markets, merchants in the UK and US | 1,750 consumers in five European countries (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy), plus merchant interviews |
| Adoption expectations | 33% of consumers expect 10%+ of purchases to be AI-driven within a year | 73.4% expect agent shopping to become common (59.2% awareness) |
| Resistance to delegation | 24% will never delegate purchases; 27% trust no organisation to run an agent | 50.1% will not share card details; only 13.9% want agents to complete purchases |
| Acceptable spend without approval | £177 per purchase on average (merchants assume £200) | 24.2% would allow delegation in the £50-100 / €50-100 range |
| Conditions and concerns | Spending caps (30%), instant revocation (29%), easy cancellation (28%) as non-negotiables | Trust at the point of payment is the biggest barrier; merchants worry about liability and chargebacks |
Despite different markets and methods, the two surveys agree on three points. First, awareness and expectation are running ahead of behaviour. Second, trust stalls at the moment of payment, and consumers willing to accept unconditional delegation remain a minority. Third, a sizeable segment will delegate if — and only if — spending is capped and permissions are revocable. What blocks adoption is not rejection of the technology but the absence of control designs that have actually been put in front of consumers.
A Day Earlier, Visa and Mastercard Moved: Demand-Side Data Meets Supply-Side Infrastructure
The timing is no coincidence worth ignoring. On June 10, the day before these surveys were reported, Visa announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI featuring agent payments built around spending limits, merchant category restrictions and approval requirements. The same day, Mastercard unveiled Agent Pay for Machines, a machine-to-machine payment platform that records delegated permissions on a blockchain. The spending caps and instant revocation consumers demanded in the surveys are precisely the features the payment networks committed to shipping one day earlier.
Since the start of 2026, research firms and consultancies including Forrester, McKinsey and Sopra Steria have reported the same trust-gap structure in varying terms. These two surveys join that lineage, but go a step further in specificity: they supply figures granular enough to design against, such as acceptable spend (£177, £50-100) and the ranked order of non-negotiable controls. Demand-side conditions are now quantified and supply-side infrastructure is arriving. Whether the two mesh is the question that will define the next twelve months.
Conclusion
Consumers do not doubt a future where AI shops for them. What they doubt is whether they can take back control after handing over the wallet. The Checkout.com and Ecommpay surveys show, in numbers, that the boundary sits at the moment of payment — and that crossing it depends on concrete features: spending caps and instant revocation. For e-commerce businesses, the question has shifted from "will consumers delegate to AI" to "when can we offer an experience that accepts capped delegation". The divide the surveys describe is deep, but the place to build the bridge has already been located.
