Shoppers want AI help, not control

AI-powered shopping is winning over American consumers when it saves time or makes buying decisions easy, but a slew of recent surveys show shoppers are not ready for autonomous purchase agents. For example, in January 2026 email platform Omnisend commissioned a survey of 4,000 shoppers across the U.S., Canada, and Australia as to their use of AI for shopping in the previous six months.
Of the 1,072 U.S. shoppers surveyed, only 8.29% were “fully comfortable” with AI completing online purchases. Nearly three-quarters of respondents wanted some form of transactional restriction, and 20.28% were “not comfortable at all” with “handing over transactions to AI tools.”