Many Consumers Say ‘No Thanks’ to Agent-Based Payments

It’s still early days for agentic commerce, in which artificial-intelligence agents could complete a shopping transaction on behalf of a consumer. And it appears consumers may want to forestall such transactions until they get much more comfortable with the technology, suggests the Riskified Agentic Commerce Pulse first-quarter report.

Riskified, with dual headquarters in New York City and Israel, says the report, which surveyed 2,000 consumers in the United States and the United Kingdom, found that 61.5% of them have used AI tools to discover products and receive recommendations, though 55% of all respondents were not comfortable with AI agents making purchases on their behalf. That compares to 70% of consumers, in the 2025 fourth-quarter iteration of the report, who said they were at least somewhat comfortable with AI agents making purchases for them.

This comes as payments and technology companies prepare for an expected role for agentic commerce in a consumer’s purchasing domain. American Express Co. released a software developer kit for its credit cards to be more easily used in agentic commerce and a purchase-protection program for agentic commerce transactions. J.P. Morgan Payments is working with fintech Mirakl SAS on infrastructure for its agentic-commerce services.

 The AmEx effort addresses another consumer concern brought to light by the survey, with 50.8% of them saying AI platforms should be responsible for unauthorized purchases, followed by 23.2% who cited the retailer or brand, and 18.7% who would accept personal responsibility.

“What we’re seeing is a widening gap between adoption and trust,” Jeff Otto, Riskified’s chief marketing officer, says in a statement. “Shoppers want the convenience and personalization AI can deliver, but they’re not yet willing to hand over control or responsibility. For merchants, that means going beyond enabling AI-driven experiences by building the infrastructure for transparency, security, and accountability that makes those experiences trustworthy.”

Other survey data point to consumer hesitation when it comes to agentic commerce. A majority—53.9%—say AI could increase the risk of online fraud, but would expect some sort of safeguards to be in place. Biometrics or one-time password authentication is expected by 73.9%.