Two in three shoppers use AI to find things. One in twenty will let it buy

Three numbers from the Adyen Index 2026 Australia Retail Report, covered by Inside Retail, are worth more than most of what has been written about AI shopping this year.

• 64% of consumers have used an AI assistant to browse, compare or discover products.
• 26% are comfortable with an AI completing a purchase.
• 5% are fully comfortable letting an AI buy independently.

Worth saying up front that the research was commissioned by Adyen, a payments company, so it has an obvious interest in the finding that payment trust matters. Read the payment numbers with that in mind. The consumer behaviour numbers are still the most useful thing published on this in months, and they tell a story the marketing around agentic commerce mostly does not.

Discovery is here. Buying is not

Two-thirds of people are already letting AI do the looking. That is not a future trend, that is now, and it is roughly the same share of people who used to open Google and scroll.

But when it comes to handing over the card, the numbers collapse. One in four is comfortable with an AI completing a purchase, and only one in twenty is relaxed about it doing so independently. Ninety-one per cent say they would rather have security checks at the checkout than speed.

So the shape of the thing is clear. The research part of shopping has been handed to machines. The paying part has not, and consumers are in no hurry to hand it over.

We should be straight about our own coverage here

We have written about agentic commerce a fair bit this year, including when Airtasker made itself bookable inside ChatGPT and when a wholesaler started automating its customers’ ordering. Read together, those could leave you thinking a wave of AI agents is about to start buying things from you next quarter.

This data is a useful correction to that, and it is worth being precise about why both things are true.

The agents that are genuinely live today sit on the business side. A marketplace exposing its jobs to ChatGPT, a wholesaler placing routine orders for its retailers, a supplier automating procurement. Those are real, they are shipping now, and they matter.

The bit that is still early is the consumer side: an ordinary person telling an assistant to go and buy something and letting it complete the transaction alone. Five per cent. That is a rounding error, and it is the part that most of the breathless coverage is actually about.

Same technology, two very different timelines, and it changes what you should do this year.

Where the money goes

If discovery is at 64% and autonomous checkout is at 5%, the spending priority writes itself.

Do now: be legible to the thing doing the looking. Accurate service and pricing information, clean structured data, consistent details across your site and listings, content that answers the questions people actually ask. This is the getting found in AI search work, and its payoff is not in some agentic future. It is collecting today from the two-thirds of people already researching this way.

Do not build for: autonomous agent checkout. Not yet. There is no return in re-engineering your payment flow for a behaviour five per cent of people are comfortable with. Revisit in a year.

That is the whole strategic call, and it is a relief rather than a burden, because the useful work is the cheaper of the two.

The payments half, taken with the pinch of salt it deserves

The other numbers in the report are about failure at the checkout, and even discounting for who paid for the research, they are steep. 62% say payment errors damage their perception of a retailer. 24% actively avoid a business after a failed transaction. 15% go straight to a competitor.

You do not need an agentic strategy to act on that. You need a checkout or booking flow that works on a phone, on a bad connection, on the first try. A payment that fails once costs you the customer at roughly the same rate as never being found at all, and it is a much easier problem to fix.

The report’s framing is that payments are “where trust becomes tangible”. That is a payments company talking its book, but it is not wrong, and it sits alongside the point we made last week about what actually proves your business is real. A transaction that completes cleanly is a trust signal. One that dies at the last step undoes everything upstream of it.

The func.digital take

The honest summary of agentic commerce in Australia right now is that the research half has arrived and the buying half has not. Businesses acting on the first are collecting already. Businesses waiting to be ready for the second are preparing for something most of their customers are not yet willing to do.

We would rather tell you that than sell you a project. Get your information clean, structured and consistent so the assistant doing the looking can find you and describe you correctly. Make sure your checkout or booking actually completes. That is a year of sensible work, and none of it is wasted if the 5% becomes 50%, because a business an agent can read is the prerequisite for everything that comes after.

If you want to know how you look to the thing doing the searching, and whether your booking or payment path holds up, that is what a free digital systems audit covers. Get in touch, and we will tell you which half is worth your money right now.