Shoppers trust AI more than influencers. Not with checkout.

The consumer half of agentic commerce just got measured, and the split is sharper than the hype allows. AI shopping tools now out-rank influencers and social feeds on trust, but a third of shoppers still want a human hand on the checkout button. Discovery has flipped. Purchase authority has not. For any merchant deciding where to put engineering hours this quarter, that gap is the entire answer.

What actually happened

RTB House surveyed 1,840 consumers across the US, UK, France, and Japan in June and July, publishing the results as Who's Buying? Consumer Trust in the Age of Agentic AI. Retail Dive covered the findings on August 13.

On trust: 44% of respondents trust AI tools for purchasing decisions, against 59% for friends and family. AI landed ahead of influencers, newspapers, major media outlets, TikTok, and Instagram. Second place to your friends is a strong position for a channel that barely existed three years ago.

On behavior: 68% used at least one AI platform to shop in the past three months, and 62% used AI specifically to compare prices, brands, models, and reviews. In the US, Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT tie as the top shopping tools at 43% each, followed by Claude at 23% and Grok at 21%.

On the ceiling: 35% globally want a human to review before an AI agent completes a purchase, rising to 44% among baby boomers. Willingness is conditional, not absent — 42% of American millennials said they would let an agent buy inside a $250 budget if they could return it within seven days.

One more number worth sitting with: 42% of US consumers say AI tools make purchase decisions take longer, because the tools surface more brands and alternatives. And 59% credit AI platforms with showing them brands they did not previously know. Those two findings are the same finding.

Worth flagging: RTB House is a performance marketing firm, so this is vendor research on a category it sells into. The sample and methodology are disclosed, which is more than most.

Why it matters for your business

If AI is lengthening the consideration phase and injecting unfamiliar brands into it, the winnable fight is being one of those unfamiliar brands. That is not a marketing campaign — it is a data problem. Whether an assistant can quote your price, your stock status, your dimensions, and your return window determines whether you appear in the comparison at all. Merchants with clean, machine-readable product data get surfaced. Merchants whose specs live in a PDF or a product image do not.

The return window is the second lever, and it is nearly free. Millennials told the survey they will hand an agent a $250 budget when returns are easy. That is not a checkout integration — that is a policy page, stated plainly, in structured markup an assistant can read.

What we would not build yet is autonomous agent checkout. A third of your customers want to approve the transaction themselves, and agent-completed checkout is still a rounding error in actual traffic. Build for the AI-referred human who arrives already researched and ready. That customer exists today, in volume, and converts.

Sources: Retail Dive, RTB House via BusinessWire.