New Adyen research reveals 64% of Australians use AI to shop, but most still don’t trust it to complete a purchase
Australian retailers are betting big on artificial intelligence. Shoppers are far more cautious.
Every enterprise retailer surveyed for the Adyen Index 2026 Australia Retail Report is now investing in AI tools to automate product discovery, decision making and checkout, and 95% say they’re familiar with agentic commerce, AI systems capable of acting on a customer’s behalf. Nearly two thirds of Australians, 64%, say they’re uncomfortable letting AI complete a purchase for them. That gap is the story.
AI as advisor, not buyer
AI is already a normal part of how Australians shop. Some 64% have used AI assistants to browse, compare or discover products. “AI is becoming embedded across retail, but consumer trust has not advanced at the same pace,” said Hayley Fisher, Country Manager Australia and New Zealand at Adyen, describing a shift that’s easy to see in the discovery numbers but harder to find once money is on the table.
Comfort narrows fast once AI moves from suggesting to deciding. Only 26% of Australians are comfortable with AI completing a purchase. Just 5% are fully comfortable letting it buy independently. “When AI moves from assisting to acting, payments, identity and security become the real conditions for adoption,” Fisher said.
Payments are the trust test
Payment reliability matters more as automation increases, not less. Fisher put it plainly: “At machine speed, even small payment failures can quickly become larger trust issues. Payment reliability is no longer just an operational concern, it’s a reputational issue.”
The numbers back that up. 62% of Australians say payment errors damage how they view a retailer. 24% actively avoid a retailer after a failed transaction. 15% switch to a competitor entirely, and don’t come back to check if the problem was fixed.
Nine in ten Australians, 91%, say they prioritise security checks over speed at checkout. Verification, in other words, reads as reassurance rather than friction, at least when it’s done well.
That preference already shows up in behaviour. More than a third of Australians, 36%, use biometric authentication such as fingerprint or facial recognition to secure transactions. 35% say verifying identity in multiple ways makes them feel more protected. Retailers appear to be catching up to this: the report found retailers are now prioritising protection of the direct customer relationship (63%), competitive pressure (55%) and automation and cost reduction (51%), roughly in that order.
Fisher summed up where this leaves the industry. “Agentic commerce has the potential to transform retail, but adoption will depend on whether retailers can build trust into every transaction. The retailers that succeed will be those that match intelligence with resilience, building payment experiences that perform reliably, protect customers when things go wrong, and earn trust at scale.”
What retailers can do
A few practical priorities fall out of this for SME retailers weighing AI investment.
Treat payment reliability as core infrastructure rather than an afterthought. With 62% of shoppers saying errors damage trust, and 24% avoiding a retailer after just one failed transaction, a glitchy checkout can undo whatever goodwill AI-powered discovery built earlier in the visit.
Make security visible instead of stripping it out. Since 91% of shoppers prioritise security checks over speed, shaving a few seconds off checkout by cutting verification steps may work against you rather than for you.
Offer biometric or multi-factor verification where practical. More than a third of Australians already use it, and a similar share say it increases their sense of protection.
For now, keep AI in an advisory role at the point of purchase. Only 5% of Australians are fully comfortable letting AI buy independently, so leaving the final call with the customer, even after AI has done the browsing and comparing, matches where trust currently sits.
And have an actual recovery plan for failed payments. Fifteen percent of shoppers will simply switch to a competitor after one bad transaction. How a business responds in that moment may end up mattering more than preventing the failure in the first place.
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