The agentic commerce trust gap: what the data actually says

If you ask European consumers whether AI shopping assistants will be common in the next five to ten years, 73.4% say yes. Ask whether they'd hand their card details to one of those agents right now, and 50.1% say no.

The hype around agentic commerce tells one story, but our data tells another.

We surveyed 1,756 consumers across the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. We also interviewed 16 senior payments and commerce leaders from TUI, Volkswagen, Wolt, Nord Security, Würth, and others.

Here's what we found out.

The headline figure (50.1% wouldn't trust an agent with card details) looks like a clean split, but it isn't. Break it down by age, country, and purchase type, and the picture gets far more interesting.

The 25–34 cohort is the most willing to trust an AI agent: 58.5% say yes to sharing their card details. That falls to 51.1% for 35–54s and 48.8% for 18–24s. Among consumers aged 55 and over, only 36.4% say yes.

Younger adults are often assumed to be natural early adopters of anything AI-related. But comfort with AI tools and comfort with AI spending are not the same thing. When money is involved, the enthusiasm gap between Gen Z and Millennials closes considerably.

The 22-point spread between the most and least trusting age groups has real implications for how merchants should think about agentic commerce investment.

The breakdown by country is even more dramatic. Spain leads, with 62.5% of Spanish respondents stating they would trust an agent with their card details. France (50.8%), Germany (50.2%), and Italy (52.1%) sit close to the overall average. The UK is a different story entirely; only 32.5% of UK consumers say yes, making them nearly twice as reluctant as their Spanish counterparts.

That isn't a small regional variance. Any PSP or merchant thinking about where to deploy agentic infrastructure first should treat the UK and Spain as fundamentally different trust environments - because the data says they are.

Consumers aren't flatly refusing agentic commerce, though more than one in five (21.3%) say they wouldn't let an agent spend on their behalf at all. A further 44.3% would allow it, but only up to £100/€100. Just 6% would allow a single transaction above £500/€500.

Among 55+ consumers, 36.2% refuse any AI spending whatsoever - more than double the rate for 25–34s (13.3%). In the UK, 32.2% of all respondents won't allow any AI spending at all, the highest refusal rate of any market in our survey.

Some consumers will delegate small, predictable payments, but they won't delegate high-stakes ones.

The same logic holds across what people will actually buy.

Agents get the most traction with everyday, low-consideration purchases: clothes and shoes (38.1%), everyday items like groceries (35.2%), and gifts (34.8%). For bigger or more emotionally loaded decisions, willingness drops sharply. Only 11.4% of 25–34s - the most willing age group overall - would use an agent for purchases above £500/€500. For 55+ consumers, that falls to just 6.5%.

Travel is its own category. Even among the 25–34 group, only 28.6% would hand a flight or hotel booking to an agent.

Mark Blake, Global Head of Technology Payments at TUI, explained the dynamic: "Part of the holiday experience is selecting the hotel people want, adding extras and other items such as cars. So we expect customers will still want to make that payment through our infrastructure rather than via an agent."

A £5,000 holiday is not the same decision as a £35 food shop. Agentic commerce that treats them the same way isn't just impractical. It's simply not what consumers want.

One final data point worth noting: 22.6% of 55+ consumers say they wouldn't use an agent for shopping at all. That opt-out rate sits at 9.3–9.7% across younger groups. A meaningful portion of older consumers simply aren’t considering agentic commerce; they've already made up their minds.

When consumers explained what would stop them from using an agent, the top answer was handing over payment information (39.7%). Second was loss of control over decisions (34.7%). Third was worry about the agent buying the wrong thing (31.4%), and fraud and scams came in fourth, at 28.1%.

The single biggest thing that would persuade consumers to use an agent was knowing it would ask for approval before buying (37.1%). Easy refunds if something goes wrong are also important (29.8%), as are setting spending limits (25.5%).

Even with a trusted brand backing the technology, only 7.6% of consumers said that would give them confidence. Brand endorsement alone won't shift this. The trust has to be built into the mechanics of the transaction itself.

While 55.9% of European consumers use AI for asking questions and getting answers, what they're not comfortable with is AI as a buyer making decisions on their behalf.

Andrzej Tomaszewski, Head of Business Products at Zing Coach, had already seen this in his own informal research: "They told me they like to search and compare products. But after that, they want to checkout themselves."

Our data backs this. Price comparison (52.2% find it attractive) and finding discounts (47.0%) top the capability rankings by some distance. Completing a purchase, even with the consumer's approval, sits last at just 13.8%.

The merchants we spoke to are dealing with their own set of concerns about agentic commerce - and they tend to be more operationally urgent.

Fraud comes up in almost every conversation. Danish Kanojia, Payments Product Lead at Wolt, put it clearly: "Consumers are going to hesitate when it comes to payment authorisation. That means merchants and protocol providers need to work together to solve these problems, and we need trusted partners and trusted technology to solve these issues."

Mark Blake at TUI shared the same concern: "Fraud is a big issue. The onus is on us as an industry to try and thwart that as much as we possibly can. But it's difficult, especially when things evolve in the AI space so quickly."

Then there's the liability question. If an agent completes a transaction the consumer didn't intend, or burns through a budget loop negotiating with another agent, who takes the loss?

Our consumer data points firmly at the AI company (38.9%) and payment providers or banks (23.9%). Together, consumers assign only 25.4% of responsibility to themselves or the merchant. There's no regulatory framework yet that settles this. That ambiguity is exactly what keeps merchants up at night.

Kestas Saulis, Head of Payments at Nord Security, made the commercial case for taking it seriously: "The main challenges in agentic are risk and compliance, followed by brand reputation, which can be harmed way easier in agentic's current state than in an old-school payments flow."

The industry isn't short of vision for what agentic commerce could become. What's short is the infrastructure to back it up.

Consumers are not rejecting agentic commerce entirely, but they are asking for a version with guardrails.

Approval before purchase. Easy refunds. Spending limits they set themselves. These demands aren’t limited to a nervous minority; they're the majority preference.

Daniel Kornitzer, CEO of Ebanx, described the permission model that makes this work: think of it like a power of attorney. You grant an agent the authority to act on your behalf, but within a scope you define, for purposes you specify, up to limits you set. In practice: "Automate 96% of the transactions because they're within a range that's expected. Anything below or over comes to me, because a human needs to double check."

This model is the right way forward when considering where consumer trust actually is right now. And it happens to map closely to how people already manage things like direct debits and standing orders: trusted, automated, and with safeguards in place when something looks off.

The question then becomes: who builds and operates that infrastructure? Every merchant and intermediary we spoke to gave a version of the same answer.

Shyam Sreenivasan, Solution Architect for E-payments at Würth, said it as plainly as anyone we interviewed: "PSPs can become the trust layer in agentic e-commerce - ensuring the entire ecosystem stays safe, compliant, and authenticated."

Cihan Duezguen, CEO of the Green Banana Group, put the near-term priority in practical terms: "Limits and options will help to build consumer trust. Consumers will say, okay, my limit is 100 bucks, or I want to pay in three rates. These choices will help to build trust, and make using agents seem normal."

The real question isn't whether consumers will eventually trust agentic commerce. The question is who builds the trust layer that gets them there, and whether they do it before the first wave of high-profile failures makes the job significantly harder.

This post draws on Ecommpay's primary research: a survey of 1,756 consumers across the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, conducted in April 2025, alongside 16 in-depth interviews with senior merchants and industry leaders.