Seven Percent of Fashion Shoppers Would Let an AI Assistant Buy Without Their Approval
New research from ACI Worldwide finds 35% of fashion shoppers in the US and UK value AI price drop alerts, and 7% would let an AI assistant buy for them under predefined conditions.
Would you let an AI agent buy your next pair of sneakers? ACI Worldwide put a version of that question to fashion and sportswear shoppers in the United States and the United Kingdom, through a YouGov survey of 3,328 adults. The answers show shoppers want AI working for them on price while keeping their own hand on the purchase. The full report, The New Rules of Fashion and Sportswear Payments, was released September 16.
What Shoppers Want AI to Do
Price tools lead the list, with price drop alerts and cross-retailer price comparisons each selected by 35% of consumers. Interest falls off once the AI moves from comparing to recommending, with 27% interested in help finding similar products or alternatives, 18% in personalized product suggestions and 17% in outfit recommendations.
Personalized suggestions and outfit ideas draw about half the interest of a price alert in this survey.
By age, interest in price alerts peaks among 45- to 54-year-olds at 40%, against 27% among 18- to 24-year-olds, which puts the strongest pull for AI price tracking with shoppers in their mid-forties to mid-fifties rather than with the youngest group.
Where Trust Stops
On the agentic commerce questions, 53% of respondents are uncomfortable allowing an AI assistant to make purchases on their behalf. Another 20% would accept recommendations from AI and stop short of letting it buy, and 14% would require manual approval on each purchase. Seven percent would permit autonomous purchasing under predefined conditions.
Add the first three groups together and 87% of shoppers are either uncomfortable with the idea or want a person in the loop before money moves. Agentic commerce in fashion has that 87% to win over, in a category where fit, style and returns make a wrong purchase expensive to undo.
“Consumers are drawing a clear distinction between AI that helps them make better decisions and AI that makes decisions for them,” said Adriana Iordan, global head, merchant product management and payment intelligence at ACI Worldwide. “Fashion shoppers see real value in AI tools that help them find better prices, but they’re not ready to hand over the final purchase decision. For merchants, the challenge is making AI-driven purchases feel as secure and controllable as any other transaction.”
“Shoppers are telling us they want AI to inform the purchase, not make it,” said Marie Driscoll, president of the Retail Marketing Society. “Price tools succeed because they add insight without removing control. Handing a fashion purchase decision to an agent is a much bigger leap of faith. The requisite trust will be earned when retailers prove that AI can be reliable, transparent and safely constrained, not just convenient.”
What does “safely constrained” look like at checkout? The 14% who want to approve each purchase and the 7% who would accept predefined conditions are describing the same set of controls from two ends, spending limits, approval steps and rules about what an agent can and cannot buy. Those controls live in authentication, authorization and fraud tooling, and ACI’s release names building those controls as the opportunity for merchants and payment providers.
The Payment Still Has to Go Through
Whoever presses buy, a failed payment puts the sale at risk. Among consumers who have had an online payment fail, 39% abandoned the purchase altogether and 22% switched to another retailer. Fifty-three percent tried an alternative payment method, and respondents could select more than one answer.
For a merchant, the 22% who switched retailers wanted the item and bought it from a competitor, after the discovery work had already brought them to the payment form.
“As agentic commerce moves from concept to reality, merchants will need infrastructure that can securely authenticate transactions, manage risk and ensure payments are completed reliably,” Iordan said. “Success will depend on creating seamless experiences that combine innovation with the transparency, control and safeguards consumers expect.”
The risk side of AI shoppers came up on Talk Commerce when Jeff Otto of Riskified talked about protecting profitability in the age of AI shopping agents.
How ACI and YouGov Ran the Survey
ACI Worldwide commissioned YouGov to conduct an online survey of 3,328 adults aged 18 to 65 in June 2026, with 2,172 respondents in the United Kingdom and 1,156 in the United States. The survey covered shopping, payment and checkout preferences in fashion and sportswear retail. Fashion-related findings are based on the 3,194 respondents who purchase clothing, footwear or accessories. Country samples were weighted to be representative of adults aged 18 to 65 in each market.
About ACI Worldwide
ACI Worldwide, listed on Nasdaq as ACIW, builds payments software for banks, billers and merchants, including real-time payments orchestration. The company has worked in payments technology for more than 50 years.
