Accenture: 74% of consumers trust AI agents for shopping more than friends

Three-quarters of consumers worldwide are willing to entrust their purchases to a personal AI-agent — and trust it more than their best friend. This is the main conclusion of the Accenture Consumer Pulse 2026 study, which included 25,590 consumers from 16 countries.

Key Figure: 74%

Seventy-four percent of respondents stated that when making purchasing decisions, they trust a personal AI-agent more than the advice of their best friend. This is not just a high figure — it is a watershed moment. Trust in technology has surpassed trust in human relationships in one of the most personal areas of daily life: choosing products and spending money.

To understand the scale: Accenture surveyed 25,590 consumers across 16 countries — this is one of the largest consumer panels on AI ever conducted. The sample covers both mature economies (USA, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom) and fast-growing markets (India, Brazil), making the data representative at a global level rather than reflecting the specificity of a single region.

What Consumers Are Ready to Delegate

The greatest interest in AI-agents arises where speed, broad coverage, and impartiality are required — all things that a human advisor naturally lacks:

• Comparing prices across multiple marketplaces in real time
• Selecting products according to specific parameters — size, composition, rating, compatibility
• Automatic notifications about price drops on tracked items
• Processing repeat orders — food products, household chemicals, consumables
• Finding active promotional codes and applying the best one without manual selection

For routine tasks, an AI-agent is objectively more efficient: it doesn't get tired, doesn't lobby for specific brand preferences, and processes thousands of options in seconds. It is precisely this combination of speed and neutrality, according to the study's findings, that shapes consumer trust.

Why Now

The shift in perception did not happen suddenly. Consumers have spent years becoming accustomed to Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon algorithms knowing their tastes better than many people around them. An AI-agent is the next evolution of this trend: it doesn't just recommend, but acts independently on behalf of the user. The accumulated experience with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other systems also played an important role. Over two to three years of mass adoption, users have become convinced that AI can maintain conversational context, clarify preferences, and handle multi-step tasks. Extending this experience to the shopping sphere is a logical and expected step.

"Consumers are not simply accepting AI-agents into their daily lives —

they are ready to delegate real authority and actions to them," the study's authors emphasize.

What This Means

Accenture's data is a strategic signal for retailers, brands, and technology platforms simultaneously. Stores and marketplaces that fail to adapt their catalogs for machine search and agent API requests risk becoming invisible to a new generation of buyers. Brands betting exclusively on advertising to humans are losing a channel that is rapidly gaining strategic weight. The era of agent-driven shopping is no longer on the horizon — it is in consumer preferences right now.