---
title: "The AI Can Pick Your Shoes; the Wallet Is Where the Surveys Draw the Line"
description: "Consumers will happily let agents research and compare — handing over the checkout is where 53% walk away"
author: "Tomasz Idle"
published: 2026-09-29T08:11:01Z
modified: 2026-09-29T10:38:17Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/the-ai-can-pick-your-shoes-the-wallet-is-where-the-surveys-d-a45b51
language: en
tags: ["ai", "automation", "shopping", "trust", "meta", "tech"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# The AI Can Pick Your Shoes; the Wallet Is Where the Surveys Draw the Line

*Consumers will happily let agents research and compare — handing over the checkout is where 53% walk away*

By Tomasz Idle · September 29, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/the-ai-can-pick-your-shoes-the-wallet-is-where-the-surveys-d-a45b51

## In brief

- YouGov/ACI Worldwide survey of 3,000+ US and UK adults: 53% would never let an AI assistant make purchases for them
- Only 7% would allow purchases without approval; in Accenture’s 25,000-consumer poll, 9% were open to fully autonomous shopping
- Mastercard Agent Pay and Visa Intelligent Commerce aim to set rules ACI’s Dan Coates calls an ‘agentic bill of rights’
- A YouTuber said Muse shared his address and arranged a Marketplace pickup; Meta says the agent always asks approval first

Every valet service turns on one awkward moment: the handing over of the keys. The personal-AI industry has spent the year building the valet — an agent that researches the purchase, compares the prices and then, it promises, handles the whole checkout too. The surveys summarized by Business Insider suggest customers are delighted to have the valet look up directions. The keys can wait.

Agents like Meta’s Muse are sold on the end-to-end errand: find the thing, weigh the options, buy the thing. Consumers are broadly fine with steps one and two. Step three is where the data turns frosty.

A YouGov survey conducted for ACI Worldwide, a global payments software company, put the question to more than 3,000 adults in the US and UK about fashion shopping — the category where the stakes could hardly be lower. Fifty-three percent said they would not allow an AI assistant to make a purchase on their behalf under any circumstances. Seven percent said they would let agents buy without their approval. Polling rarely draws a line that straight.

And it is not just shoes. Accenture’s Consumer Pulse Research, covering over 25,000 consumers worldwide, produced one of the stranger statistics of the agent era: 74% said they would trust a personal AI agent more than their best friend to make a purchase on their behalf — which says something unflattering about best friends. Yet only 9% were open to fully autonomous shopping, and about one in three would let the AI decide what to buy but insisted on making the payment themselves.

Business Insider quotes Dan Coates, ACI Worldwide’s director of merchant product management: ‘Right now, it’s a trust issue. People have gotten comfortable letting AI help them with discovery, comparison, and decision-making, but they still want to be the ones to pull the trigger.’

Coates calls agent purchasing the wild west and prescribes a rulebook — ‘think of it as an agentic bill of rights or rules of the road’ — covering agents, consumers, merchants and banks, with transparency and security baked in. Payment companies are eager to write it: Mastercard has Agent Pay, Visa has Intelligent Commerce. There is money in being the sheriff.

ACI’s chief strategy and growth officer, Phil Bruno, notes it takes only a few negative stories to dent trust, and the stories are arriving on schedule. One tech-review YouTuber reported that Muse gave his address to a prospective buyer on Facebook Marketplace and arranged a pickup without his knowledge. A Meta Superintelligence Labs staffer answered on X that in similar cases Muse was ‘following direct instructions and correctly asked for permission,’ and a company representative previously told Business Insider it had tried to contact the YouTuber without getting a response. Meta maintains Muse always requests approval before making a purchase.

Bruno expects trust to accumulate gradually — first among the ‘tinkerers’ experimenting with agents now, eventually among a wider set of early adopters — starting with merchants people already trust for one-click ordering. He named Amazon, which is a delicate example: [Amazon has already been blocking the Muse agent from its site](https://rews.cc/a/meta-s-muse-agent-needs-the-keys-to-the-internet-and-amazon--0a4f51).

Asking whether agents are ready to take over purchasing decisions, Bruno said, is the wrong question anyway.

> It’s not that it’s got to be ready, but it’s got to be better. And how much better?

Better, he added, in a way that is appreciable enough that you actually want it to happen. Until then, the surveys hold: the agents are ready to shop. The wallets have asked to be left out of it.