Future Shopper 2026: 82% use AI, 33% won’t let it buy for them

Shoppers say they use AI, and also say they will not hand it the last step. VML published Future Shopper 2026 on 17 September, after surveying 28,000 people in 17 countries and collecting 2.66 million data points. In the sample, 82% have used AI and 58% check its recommendation before they buy.

Two thirds are at least open to AI buying for them

The report puts the refusal at 33%. That is the share who would not allow AI to make a purchase without them. Read the other way, two thirds are at least open to it, which is the number agentic checkout projects are built on.

AI already moves choices earlier in the trip. VML reports that 46% changed which brands they considered after an AI suggestion, and 54% say a chat helped them find products they would not have found alone. That tallies with how often ChatGPT builds shopping answers straight from product feeds.

44% say search got worse over the past year

Search remains the most common place to start looking for a product, but the report records real irritation with it. Some 44% say search quality fell in the past year. A larger group, 55%, say sponsored results make it harder to find the best product, and 47% think their favourite platforms have got worse.

Trust in the pictures is shaky too. Half the sample, 49%, lose trust in a brand when product images look AI-generated, and 48% skip content they believe a machine wrote. Another 53% suspect AI tools are commercially steered. IAB found a similar demand for named sources in AI shopping answers.

Online takes 51% of spending and 37% want two-hour delivery

Close to 60% report more financial worry than a year ago. Online now takes 51% of what people spend, so the split with shops is near even. Speed expectations keep climbing: 37% want delivery inside two hours, up from 32%.

Human advice still wins. Family and friends are the most trusted source, while the influence of established creators slipped from 15% to 13%.

Brent Taylor, global chief executive of WPP Commerce, and Neil Dawson, global chief strategy officer at VML, present the gap as a business race running ahead of shoppers. The numbers behind that claim are the report’s own, gathered from a panel rather than from tills.

Two figures belong side by side in a plan. Sixty per cent of the sample have bought something through social, and social accounts for 2.78% of purchases. Budget priced against the first number buys a sales channel that behaves like a shop window; priced against the second, the same money reads as discovery. Campbell’s put 85% of its working media into social and creators, which is one answer to that arithmetic.