Dive Brief:
- While most (89%) shoppers don’t fully trust AI recommendations, 76% of them have used AI to make purchases in the past year, according to a SmartCustomer survey of nearly 1,200 U.S. consumers released Monday.
- A third of survey respondents said they made a regrettable purchase based on an AI recommendation. Though half of the bad purchases were electronics, apparel and footwear accounted for 45%.
- More than half (53%) of respondents suspect companies of releasing false or misleading information specifically to influence AI recommendations.
Dive Insight:
Though consumers are turning to AI for product recommendations, SmartCustomer’s recent survey suggests they will ultimately blame AI platforms for surfacing inaccurate information.
The majority (98%) of survey respondents said AI companies should take at least some of the responsibility for validating the sources of a recommendation, the survey found. Furthermore, the same percentage of survey respondents said AI should also confirm that a company is legitimate before recommending it.
“AI is becoming a normal part of how people shop, but trust isn’t keeping pace with adoption,” Michael Lai, CEO of SmartCustomer, said in a statement. “That's not without reason: a third of the shoppers we surveyed have already regretted a purchase AI talked them into.”
Other reports have also pointed to trust as a barrier to AI adoption. In a survey last year, YouGov found that 41% of respondents didn’t trust AI shopping assistants at all.
The SmartCustomer survey also offers some insight into gender and generational divides between shoppers who use AI and those who don’t. While more than half (53%) of women use AI to shop “at least sometimes,” nearly two-thirds (63%) of men are doing so. Meanwhile, about one in five (21%) of Gen Z shoppers said they will never use AI to shop, followed by Gen X (19%) and millennials (10%).
Meanwhile, another survey by marketing firm RTB House found that 35% of survey respondents across generations would want a person to review transactions before AI agents make purchases for them. A greater percentage of baby boomers (44%) expressed that sentiment.
For some consumers, brands’ use of AI is a turn-off in and of itself. A Gartner survey of more than 1,500 U.S. consumers found that half prefer shopping with brands that don’t use AI in their consumer-facing messages, content and advertising. The survey, released in March, also found that more than two-thirds of shoppers question whether the content they view is authentic.
