Holiday shoppers have low trust in AI — except for certain tasks

What happened

New research into holiday shopping behaviour finds that consumers remain wary of relying on artificial intelligence for complex or high-value purchase decisions, even as adoption of AI tools continues to grow. According to reporting from Customer Experience Dive, shoppers are far more willing to trust AI for narrow, well-defined tasks — such as generating product recommendations — than for decisions involving significant cost, risk or nuance.

The findings point to a split in consumer sentiment this holiday season: enthusiasm for AI-assisted convenience sits alongside persistent scepticism about handing over judgement on bigger-ticket or more personal purchases.

Why it matters

For retailers investing heavily in AI-driven shopping assistants, chatbots and personalisation engines, the research is a reminder that trust in AI is task-specific rather than blanket. Consumers appear willing to delegate low-stakes, easily verifiable tasks to algorithms, but want a human — or at least the option of one — involved when a purchase carries more weight, whether financially or emotionally.

This has direct implications for how brands design AI touchpoints during peak shopping periods. Deploying AI broadly across the entire purchase journey, without regard for where confidence genuinely exists, risks eroding trust rather than building it. The more useful strategy is calibrating AI's role to match where shoppers are actually comfortable ceding control.

The Renascence take

The gap between where shoppers trust AI and where retailers want to deploy it is itself the story — and it is a behavioural one, not a technological one.

Trust in AI isn't a single dial that rises with exposure — it's task-dependent, and shoppers are drawing the line exactly where perceived risk and irreversibility increase. Retailers who read this as "customers aren't ready for AI yet" are missing the point: customers are ready for AI that knows its place. The winning move this holiday season isn't maximising AI's footprint across the journey; it's being deliberate about where AI recommends and where a human — or a visible off-ramp to one — closes the sale. Get that boundary right and AI becomes a trust-builder; get it wrong and it becomes the reason a cart gets abandoned.