UAE Consumers Among Most Open to AI Shopping Agents, Mastercard Finds

What happened

Consumers in the UAE are among the most willing in the world to delegate purchasing decisions to autonomous AI shopping agents, according to new research published by Mastercard. The study, reported by The Fintech Times, finds that UAE shoppers show a markedly higher openness to letting AI systems browse, compare and complete transactions on their behalf than counterparts in most other markets surveyed.

The findings arrive as a wave of technology firms — from established payments networks to emerging fintech players — race to embed agentic AI capabilities directly into commerce flows. Rather than simply recommending products, these systems are designed to act: selecting items, applying loyalty points, negotiating prices and finalising checkout without requiring the consumer to intervene at each step.

Why it matters

When a machine makes the purchase, the traditional customer journey collapses. The discovery moment, the consideration phase, the emotional micro-decisions that drive brand preference — all of these are either compressed or bypassed entirely. For CX practitioners, this represents a structural shift rather than an incremental one: if the agent is the shopper, then the real customer relationship is with the agent's developer, not the end consumer. Brands that have invested heavily in front-end experience design — store atmospherics, app UX, loyalty nudges — may find those investments reach a diminishing audience.

From a behavioural-economics standpoint, agentic shopping also strips out many of the deliberate friction points that retailers use to influence choice: the upsell prompt, the scarcity cue, the social-proof banner. An AI agent optimising purely on stated preferences and price will, by default, ignore most of the persuasion architecture that underpins modern retail. Service designers will need to think about how to influence agent-level decision criteria — essentially, how to market to an algorithm rather than a human.

By the numbers

• UAE consumers rank among the highest globally for willingness to use autonomous AI shopping agents, per Mastercard's research.

The Renascence take

The instinct among most CX teams will be to treat agentic AI as a channel optimisation problem — make sure the product feed is clean, the API is fast, the data is structured. That misses the deeper disruption entirely.

The real question is not whether your checkout is agent-ready, but whether your brand has any meaning to an agent at all. Agents do not feel reassured by a warm tone of voice or a beautifully designed loyalty card; they parse criteria, rules and data. Customer-obsessed operators should be asking right now: what values, preferences and constraints do our best human customers hold — and how do we encode those into the decision logic that AI agents will eventually inherit? The brands that win the agentic era will be the ones that shaped the agent's preferences before the consumer ever set them.