AI shopping reaches 72% in Singapore as checkout trust lags

Only 29% trust AI assistants to complete purchases.

Singapore consumers are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) for shopping, but many remain uncomfortable with letting AI complete purchases, according to Adyen’s 2026 Singapore Retail Report.

The report showed that 72% of Singapore consumers use AI assistants for shopping, including 42% who use them at least weekly.

However, only 29% are comfortable allowing an AI assistant to complete a purchase, whilst 58% are uncomfortable. Amongst existing AI shopping users, 49% would hesitate at the payment stage.

The gap comes despite strong commercial results from AI-led shopping. AI-referred visitors generate 53% more revenue per visit than non-AI traffic and have a 54% higher conversion rate.

Amongst merchants using AI for personalisation and recommendations, 39% reported higher turnover, whilst 24% reported a decline. Yet 36% cited the risk of losing direct customer relationships or brand control as a reason to delay wider AI adoption.

The findings come as AI increasingly changes how consumers discover products and how retailers prepare for agentic commerce.

According to Salesforce’s Fourth Edition State of Commerce report, 82% of Singapore commerce leaders expect large language models (LLMs) to become essential to product discovery within the next year.

Use of agentic search as the first step in the shopping journey grew 200% year over year. The report draws on surveys of 3,450 commerce professionals, including 100 from Singapore, 4,690 consumers and behavioural data from more than 1.5 billion global shoppers.

Singapore businesses are already adapting, with 42% improving product content quality, 40% optimising for conversational queries, 39% submitting data feeds to AI search platforms and 38% optimising product descriptions for natural language.

Globally, traffic referred from AI chats grew 150% to 428% year over year in every quarter measured, while overall traffic grew at single-digit to low-double-digit rates.

Between August 2025 and May 2026, product discovery through brand-owned properties fell 7% and traditional search declined 15%. Discovery through newer channels, including AI assistants, social media AI, and delivery apps, rose 38%.

Singapore is also moving towards agentic AI. Some 28% of organisations currently use agentic AI, whilst 52% of non-adopters plan to deploy it within six months. Another 65% say scaling across channels is not viable without AI.

Across APAC organisations already using agentic AI, 5% of leaders say they are still primarily piloting use cases, while 35% are scaling AI across functions and teams, including service, IT and merchandising.

Adyen found that 89% of merchants are familiar with agentic commerce. Over the next two years, 61% plan to invest in it to drive incremental sales through AI-led product discovery, whilst 60% plan to focus on protecting and retaining direct customer relationships and another 60% on managing payment risk and machine-speed transactions.

Businesses, however, face growing infrastructure challenges as they scale AI.

Some 81% of Singapore commerce leaders say their vendor count has increased over the past two years, while only 25% say their customer data is fully unified across sales, service, marketing and commerce.

Among organisations with fragmented data views, 36% report slow or ineffective responses to customer issues, 32% struggle to measure the impact of their commerce investments and 40% face high costs from maintaining disconnected systems.

Omnichannel breakdowns are also widespread. Just 2% of Singapore multichannel organisations report no significant failure points. The most common issues are inventory that is not synchronised in real time, at 46%, and inconsistent pricing and promotions, at 36%.

The disconnect extends into physical stores, which remain the top holiday shopping destination for 77% of consumers. Some 79% use their phones whilst shopping in-store, whilst 12% ask an AI assistant for purchasing advice in an aisle.

Customers also expect greater consistency across channels, with 86% of B2C respondents saying they expect the same personalisation in-store as online.

Businesses that have unified their data report better alignment between sales, marketing and commerce teams, cited by 44%; improved customer retention and loyalty, 42%; and improved AI and automation outcomes, 31%.