• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, Yesterday

As AI platforms move from search and discovery into more agentic shopping environments, consumers are ready to make trade-offs, such as the acceptance of advertising in exchange for free AI services.

Research from PSE Consulting released Monday reveals consumers have accepted advertising as the price for free AI shopping assistants, according to a study of 4,250 consumers across the UK, U.S., France and Germany. The research is part of a broader study into the commercial and structural implications of agentic commerce.

About 43% who participated in the study would choose a free AI shopping assistant even if recommendations were influenced by advertising, compared with just 27% who would pay for a fully impartial alternative.

PSE Consulting analysts suggest consumers now have the same expectations that shaped search engines and social media into AI commerce.

Data from the study also found 40% say advertising would reduce their trust in AI-generated recommendations, rising to 48% in the UK. Half of those aged 55 and over say advertising would reduce their trust, compared with a third under 35 years old who have grown up with algorithmically curated services and apply a different standard of what neutral looks like.

Thirty-five percent of U.S. consumers say they would be willing to pay for a fully impartial AI assistant, making it the strongest “pay for quality” market among those surveyed.

Platforms building out AI agentic systems are moving quickly to accommodate this shift.

OpenAI and Visa last week expanded their partnership and began allowing artificial-intelligence agents to make purchases online after users give permission.

Visa’s payment services will integrate into OpenAI’s platform giving online retailers and merchants another way to accept payments.

Customers can now direct an AI agent to pay a bill or buy paper napkins, for example. Transactions will operate within clearly defined user permissions, policies and controls, such as spending limits, merchant categories using tokenized Visa credentials and real-time authorization and fraud monitoring.

AI agents are reshaping everything from online ads to buying transactions. With 55% of consumers now starting their shopping journeys through large language models, AI agents are actively spearheading purchasing decisions.

These algorithms don’t browse aisles or get persuaded by traditional marketing. They analyze data and verifiable claims, according to Deloitte Consulting.

If AI agents cannot interpret, compare, or trust a product’s data, that product is excluded from recommendations without any human rejection or warning signs that may appear in key performance indicators (KPIs).

Since products are continuously ranked, substituted, or excluded in real time by algorithms, Deloitte identified five strategies consumer products companies can take to adapt their data, become readable to machines, and remain visible as algorithms take over purchasing journeys.

But it’s not only what consumers see in queries while using Gemini or ChatGPT, for example. Product feeds have turned into bidding signals rather than catalogs to view, and paid ads open inside platforms such as Google’s AI Mode, according to one report.

Performance Max and Shopping start placing into that surface directly, and your conversion tracking breaks in ways that depend on how the agent checks completes the transaction.

Akamai, a cloud computing, cybersecurity, and content delivery network (CDN) provider, today also introduced a secure framework to support Visa. It authenticates AI agents to give permission and secure payment transactions.