A Czech customer types into ChatGPT which coffee machine to buy, and within seconds gets a shorter list. Before entering payment, they open a review video on YouTube or ratings on Heureka, to see the product in the hands of a specific person. Agency Croud has now quantified this habit among British consumers and shows where the decision to buy is really made today.
Britons let AI move closer to their wallets
Croud based its findings on a representative survey of more than 2,000 British consumers, which it summarised in a report titled “The Expansion of the Validation Economy”. According to it, 56% of Britons would let AI buy for them in at least one category, and roughly two-thirds would use one-click purchasing directly in an AI tool.
At the same time, verification is not going away. According to the report, 74% of AI users search for information through language models before deciding on a particular brand or product. The model enters the game before the customer has formed a preference.
Where people go for confirmation
Once AI gives a recommendation, people check it against other sources. According to Croud, more than a third of AI users confirm a recommendation across four or more sources before they buy. 41% of them head to YouTube, and 35% to Instagram or TikTok. The machine takes care of the search and the shortlist, while people with an audience do the verifying.
Debbie Ellison, EMEA CEO of Croud, summed it up in one sentence. “AI is changing how brands are discovered, but it isn't changing how trust is earned,” she said in a press release accompanying the report. Search is moving to machines, but trust stays with people.
Creators and higher spending on AI purchases
Data on spending gives this behaviour a price. In fashion, British AI users spent an average of £125 per purchase, against £96 for those who did not use AI. In womenswear, British AI users spent an average of £125 against £96 for non-users, roughly 30% more. That is the strongest difference between the categories in which Croud compared spending.
Joe Lamb, MD, Commercial at the agency Arcade, built on these figures in a public LinkedIn post. “Means creators shouldn't be a tack-on to marketing campaigns. They're the human faces shoppers actively go hunting for, and increasingly it seems, the final thing tipping consideration into checkout,” he wrote. For a brand, this means creators belong at the core of a campaign, because the purchase decision is made around them.
Automated buying is so far only in the US
The layer that turns a recommendation into a payment is being built mainly by American firms. OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, which lets people complete a purchase directly in the conversation with US sellers on Etsy and, gradually, with stores on Shopify. It has also opened up the Agentic Commerce Protocol standard with its partners. Perplexity has launched a similar purchase option via PayPal across thousands of merchants. Both features are so far aimed at consumers in the US.
The difference between markets also shows in the data. In a comparable US survey by Croud, 69% of Americans would entrust purchasing to AI, more than in Britain. For European and Czech brands, therefore, the part that the British survey describes is the most usable at present. Automated purchasing inside AI tools has not yet arrived in the EU, while verification with creators and reviews is already happening today.
The purchase journey splits into two parts. The model handles the shortlist, while the last step before payment stays with people.
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