Nine in ten shop with artificial intelligence and only a third delegate to agents, a trust gap tests digital commerce in Saudi Arabia

Digital commerce in Saudi Arabia is testing a clear paradox between the rush toward AI tools and the hesitation to delegate financial decisions to them. While nine out of ten consumers in the kingdom rely on artificial intelligence during their shopping journey, the share that trusts AI agents to complete purchases on their behalf does not exceed 33 percent. This gap, revealed by the “Stay Safe” study issued by Visa, outlines the real fault line for the retail sector, where shoppers are eager to discover and compare products through algorithms but pause before handing payment decisions over to an independent software agent.

The figures show that 93 percent of consumers in the Saudi market believe that artificial intelligence makes online shopping faster and easier, reflecting a notable consumer maturity of search and comparison tools. This expansion rests on an advanced digital-payments infrastructure, as data from the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) indicate that electronic payments accounted for 85 percent of total retail payments in the kingdom in 2025, up from 79 percent in 2024. With fintech investments growing under the Saudi Vision 2030 initiatives, the challenge is no longer limited to digitising traditional payments but to moving consumers safely from manual checkout interfaces to agents that execute tasks fully.

Consumers trust AI’s ability to protect them, yet they demand strict guarantees before granting it autonomous purchasing authority.The survey results confirm this, with 84 percent of respondents believing that artificial intelligence will play a pivotal role in protecting them from fraud in the future. However, direct risks are closely linked to commerce environments on social media platforms, through which 73 percent of consumers in the kingdom have made purchases. The seriousness of this pathway is highlighted by the fact that 51 percent of those who experienced financial fraud in the past year reported that the fraudulent transactions originated specifically from social-media platforms.

At the level of institutional responsibilities, 46 percent of consumers place primary accountability for fraud prevention on government bodies, while 40 percent assign it to banks, and payment-service providers rank third with 30 percent. These percentages clearly reflect consumers’ desire for a robust governance and legislative umbrella that secures transaction safety before moving to fully automated commerce through software agents.

Shifting from assisting the buyer to making decisions on their behalf reshapes the priorities of the commerce and fintech sectors in the region.If you operate a digital commerce platform or are building a financial application in the Saudi or Gulf market, merely adding a chat-bot to answer queries no longer suffices to ensure market-share growth. Bridging the current trust gap requires a clear security architecture that includes setting credit limits for smart-agent transactions, embedding instant confirmation alerts for users, and providing transparent refund pathways when errors occur. This shift also pushes payment-gateway developers to invest in proactive fraud-detection algorithms on social networks, in response to stringent regulatory requirements that top the regional financial sector’s priorities.