Consumer frustration with AI is growing. Mailboxes bloated with unrequested offers, full-throated pitches and botched bot sessions are leading to annoyance, and, in some cases, uncompleted purchase attempts – even a loss of faith in retailers and brands.

This disillusionment, exacerbated by economic uncertainty, is making consumers more pragmatic and risk-averse. They’re abandoning aspirational purchases in exchange for defensive decision-making and searching for the lowest-prices, according to Alter Agents and Liveopps.

Consumer fatigue with AI is marked by declining novelty, cognitive overload, and an active rejection of synthetic content. Users are exhausted by generic marketing, unreliable AI customer service, and the proliferation of low quality content often referred to as AI slop. According to Gartner, 49% of consumers agree that generative content has actively worsened the quality of AI-generated content.

With consumers demanding transparency, authenticity, and genuine problem-solving, brands should now re-evaluate their AI implementation, focusing on seamless, human-centric experiences and clear value to rebuild faith and navigate what Alter Agents calls a “trust recession.”

Only 11% of U.S. consumers are willing to let AI make a purchase decision for them, even for lower-stakes categories such as personal care and household supplies, while 62% said AI shopping recommendations were a waste of time, according to Gartner Inc.

As brands race to invest in agentic commerce, Gartner said marketers should focus AI shopping investments on tools that help consumers research products, compare prices, surface deals and narrow down choices, rather than launching fully autonomous shopping agents.

AI platforms will account for $20.57 billion in U.S. retail ecommerce in 2026, said Gartner, which estimated that 90 percent of all B2B purchases will be done through AI agents by 2028, routing more than $15 trillion through machine-to-machine exchanges.

Alter Agents’ recent Consumer Sentiment Study reveals how years of economic disruption, political instability and radical technological advancement are reshaping how Americans shop, evaluate brands and make decisions.

Easy Human Access Is Non-Negotiable

What began as a study about consumer anxiety evolved into something broader, a long-term view into how trust and economic pressure influence shopping behavior. “AI-driven uncertainty and information overload are reshaping the relationship between consumers and brands,” said Rebecca Brooks, CEO of Alter Agents.

Marketers lob pitches at consumers while influencers pop into their feeds. Consumers realize they’re being sold something. Then, there’s the added pressure of worrying if you’ll be scammed, Brooks said.

“There’s a feeling of dissatisfaction. Consumers have a lot of distrust in all sorts of institutions and brands. It’s sort of every system that manages our lives,” Brooks said. “Consumers even distrust their employers, which is also leading to distrust of brands. Part of this is that consumers are seeing the race to AI without thinking about the consequences.”

The findings of Alter Agents suggest consumers are becoming more pragmatic and trust-sensitive as shopping grows more cognitively demanding amid nonstop recommendations, fragmented information environments and skepticism around reviews, retailers and AI-generated content.

Heather O’Shea, Chief Research Officer at Alter Agents said consumers are looking for reassurance, transparency and confidence that they are making the right choice. “For brands, the challenge is no longer simply reducing friction or accelerating conversion,” she said. “It’s helping people feel informed, supported and certain in an environment where trust is harder to find.

We are seeing consumers move away from aspirational purchasing and toward more defensive decision-making," O’Shea said. “Bot to human handoffs are so ineffective. Younger customers are more impatient because they’re used to picking up the phone and getting an answer immediately.”

Molly Moore, president and COO of Liveops, which recently published “The Resolution Gap,” a report about the failure of AI in certain areas, agreed that consumers are fed up. “Really, it’s about delivering a better experience overall and designing [a better] customer journey," she said. “Consumers are more frustrated with those core processes. Consumers aren’t rejecting AI so much as getting increasingly irritated with experiences like shopping that make more work for them.”

Customers are okay with automated support for simple issues, but want to reach a person when AI can’t solve the issue, said Moore, adding, “Consumers certainly don’t want to deal with a shopping problem and have to speak to a human because the AI agent couldn’t handle it.”

The Liveops study identified a growing disconnect between the speed of AI-powered customer service and the customer’s ultimate satisfaction, a gap that occurs when automation fails to fully resolve an issue. Nearly 60% of respondents said bot-to-human handoffs break down badly enough that they have to start over completely.

“I don’t care if I interact with a bot or an AI agent verses a human as long as my problem gets solved,” Moore said. “I don’t want to re-explain my problem to a human. The frustration level rises very quickly. Automating as much as possible and designing seamless handoffs between AI and humans would help.”

**Simmering Discontent **

Coresight Research, in collaboration with Rezolve AI, has projected that by 2030, $943 billion in retail sales will be mediated by autonomous AI experiences. This “agentic commerce” model replaces traditional manual search with AI shopping agents that understand conversational intent, context, and product use cases, enabling precision matches and reducing guesswork in discovery.

“There’s been a bit of a backlash against AI,” said John Harmon, managing director of technology research at Coresight Research. “The ground rule is that retailers should disclose that they’re using AI. Especially with agentic AI since maybe all it takes to make the customer happy is a small action like free shipping. The ideal model to emulate is an associate at a luxury boutique. There’s incentive for breaking some rules for good customers.”

“You need to limit the scope for where you use them," Harman said. “Automatically, for returns over $100, you should refer the sale to a manager for review. Returns are very expensive. Keeping humans in the loop is very good business.”

Sonia Lapinsky, partner, managing director and head of the global fashion practice at Alix Partners, said, “It’s up to brands and retailers to get smarter about governance and make sure they know what the chatbots are doing and how they’re behaving. There is a little bit of a fear that these things are coming out of control. It’s a new muscle for retailers and brands to establish. Using a lot more AI and agentic models to do things such as inventory planning and buying planning makes sense, but not without the scrutiny to make sure they’re doing what you expect and you’re constantly testing the outcome.”

“AI has to be trained," Lapinsky said. “It needs to have strong governance and controls around it. Brands and retailers can’t just set their chatbots and monitor them. They have to make sure they’re staying within the bounds and operating appropriately. Chatbots are supposed to make it easier and make customer service more seamless. If that’s going the opposite way, it’s going to have a very magnified negative impact on consumers.”