THE numbers are striking, but they should surprise no one who has watched the UAE’s relationship with technology evolve over the past decade.
A new report by Checkout.com, the global digital payments company, finds that 79 percent of UAE consumers are comfortable letting an artificial intelligence agent complete a purchase on their behalf. Nearly two-thirds trust such an agent more than a family member to shop for them. Almost a quarter are willing to share their salary, disposable income, and real-time bank balance with an AI. These are not the cautious, wait-and-see numbers you find in London or New York. They are the numbers of a society that has decided, collectively and with conviction, that the future is not something to be managed at arm’s length.
This is not consumer recklessness. It is consumer confidence — and it is being built on solid institutional foundations. This week, the UAE government held a landmark workshop bringing together more than 300 officials from 50 federal entities, with a clear mandate: convert 50 percent of government services and operations to agentic AI within two years. Minister of Cabinet Affairs Mohammad bin Abdullah Al Gergawi described the initiative as deploying AI to “support employees, accelerate task completion, boost productivity and advance data-driven decision-making.” When governments move this decisively, and visibly, consumer psychology follows. Citizens who interact daily with AI-powered public services do not baulk at AI-powered shopping carts.
The same message resonated this week in Geneva, where the UAE’s Minister of Human Resources Dr. Abdulrahman Al Awar told the International Labour Conference that smart labour market solutions had already enabled the automated processing of more than 11 million transactions in 2025, cutting data-entry time from three minutes to three seconds. AI, in the UAE’s telling at the ILO, is not a threat to workers — it is infrastructure for a better-functioning economy. That framing matters enormously for public trust in agentic technology across every sector, commerce included.
What the Checkout.com research also reveals, with useful honesty, is where the gap lies. Consumer appetite is running ahead of the infrastructure designed to serve it. Trust controls, refund mechanisms, spend limits, and permission frameworks are still being assembled. That is not a failure — it is a sequencing challenge, and one that the UAE’s payments and fintech ecosystem is well placed to close quickly.
The most telling finding may be the simplest: only two percent of UAE consumers say they would not be motivated to use an AI shopping agent at all. In any other market, that figure would be remarkable. In the UAE, it feels like the logical destination of a journey that began the moment this country decided that ambition, not anxiety, would be its default response to technological change.
The UAE consumer has made the leap. The infrastructure now needs to meet them on the other side.
