Singapore's retailers race into AI while shoppers hold back
Source: Fintech News SG
Nearly all of Singapore's retailers now use AI, but more than half of consumers still won't let an autonomous agent buy on their behalf — and a fresh survey shows why.
Singapore's retailers have gone all-in on AI — 99% of the merchants Adyen surveyed use it somewhere in their operations — yet the people buying from them are far warier. Some 58% of consumers will not let an autonomous AI agent complete a purchase for them, even though 72% have already used chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini to help them shop.
The figures come from a poll of 1,000 Singapore consumers and 300 senior retail staff, run in March and April 2026. Fraud anxiety is grounded in something real: e-commerce scams keep climbing. The Ministry of Home Affairs counted over 2,700 cases in 2021, with losses near S$5.8 million (US$4.6 million); by the first half of 2026 they had reached 3,865, up 19.3% from 3,240 a year earlier, with losses up 18.9% — the city-state's most common scam type, per the Singapore Police Force's latest mid-year brief.
Consumers have reasons to flinch. Of those who shop with AI, 38% told Adyen they had received phishing messages and 15% had met scammers posing as a retailer. Merchants carry their own scars: 84% reported payment fraud within the past year and 94% hit payment performance problems — fallout that meant abandoned carts for 30% and weaker customer confidence for 27%.
Data quality is the other drag. Just 23% of merchants drew on real-time AI data last year, leaving 77% with partial, disconnected sources and uneven journeys across channels. Consumer intelligence emerged as the most cited business challenge, named by 31% of respondents and by 24% of large merchants as their foremost obstacle.
Shoppers do embrace the frictionless bits: 63% use self-checkout, 37% check out inside a brand's app and 26% pay on a mobile terminal while queueing. AI shapes discovery too — 21% of consumers lean on it while shopping, and of those, 72% say it filters the noise while 68% call it the fastest route to ideas. Enterprise appetite runs hotter still: a separate ServiceNow study puts agentic AI adoption at 51% in 2026, double the prior year's 22%, with 33% using it routinely and 10% running autonomous end-to-end workflows.
Why it matters for Singapore: Roughly 9.8 million mobile connections serve about 6.8 million people — penetration of 166%, per DataReportal — so digital-first commerce here is already the norm. Corporate IT budgets now steer 15.4% toward AI, growing 108% year on year, and agentic adoption has doubled in twelve months. Closing the trust gap with shoppers is what will decide whether that head start holds.
