31% of retailers say AI wrongly took action on a shopper’s account
Whether improperly handling a refund or making an incorrect order change, 29 per cent of retailers say they’ve lost a customer due to agentic AI activity, according to research published by Talkdesk.
Based in Palo Alto, Calif., the provider of customer experience (CX) automation software commissioned a survey of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers and interviews with more than 300 retailers to produce its 2026 AI Holiday Shopping Survey.
Talkdesk found retail AI agents didn’t just take wrong actions. A quarter of them said customers were also given improper product information or recommendations, and 22 per cent said AI’s outputs were clearly biased. Eighteen per cent cited false or misleading information coming from AI tools.
What retailers shared aligns with rising concerns about AI among consumers. For example, 41 per cent worry they’re being shown products because a brand paid for placement, which points to bias. The same proportion are worried about dynamic pricing, and nearly half (48 per cent) worry there will be no way to reach human employee if something with AI goes awry.
“When AI goes wrong, the damage goes well beyond a bad refund,” a Talkdesk exec said in a post outlining the research findings. “As AI agents become another face of the brand, my advice to retailers is to vet them as rigorously as a new hire. This means testing and simulating AI agents before they go live, and continuously evaluating their performance once they do.”
360 Magazine Insight
All of the stats cited in this article so far come from the back half of Talkdesk’s report, and no wonder: emphasizing the mistakes AI has made is not a great way to great retailers psyched up about using it during the all-important holiday shopping season.
The more positive spin on the story is the 49 per cent of shoppers who said they would likely consider buying from a brand they’d never heard of before if an AI tool recommended it. Pay attention to the word “consider,” though. Most would likely do a lot more research before making a move, and more than a quarter of those surveyed said they won’t use AI as part of their holiday shopping this year at all.
For some vendors, the real Holy Grail is getting retailers to deploy AI agents who will actually help complete purchases, but Talkdesk’s data indicates only 15 per cent would be okay with that, and that’s only if they got to review the transaction before it was completed.
The difference between offering a human review step and not is probably the most helpful part of Talkdesk’s research. It makes clear that retailers should not necessarily be aiming for “effortless” experiences so much as “assisted” experiences where shoppers feel they remain in control of key shopping tasks. (Even with human review, though, 31 per cent said they wouldn’t let an AI agent do any of these tasks).
Talkdesk’s survey is ungated and is notable for not creating an undue sense of FOMO among retailers if they haven’t deployed AI at scale yet. Though there’s an undercurrent of “the technology will get better eventually,” this data could be used to make the case for the most human-centered holiday shopping season yet.
