Forty percent of American adults would let an AI agent handle at least one everyday task for them. Only 17.6% think AI agents are a good idea. And just 7.7% use one today. Those three numbers come from a survey of 7,675 U.S. adults that Channel V Media released on October 8, 2026, and together they describe the exact problem every brand building or selling through AI agents now has to solve: people will try it, but they don't trust it.
What the survey found
Prosper Insights & Analytics fielded the survey in June 2026. Channel V Media, a New York PR firm, picked the questions and ran the analysis. The headline is a gap between permission and approval.
Respondents chose from 13 everyday tasks they would hand to an agent. Booking a restaurant led at 12.1%, followed by buying groceries at 11.0%, managing a smart home at 10.0% and paying bills at 9.8%. Buying a car came in at 5.0%. Altogether, 40.1% picked at least one task. The other 59.9% picked nothing.
Ask whether agents are a good idea, though, and 41.8% say no, 40.6% say they're unsure, and only 17.6% say yes. Privacy drives a lot of that. 60.5% of adults are very or extremely concerned about AI violating their privacy, and 69.1% still prefer a live person when shopping online.
The split between bosses and staff is sharp. Executives and business owners use agentic AI at 17.5%, against 6.6% for employees, a 2.7x gap.
"Far fewer want it making decisions for them, and that gap is what any company launching an AI agent is up against," said Kieran Powell, Executive Vice President at Channel V Media.
What it means if you sell anything
The timing matters. Two days earlier, Meta and Sierra announced the Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard for how personal agents like Meta's Muse sign in to businesses and act for customers, with Shopify, Stripe and Walmart named as partners. On the same day as the survey, Crossmint shipped a toolkit that lets agents check out on almost any store with a saved card, whether the merchant opted in or not. The plumbing for agent shopping is arriving this quarter. Consumer trust is not arriving with it.
That gap is the opportunity. Most buyers will accept an agent for low-risk, repetitive jobs like booking a table or reordering groceries. They balk at anything that feels like handing over judgment. So the winning move for most businesses is narrow, visible automation: an AI that answers instantly, books the appointment, confirms by text, and hands off to a human the moment a decision gets expensive.
Tools like KenjiAI (kenjiai.com) are built for exactly this kind of shift, putting AI on the repetitive front end of sales, the missed calls, follow ups and booking, while keeping the person in charge of the close. Our view is simple. Automate the chores customers already said yes to, and keep humans on the decisions they said no to.
The executive gap is a warning too. If you run the company, you are almost three times likelier to use agents than the people you sell to. Don't design your customer experience around your own comfort level.
What to watch next
Three things over the next 90 days.
- The Personal Agent Protocol v0.1 spec, which Sierra says it will publish later this month. Read it, then decide whether your store wants agent traffic and on what terms.
- Your own checkout logs this holiday season. Simon-Kucher's October 8 study says 16% of shoppers would let AI complete a purchase. If agents start hitting your site through browser automation, your bot rules may block real orders.
- Disclosure. With 60.5% worried about privacy, tell customers plainly when they are talking to AI and what it can and cannot do. Brands that say this out loud will earn the trust the survey shows is missing.
The 40% who would let an agent help are your early market. The 82% who aren't sold yet are why you should move carefully.
Source: Channel V Media, The State of AI Adoption in America, 2026, released via Business Wire on October 8, 2026.
Published by the Media Traffics | KenjiAI team. kenjiai.com
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