AI shopping just crossed 50% of US consumers for the first time, NIQ's monthly tracker finds

For the first time since NielsenIQ started asking, more than half of US shoppers say they used some kind of AI tool to help them shop in the past month. NIQ's Agentic Commerce Tracker put the figure at 51% in its September reading -- a threshold the monthly survey has approached but not cleared since it launched, per NIQ's own release. NIQ runs the tracker as part of a research operation that covers more than 90 countries and roughly 82% of the world's population, though this particular reading is US-only.

The two categories NIQ named are both AI working in the background of a purchase a person still makes themselves -- a recommendation engine narrowing options, an assistant answering questions -- rather than an agent placing the order outright. NIQ's own framing treats that as the meaningful shift regardless -- the underlying number is self-reported behavior from a 500-person monthly panel, not a count of transactions an agent actually completed.

“Crossing the 50 percent threshold is a defining moment for the industry. Today, it is now mainstream.” — Liz Buchanan, President of North America, NIQ

The reading lands the same month a run of actual shopping-agent moves played out in public -- Meta's Muse agent added PayPal checkout worldwide, while Amazon kept Muse locked out of its own marketplace even as it opened Seller Central to a Claude plugin instead. NIQ's tracker doesn't distinguish those headline-grabbing agent deployments from the far more mundane AI recommendation widgets already built into most retail sites -- which is probably why the adoption number is already this high.