72% of Singapore Shoppers Now Use AI to Decide What to Buy — Retail's New Middleman

Singapore's retail story has quietly stopped being about shopfronts and search rankings. A new wave of consumer behaviour data shows artificial intelligence inserting itself between shoppers and brands — not as a fancy checkout feature, but as the layer that decides which products get seen, compared and chosen in the first place. For a market where e-commerce penetration and tech literacy run high, this is less a trend to watch and more a shift already in motion.

The evidence comes from the Adyen Index 2026: Singapore Retail Report, released this week by the Amsterdam-based payments firm. The headline number: 72% of Singaporeans have already used AI assistants to support their shopping experiences, with Gen Z and Millennial consumers driving the most habitual usage. The same report found 87% of AI-assisted shoppers feel there is too much information to digest on social media, while 72% say AI helps them cut through the noise and 68% say it delivers inspiration faster than traditional channels. Consumers, in other words, are outsourcing the filtering part of shopping to machines.

The behavioural shift matters more than the technology behind it. For years, retailers optimised for visibility — websites, marketplaces, search engine rankings. Those levers still matter, but AI introduces a new intermediary that ranks, summarises and recommends on the consumer's behalf. Products that read well in a conversational AI environment gain an advantage over those that merely rank highly on a search page. The report also flags a trust paradox: 58% of Singaporeans are uncomfortable letting AI complete purchases on their behalf, and 42% view retailer tracking of browsing behaviour as invasive, even as they happily lean on AI for discovery.

For Singapore's retailers, the practical takeaway is that convenience is now a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator, and security has become visible reassurance. Payment failures dent trust for 59% of consumers, and biometric authentication is increasingly welcomed when it reinforces security — a meaningful signal in a market where scams and phishing are a persistent national concern. The merchants that win will be those who treat AI readiness, fraud protection and trust as one single experience rather than separate systems.

Why it matters for Singapore: This report shows Singapore consumers are ahead of most Asia-Pacific markets in adopting AI as a shopping companion, which puts local retailers on the frontline of a global experiment in AI-mediated commerce. With the government pushing AI adoption across enterprises and the National AI Impact Programme targeting 10,000 businesses, the retail sector's response to this behavioural shift will be an early test of whether Singapore's AI strategy translates into real commercial advantage — or leaves consumers one step ahead of the businesses serving them.