One in four Irish adults has now bought something on the advice of an artificial intelligence (AI) tool.
That figure comes from new research by Dublin marketing agency Wolfgang Digital and Amárach Research, which surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,000 Irish adults about how they use AI assistants when shopping.
Sixty-nine per cent of Irish adults now use at least one AI tool. ChatGPT is the tool of choice, reaching 55 per cent of the population. Alphabet’s Gemini reaches 28 per cent of Irish adults, followed by Microsoft’s Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude at 15 per cent and 10 per cent respectively.
“Most of the conversation about AI in business has been about productivity, headcount and cost,” says Brendan Almack, managing director of Wolfgang Digital. “Those are fair questions, but they’re distracting people from something more immediate. Customers are already using AI to decide what to buy, and who to buy it from.”
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The study breaks the behaviour into stages: 46 per cent of Irish adults – or roughly 1.9 million people – have used AI to research, compare or choose a product or service. Of those, 56 per cent went on to buy. That works out at 26 per cent of all Irish adults – about 1.1 million people – who have bought something after researching with AI.
Beyond that, 26 per cent of Irish adults say an AI tool has recommended a brand, product or retailer they had never heard of. Among 18- to 24-year-olds, that rises to 43 per cent.
“People used to use AI to confirm a decision they’d already half made,” Almack says. “Now it’s introducing them to businesses they’d never have found otherwise. Brand discovery has gone from ads, to algorithms and now to AI assistants.”
Almack believes businesses now need to consider if and how they are showing up to potential customers. “Around 1.1 million Irish adults have been introduced to a brand by a machine. The key question to answer is: when an AI assistant makes a recommendation, does it recommend you or your competitor?”
The categories where people ask AI for help are broad, covering topics such as education and learning (38 per cent) and travel (38 per cent), followed by electronics and gadgets (35 per cent), health and beauty (30 per cent), recipes (28 per cent) and DIY (27 per cent).
Consumers are happy to ask AI for advice, but most are not yet ready to hand over control of their wallets. Asked how comfortable they would be allowing an AI assistant to make a purchase for them, based on criteria they’d set themselves, 63 per cent said they’d be uncomfortable, including 46 per cent who said very uncomfortable. Only 19 per cent said they’d be comfortable.
Almack doesn’t believe that this will slow down the industry’s move towards agentic commerce. “We saw similar scepticism in the early days of ecommerce; now we don’t give a second thought to making an online purchase. In a few years, the same will be true of agentic commerce”.
His read for business owners is that the audience they are targeting is changing. “You have two audiences: your customers and the AI systems they ask for advice. Most companies are only optimising for the first one.”
Wolfgang Digital’s full analysis of this research is available on its website, with further detail on how AI is changing the way Irish consumers discover, research and ultimately buy products and services, as well as what the shift means for businesses adapting to an increasingly AI-led marketplace
