For this year’s Buen Fin, you might consider asking an artificial intelligence (AI) to find a smartphone for you under 10,000 pesos and even complete the purchase to save time. In fact, 48% of Mexican consumers surveyed said they would allow an AI to handle the whole process, including payment, according to Adyen’s Retail Report 2026, the global fintech platform’s study.
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Users willing to hand over their Buen Fin shopping to AI
New buying channels
AI-driven shopping opens a fresh sales channel for retailers. Adoption remains limited today, but that hasn’t stopped businesses from preparing: 32% of Mexican merchants say they accept purchasing agents, and 27% report plans to invest in this technology within the next year. Adyen’s data also points to a larger share of merchants that see investing in agentic commerce as a priority going forward.
Anna Aguilar, Adyen Mexico’s commercial vice president, told Expansión that the 32% figure refers to retailers that have begun adapting or readying their infrastructure — not to merchants already processing wholly autonomous payments. To allow a software agent to pick and pay for items, a store needs to link its catalog, inventory and payment systems to the AI tools. “For this Buen Fin 2026 we will not see fully autonomous purchases operating in Mexico without some user intervention,” she says.
What changes is the level of autonomy. Although 42% of consumers said they used AI assistants to help with shopping over the past year, that typically means using them to search, compare prices or answer questions — not to complete purchases without oversight. Adyen also reports that 37% of merchants are planning investments in agentic commerce in the coming year.
At the moment, AI’s strongest presence is in discovery and comparison: 67% of surveyed consumers say AI helps them find alternatives faster, and 69% say it saves them time when comparing products.
Mexico saw the first agent-initiated commerce transaction in Latin America when Getner, Mastercard and Neivor — a group of tech and finance companies — completed a purchase started by an AI using Mastercard Agent Pay. That demonstration shows the technology can execute transactions, but it remains far from widespread consumer practice.
Conversational assistants as an intermediary
Aguilar doubts fully autonomous shopping will reach mass adoption for the Buen Fin. The report reinforces that many consumers see AI as a tool to speed discovery (67%) and streamline comparisons (69%).
Thiago Goncalves, Blip’s country director for Latin America, told Expansión that Mexican merchants are moving forward mainly through conversational assistants. On platforms such as WhatsApp, for example, a shopper can ask about a product, pause the conversation for hours and then resume without having to begin the search again.
The next step is enabling these assistants to finalize purchases under preapproved instructions. Aguilar notes that payment companies are building mechanisms so a consumer could, for instance, authorize an AI to buy sports shoes for up to 1,500 pesos during a two-hour window — with protections to block transactions that try to exceed those limits.
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AI still makes mistakes when recommending products
Before handing over buying power to an agent, consumers face an important limitation: AI recommendations do not always match budget constraints, requested features or current prices.
That disconnect shows up in the AI Shelf Report, a study by consultancy TrendValue that reviewed roughly 1,280 outputs from eight AI tools between October 17 and 20, 2026. The tests included 40 prompts across seven categories — such as mobile phones, laptops, televisions and hotels. When asked to suggest phones with a maximum budget of 10,000 pesos, some assistants proposed models that cost many times that amount; others suggested devices up to six years old, or relied on Buen Fin posts from 2022 and 2024 when answering questions about this year’s offers.
Zeus Portillo, TrendValue’s CEO, explains that recommendations shift depending on how a user frames a query. In the phones category, four brands accounted for 75% of mentions, but the ranking changed when price limits were imposed. The sources the assistants consult also shape results: in the phones tests, 71% of cited sources were media pieces, reviews and comparison sites, while only 9% came from stores and 5% from official manufacturer pages.
Those factors can lead an AI to propose an item without verifying its current price or availability. TrendValue’s study is exploratory and not representative of every purchase made in Mexico, but it illustrates why shoppers still need to double-check offers before authorizing an AI to buy on their behalf.
What risks does an AI buyer pose?
Allowing an AI to purchase for you raises the question of who is liable if the agent orders the wrong item.
Among consumers willing to use shopping agents, 51% say payment security and privacy are top priorities, 47% want clear returns and refund policies, and 44% want to know who is responsible if something goes wrong, according to Adyen.
Returns and chargeback procedures remain in place, but transactions initiated by AI introduce an extra challenge: proving what the buyer actually authorized and what limits were set for the agent. To address this, the industry is creating systems that log specific authorizations — for example, a maximum amount and a time window during which the agent is allowed to make purchases.
When an assistant moves from recommending to executing payments, errors can have concrete financial consequences: wrong size, obsolete price, or a different product than requested. Who bears responsibility when a purchase does not match the submitted instructions? Aguilar says that clarification, return and chargeback mechanisms continue to apply to AI-initiated operations, but these cases also require evidence of what the consumer authorized and under which conditions the tool acted.
To meet that need, the payments and retail industries are developing digital authentication and authorization systems with defined limits. Aguilar adds that merchants should retain control over the sale and their return policies, though the specific allocation of responsibility will depend on each transaction’s terms.
From the customer-service side, Goncalves points out that Blip’s assistants can detect ambiguous questions, situations they cannot resolve, or complaints that require a human representative — which prevents the automated flow from relying solely on AI responses.
Retailers also have to tackle problems that already affect e-commerce: Adyen finds that 51% of Mexican shoppers would abandon a purchase if their preferred payment method isn’t available, and 47% would quit if the checkout process is too slow.
Consumers’ openness to letting AI manage purchases creates a new opportunity for merchants, but seizing it requires more than installing AI assistants. For an agent to buy on someone’s behalf, retailers must provide up-to-date product information, secure payment options and effective ways to correct mistakes — all while keeping control of the transaction.
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Lucas Monroe tracks the latest trends in mobile and 5G innovation. His work spans hardware analysis, telecom breakthroughs, and ecosystem development in next-gen connectivity.