What the 2026 State of Digital Trust Report Means for AI and Retail/E-Commerce

Retailers have spent years treating data privacy as something to manage quietly in the background, with a banner, a policy page, a checkbox for legal to sign off on.

Usercentrics, the company behind Cookiebot, surveyed 11,000 consumers across seven markets for the 2026 State of Digital Trust Report, and the finding is direct. Shoppers aren't just uneasy about how brands use their data for AI. They're acting on it with their wallets.

For a retail or e-commerce team, that shows up in cart abandonment, churn, and whether a shopper trusts a personalized recommendation enough to click it.

AI Didn't Create the Distrust, but Gave Shoppers a Reason to Act

Consumer wariness about data sharing has been building for years, but AI gave it something concrete to act on. Over AI data concerns, in the past six months:

24 percent of consumers canceled a subscription or stopped buying from a brand

20 percent switched to a competitor

20 percent reduced spending

47 percent took at least one of the above revenue-consequential actions. More than a third (35 percent) took two or more of these actions against the same brand.

For a retailer, that's the difference between a one-time lost sale and a customer relationship actively deteriorating before it shows up in the numbers.

Retail Was Already Starting From Behind

Last year's edition of this same research ranked retail near the bottom of consumer trust by industry at only 21 percent, ahead of only automotive and well behind banking, government, and technology. 

That's a mismatch for a customer-facing industry that would expect to score better, and it's the backdrop AI-driven personalization is landing on now, with less benefit of the doubt than retail assumes it has.

The Personalization Paradox

Globally, 71 percent of consumers say AI-driven personalization feels intrusive. That climbs to 75 percent among U.S. consumers, tied with the U.K. for the highest of any market. 

Read alone, that looks like a mandate to dial personalization back, but it isn't. Among privacy-aware consumers, the ones who read consent banners and make active choices about their data, 53 percent are comfortable with brands personalizing their experience. However, among privacy-unaware consumers, that drops to 19 percent.

Nearly three times the comfort level with the same technology. Has the retailer actually explained itself? There's the constraint, not AI.

The Trust Vacuum U.S. Retailers Can Fill

Only 39 percent of American consumers trust government services with their data, the lowest of any market surveyed, and 74 percent are cautious about sharing data with U.S. companies generally. Americans are wary of institutions and businesses alike, with no floor of trust to fall back on.

That’s an actual gap, well beyond a warning sign. Half of U.S. consumers will pay more for a brand transparent about its AI data use, in line with the 52 percent global average. Where no institution is filling that gap, the brand that closes it keeps the value for itself.

What This Means for Retail and E-Commerce Teams

None of this argues for abandoning AI-driven personalization, but for explaining it better. Retailers who give shoppers real visibility into what's collected and why are working with a fundamentally more receptive audience than those who don't.

• Treat plain-language disclosure about AI features as a trust asset rather than a policy footnote. This includes recommendations, chat assistants, and dynamic pricing.
• Discomfort with "AI" often isn’t discomfort with personalization itself, but with not knowing what's happening behind it.
• If your site's consent experience reads as boilerplate, it isn't doing the work this data says it needs to do.

Retailers treating this as a trust problem now, not a compliance checkbox, are the ones positioned to earn the loyalty — and the price premium — this report shows is available.