Why Customers Aren't Letting AI Agents Take The Wheel On Payments Yet

Rick Watkin is President & CEO of KUBRA, a leading provider of customer experience management solutions for utilities and other industries.

Customers are saying “yes” to a lot of what AI has to offer these days, whether that’s an AI-generated quote, a snippet to help make a purchase decision or a pre-filled form. But those turn into “nos” the moment AI renews a policy or pays a bill on their behalf.

When autonomous AI agents get involved in money matters, comfort and trust fall off a cliff the moment the system stops suggesting and starts acting. Today, only 23% of U.S. consumers trust AI to handle a payment transaction on their behalf.

In essential services, that cliff is steeper still. Six in 10 utility customers primarily pay through their utility’s app or website, yet only 27% strongly trust their utility to protect their personal data, and only 28% strongly trust the accuracy of their bill. If they don’t fully trust the provider with their data and their bill, giving an AI agent the authority to act on that bill is a much bigger leap.

From Trusting AI To Trusting AI With Something

Trust is a threshold. Right now, customers trust generative AI to assist long before they trust AI agents to act. Delegation is trust measured by how much control you hand over. Each step up the ladder, from awareness to permission to reliance to full autonomy, requires a higher threshold than the one before.

There’s also a structural mismatch. AI is built to produce the most likely or most helpful answer, not a guaranteed one. For financial execution, customers want an exact, deterministic outcome every time. That gap is a design problem to solve.

Stakes matter too. If an AI agent overpays for a pair of shoes, it’s an inconvenience. An underpaid insurance premium or an overpaid utility bill can disrupt a household. That’s why essential services face a higher trust bar than retail.