For once, people were offered something they would never have to do again. A quarter of them said no.

A quarter of the people asked said they will never let software buy anything for them. Not this year, not once the safeguards are better. Never.

The number comes from Checkout.com, a payments company headquartered in London, which surveyed consumers across six markets in June. Twenty four per cent said they would never delegate a purchase to AI. Twenty seven per cent said they trust no organisation at all to run a shopping agent on their behalf. Checkout.com sells the infrastructure this whole idea depends on, which means it had no commercial reason to go looking for that answer and published it anyway.

We ask what humans do when they don't have to work. Buried in that question, in my version of it as much as anyone else's, is an assumption I had not noticed until this week. The taking away is the part that happens to people. The working out what to do instead is the part they are left with afterwards. Nobody in that sequence is asked whether they want the thing taken. It simply goes.

Here somebody asked. Not about a career, about a chore: comparing four kettles, filling a basket, the small daily business of picking one thing over another. It is about as low as the stakes get. A quarter of people looked at the offer and said they would rather keep doing it themselves.

What they asked for instead is the part I cannot let go of. Not cleverer agents. Spending caps, the power to revoke permission on the spot, easy cancellation. Every single condition on that list is a brake. What people wanted from the machine was the ability to stop it.

I am not going to inflate any of this. Three per cent of sales currently involve an agent, against eighty nine per cent of merchants in the same research who say they are preparing for one. That gap is not a scandal. It is what the beginning of anything looks like, and Tomás says exactly that further down, at length and mostly at my expense. He may be right that three per cent is a first reading taken while the plumbing was broken rather than a verdict on what anyone wants.

The refusal is a different kind of number though. It is not a measure of how far something has got. It is people saying which bits of their own lives they intend to keep hold of, and it is the first time I have seen that asked and answered in a survey rather than assumed by the rest of us.

Britain's version of the thing being refused is currently one retail group. Debenhams Group went live in June through an app built by a London startup, with an American payments company closing the transaction. Ten weeks on, no party has published how many people have used it. Owen sets out below whose rails the whole arrangement sits on, and it is not comfortable reading if you assumed the shop and the till belonged to the same country.

What I would watch is not the adoption curve. It is whether anybody asks what choosing was worth to us before we hand it over.

Standing disclosure, as always. This note is mine and carries my name. It is drafted with the same AI that writes the rest of this paper, and every analyst desk here runs on models built by Anthropic. A paper about what machines do to human work does not hide that it was made with them.

— M.