Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are gaining trust among consumers and vendors — just so long as the tasks remain simple and don’t include financial transactions.
The results underscore the sentiments of business leaders who are being judicious in their use of AI agents even as it takes off and becomes a staple of their organizations, according to the inaugural PwC 2025 Trust & Safety Outlook.
More than 300 senior executives polled they were far more likely to entrust AI agents with data analysis (38%), performance improvement (35%), and day-to-day collaboration with human colleagues (31%) than on “higher-stakes” use cases such as financial transactions (20%) or autonomous employee interactions (22%).
“Agentic AI is opening a new frontier when it comes to trust and safety,” Dan Hayes, a partner at PwC, said in an interview. “It’s not just about handling sensitive information, but in taking autonomous actions on your behalf.”
“But people are very hesitant to provide agents with explicit authority when it comes to handling your money, like arranging a vacation,” he said. “AI agents lack regulation aside from the EU AI Act and some voluntary agreements between a handful of platforms and the U.S. federal government reached last year.”
The larger report delves into key trends that are demanding executive attention: operational and policy impacts of digital safety regulations such as the EU’s Digital Services Act; the case for measuring return on investment (ROI) on trust and safety investments; growing AI-related risks, especially around agents; and managing cost pressures without reducing impact.
The most vexing notion, per usual, appears to be the promise — and potential pitfalls — of AI agents, those autonomous digital assistants from the likes of Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Microsoft Corp., Salesforce Inc., ServiceNow Inc., and others that are designed to perform low-level tasks that augment human workers.
A whopping 88% of executives surveyed by PwC said their companies plan to increase their AI-related budgets this year largely because of agentic AI. And more than a quarter plan budget hikes of at least 26% to fund ambitious plans. Conversely, 68% acknowledged that half or fewer of their employees interact with agents in everyday work.
When polled on AI use by business function, the top-three were customer service and support (57%), sales and marketing (54%), and IT and cyber security (53%), automated tasks with high productivity upsides. Those at the bottom, however, involved financial or legal transactions: procurement (20%), legal and compliance (18%), and tax (15%).
Nonetheless, half of the respondents agreed their current operating model will be unrecognizable in two years because of AI agents. Three-quarters agree or strongly agree AI agents will reshape the workplace more than the internet did.
What’s more, 71% agree that AI agents are advancing so quickly that artificial general intelligence (AGI), in which AI can think, learn and solve problems as broadly and flexibly as a human, will be a reality within two years.
