Last Updated on July 16, 2026
Seventy per cent of UK shoppers say it matters that a brand understands their preferences. Forty three per cent will not hand over the real-time browsing data most brands use to work those preferences out.
Read that twice. It is not a contradiction. It is an instruction.
What happened
Customer experience platform Braze surveyed 2,000 UK consumers, part of a five-country study, in research reported on 13 July. The headline numbers:
Across the five countries surveyed, UK shoppers came out the most resistant to AI.
Why most businesses read this wrong
The standard reaction to “customers want personalisation” is to go shopping. A personalisation plugin. A chatbot. Some tool that promises to track behaviour and serve the right thing at the right moment.
That plan fails on the same page it starts. Your customers have just told you they will not give you the raw material those tools run on. You are buying the engine and refusing to buy the fuel.
The second mistake is quieter. Owners hear “UK shoppers are the most AI-resistant” and assume they are behind, that the market is dragging its feet and they should push harder. Wrong reading. Refusing to be tracked by a stranger is not the same as refusing to be served well by someone who knows you.
The reframe
Personalisation is not a tracking problem. It is a memory problem.
Tracking is what you do when you do not know the customer. You watch from a distance and guess. It is expensive, it only works at scale, and it is exactly the thing 43% of them will not hand over.
Memory is what you do when you do know the customer. They told you something. You wrote it down. You used it next time.
Plenty of retailers would trade their data stack for what a decent independent already has: a customer who tells you their usual order, their dog’s name, the date of the wedding. That information is consented, first-party and free. Most small businesses throw it in the bin.
What to do about it
| Stage | What it looks like in practice |
|---|---|
| Start | Write down what customers already tell you. This is not a CRM project. A spreadsheet will do, or the notes field in your booking system. Name, what they bought, what they asked for, when they will likely need it again. If you send invoices or take bookings, you already hold half of this and you are not using it. |
| Build | Ask for one thing, and say why. “Can I take your email so I can tell you when the new stock lands?” beats a naked “join our newsletter” because it names the trade. Consent with a reason attached is consent that survives. If you are unsure where the legal line sits, our note on cookie banners covers it. |
| Scale | Only once the first two are running. Automation applied to a customer you cannot remember just makes you wrong faster. If you cannot personalise one email by hand today, no tool will personalise a thousand for you tomorrow. |
The AI question, answered honestly
35% of UK shoppers say they are likely to use AI to find deals or new products. 43% say they are unlikely to use those tools at all. Both are true at once, and neither justifies betting the business either way.
What it means in practice: be findable by AI tools, because roughly a third of your market says it is likely to ask them. Be recognisably human on arrival, because a bigger share came anyway and did not want a robot. Those are not competing strategies. An AI can answer your customers in seconds, and that is the easy part. Being worth the visit is the hard part, and no tool does it for you.
The takeaway
Your customers are not refusing to be known. They are refusing to be surveilled. Those are different things, and the gap between them is where a small business quietly beats a big one.
Stop trying to buy what they will not sell you. Start using what they have already handed over.
