United Kingdom: Competition and Markets Authority released research and analysis on agentic AI and consumers

On 9 March 2026, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) released Agentic AI and consumers, a research and analysis paper examining the development of agentic AI in consumer markets. The paper defines agentic AI as systems that can be instructed in natural language to pursue goals autonomously, navigating complexity, planning actions, coordinating across services and executing tasks. Unlike traditional automation or chatbots, such systems interpret information from their environment, decide on actions, and execute them. The paper notes that current deployments are concentrated in customer operations, commerce and sales workflows, software and IT operations and internal business process automation. It identifies potential consumer benefits including reduced friction, hyper-personalisation, time savings and lower cognitive effort when interacting with markets. The paper also identifies risks including manipulative design practices, errors and hallucinations, bias, loss of consumer agency, agentic collusion and ecosystem lock-in. The CMA states that UK consumer protection law applies regardless of whether consumer interactions involve human decision-making or AI systems and references the framework introduced by the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. The analysis also identifies wider enablers for trusted deployment of agentic systems, including smart data schemes, secure digital identity infrastructure and interoperability standards. The CMA’s foundation model principles, particularly transparency and accountability, are highlighted as relevant to the deployment of agentic AI.