“Chatbot developers and retail giants are battling over user data as they lay the foundation for a future in which AI agents can do all your online shopping for you.”
It’s strange how we’ve moved from mall shopping to online shopping to now AI shopping for us
I’m winning. I don’t use AI and I’m too broke to shop for anything besides necessities.
Not a chance I would let an AI do my shopping.
I’ll let AI shop for me if AI makers let me use their money for it.
It’s strange how we’ve moved from mall shopping to online shopping to now AI shopping for us
Well, “we” only did the first move because it was more convenient. The latter is being forced on us.
Humans shopping online allows the seller to offer discounts, upsell services, create serendipity (“How about a lip gloss 50% to go with those shoes?”), and build brand loyalty. Or if you’re a techie, how about 50% off an SD-card with the purchase of a gadget?
This is why retailers create these expensive e-commerce websites instead of just dumping their wares into E-Bay or Amazon. They also do things like web heatmaps and other types of analytics to optimize the UI/UX.
Having an AI agent do the shopping means they lose all that. It’s any wonder they’re going to fight AI shopping agents. Be prepared for a lot more complex captchas when roaming around the web.
I imagine that there are ways to game any AI shopping agents that we imagine might be used in the future, same way there are to game human shoppers.
That and brand loyalty. If shopping was just api based, you could have your ai agent just buy X product from wherever when the price was right and never care about the company or marketing or anything.
It would be hugely empowering to be able to make a non website based shopping list and just have “something” sort out all the logistics, biased towards reducing your costs and inconvience, but that is never going to be what even the ai companies are selling. They will funnel you to their “prefered partners” and find every possible way to extract money and attention in the process.
Trying to bring brick and mortar shopping back to the masses, one AI push at a time.
My imagination thinks that in an AI shopping future, anyone who reads an article similar to this automatically buys a Micky Mouse plushie.
Did not want to ? That easy to fix: please go to your settings to turn off auto-shopping. Refunds work too, just ship it back
The number of dark patterns wrapped around both disabling auto shop and getting a return are going to make the current cookie nonsense look like a walk in the park.
“By clicking the ok button to activate this (critically important) site, you agree to allow us to make suggestions to the auto AI sales on your behalf”
Also, chargebacks aren’t zero-sum for the merchant. It costs them money on top of the cost of the sale, so enough people doing it would likely lead to legal action against the AI companies that negatively affect merchants’ bottom line.
I was imagining this not as an isolated event but a statistically small failure doing normal business practices of the future.
And chargeback against Google or Microsoft causes account cancellation.
What you said makes sense for this year.
I still shop at stores more than online. Would be even more if so many had not gone tits up.
Thank Amazon and Walmart, and consumers choosing an artificially cheap product over a curated experience and knowledgeable staff.
I mean the brick and mortars sorta ruined the knowledgeable staff thing themselves although admittedly they had that issue where folks were deciding at the store and purchasing online. They really should never have allowed the tax exempt thing and forced online to compete on an even plane.
It doesn’t help that with google messed up sometimes it feels like searching through ai is the only way to actually find what I want but I’d never let it buy stuff or even put in a cart unsupervised
There’s certainly no conflict of interest there…
So I’m curious what people think of this.
There’s consent from the shopper and the retailer, so it’s not unethical, but obviously the model developers are going to enshittify and try to extract as much value as they can.
I ask because just this morning I got an offer to work on exactly this.
I’d say it’s the same as giving kids access to your credit card, only they’re not your kids and they’re dumber than you are.
The most successful application for Facebook’s ‘M’ agent in testing was to reach out and make restaurant reservations, book appointments and, crucially, negotiate with Comcast for better rates.
Maybe Ai can be useful in that space.
