“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
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.
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.
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.