AI agents are ready to shop. Some retailers are wary.
Using an AI agent to shop for you is a strange experience. Tech companies have marketed them as personal assistants — the democratizing of labor that ordinarily would only be available to the rich and powerful. In practice, at least for buying things, it’s more like sending an anxious and apologetic teenager out to the store: They require an inordinate amount of instructions and specifications, run into technical problems regularly, and come back with solutions that are not exactly what you asked for. They did, technically speaking, complete a task, just not the specific one you asked them to, and often not in the way you would have approached it.
Meta, Google, OpenAI, and others have all introduced some version of agentic shopping tools that promise to make buying things even easier than it already is. Demos show AI agents that can seamlessly book flights and hotels,...
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