alt Hacker NewsI have nothing to say about the actual model, but unrelated--why do so many of these demos include people buying things autonomously?
Even if I did trust an AI to get everything right, it's not like the AI can read my mind.
If I was ordering food normally and without AI, I would want more control over the process--looking over the options, prices, thinking about what I really want. People don't know what they really want until they've thought about it a bit, so why do AI companies make it seem like a description is all that's required?
All the context in the world cannot accurately predict how I'll react to things I haven't seen. The problem is people treating this like something that needs a solution. It doesn't. If you want to make my life easier with AI, just make it easier to do stuff. I don't want you to pick things that I actively enjoy picking myself.
(Also not everyone has a cushy job in an AI lab that makes it so you won't miss $30 if the AI messes up haha.)
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That’s exactly the problem I have with all this agent ideas too. Imagine you had a human concierge that is just waiting for your instructions and is as smart or a bit smarter than you. Would you just tell them “plan this holiday for me” or “order this food”? I don’t even trust my friends to get this right, why would I give this to someone else?
You can't even get many people to buy things online at all and if you can it's less profitable than retail, because you need to spend a lot of money to convince people, advertise to be seen, and account for returns. I think this is also due to the factors you mention.
One quick example: In fashion, Inditex and Shein have about the same revenue (€39.9bn and $41.8bn in 2025), but Inditex is more than three times as profitable. I don't see how there is a demand for agentic commerce that would remove even more control from the customer when shopping. Part of why we shop is for the experience. For B2B producurement platforms like Alibaba I can see the appeal though.
The overwhelming majority of things I buy are things I've bought before. Alexa having access to my Amazon order history means I can just say "order a new water filter for my fridge" and the correct item shows up the next day. Far from life changing, but it's a feature I use somewhat frequently these days. Similarly, I would trust an AI to put in my usual Chipotle order or pizza from my local pizza joint.
I wouldn't want it to pick food for me from a place I've never been, though to be honest with enough order history it could probably do a decent job at it.
Man I can think of so many reasons why companies want “agentic commerce” to catch on - and none of them are ethical.
I work for a larger german retail chain and agentic shopping is already on the "near future vision". No one thinks this will be used but somehow shareholders love it.
Agreed. There's not many things I don't want AI to help with, but buying stuff autonomously is high up on the list of things I don't want. Brockman's latest interview was something like: "AGI would be able to say oh this band is playing, I bought the tickets for you and arranged your flights - I hope you don't mind" (paraphrasing here). I definitely don't want AGI running my life like that so I can be a mindless consumer. I'm sure the advertising/marketing companies would love it though, so they can make closed-room deals with AI providers to shill you garbage you don't need. Just another reason why open-weight models need to keep up.
True, but they're still friction to be reduced here.
What I desperately want is for 1password or stripe or even Google who already has much of my data, to o come up with a secure solution for online purchases with agentic credit cards where I can effectively get a phone prompt to authorize a purchase while the agent can fully own the checkout flow.
I have seen various things coming on the market for this, but none of them appear aimed at a consumer audience. And I am a firm believer at this point in keeping my payment authorization and history and credentials harness agnostic.
because "people will let our AI spend their money for them" is the workflow that makes their valuations reasonable.
If it was Google's marketing department it would be: booking a table at a restaurant.
I’m guessing the marketing must mean the AI-shops-for-you use case is a pretty big market, much bigger than AI-makes-life-easier.
I often feel like the use cases, demos, etc. that these Silicon Valley employees put out are based around their needs and how they operate.
"Oh hey! Here's a demo of an AI planning out a 1-week trip to Paris!" No one in Middle America would just hand their credit card to an AI and let it come up with such a trip!
I wish SV companies took more of the middle-class (and lower-middle-class) into consideration when coming up with such demos.
(Note: I live in SF)
Despite access to """"""AGI""""""" all the marketing teams at these companies can only dream up 2 things, buying plane tickets and online shopping autonomously. Sometimes they're feeling extra spicy and throw in sorting emails or something along those lines.
I suspect it's because it's tailored towards VCs and other similar rich ghouls as a replacement for their overworked and underpaid secretaries