I don't understand why we would ever want an agent to buy stuff for us.

I understand, for example, search with intent to buy "I want to decorate a room. Find me a drawer, a table and four chairs that can fit in this space in matching colours for less than X dollars"

But I want to do the final step to buy. In fact, I want to do the final SELECTION of stuff.

How is agent buying groceries superior to have a grocery list set as a recurring purchase? Sure an agent may help in shaping the list, but I don't see how allowing the agent to do purchases directly on your end is way more convenient, so I'm fine with taking the risk of doing something really silly.

"Hey agent, find me and compare insurance for my car for my use case. Oh, good. I'll pick insurance A and finish the purchase"

And many of the purchases that we do are probably enjoyable and we don't want really to remove ourselves from the process.

When Amazon came out with the "dash" button and then the "Alexa" speakers, I figured they must have expected they'd get some unintended purchases, and that they'd make more profit from those than they'd lose in the people going through the refund process. (That, or they'd learn whether it was profitable, and eat it as an R&D cost if it turned out to be unprofitable.)

I think this might be similar. In short, it's not consumers who want robots to buy for them, it's producers who want robots to buy from them using consumers dollars.

I think more money comes from offering this value to every online storefront, so long as they pay a fee. "People will accidentally buy your coffee with our cool new robot. Research says only 1% of people will file a return, while 6% of new customers will turn into recurring customers. And we only ask for a 3% cut."

I suspect part of this is rich people coming up with use cases. If you're rich enough money means nothing but product selection feels like a burden so you have an assistant who does purchasing on your behalf. You want your house stocked with high quality items without having to think of it.

For the rest of us, the idea of a robot spending money on our behalf is kinda terrifying.

Agent, I need some vitamin D, can you find me the best deal for some rated in the top 5? Agent deployed. Ok we found a bottle with a 30 day supply of Nature’s Own from a well respected merchant. It can be here in 2 days and it is $12. Should I buy? Yes.

Or you could add some other parameters and tell it to buy now if under $15.

Agent, I need a regular order for my groceries, but I also need to make a pumpkin pie so can you get me what I need for that? Also, let’s double the fruit this time and order from the store that can get it to me today.

Most purchases for me are not enjoyable. Only the big ones are.

I think the main driving force is it’s a way to monetize an LLM. If the LLM is doing the buying then a “buyer fee” can be tacked on to the purchase and paid to the LLM provider. That is probably an easier sell than an ongoing monthly subscription.

Also, sellers can offer a payment to the LLM provider to favor their products over competitors.

I agree with you but there are levels of purchase. This article explains it well https://a16z.com/ai-x-commerce/

Let's say even if I always buy "Deodorant X", I might instruct my agent every month to go out and buy it from the cheapest place. So I wouldn't do it for "any chairs" but the usual purchase from a certain brand, I can see myself automating this. In fact, I have because I use Subscribe & Save from Amazon, but sometimes things are cheaper on the brand's website or some other marketplace.

Agreed: If I was working with a human interior designer I would still want them to provide me a curated list of options on what decor to buy. Blindly trusting a person seems risky, a robot even more so.

I’ve had two cases for this in the last month. Not that I have access to an agentic browser.

* We decided to buy a robot vacuum, again. And we decided on a particular model that yo-yo‘s up and down in price by about $200 every month. We ended up buying it off of Amazon because of camelcamelcamel, but if I could have easily tracked prices and bought elsewhere, I would’ve. And I would’ve considered using an antigenic browser to do that for me – if I could trust them at all. One model number and I know the price I wanna pay, I just don’t want to check a bunch of storefronts everyday

* kids going back to school – and he has a school supply list. He’s up for a new backpack and a new lunchbox, and a bunch of back to school clothes - so those we’ve actually been shopping for all summer. But the wooden ruler, the three sheafs of college rule paper, etc. I don’t wanna shop for. I actually had chatGPT scan the paper list, and then get me either direct links, or links to searches on walmart.com (they are more than an hours drive from us, but they do deliver to my wife’s work). Then I created a cart and had them deliver. ChatGPT solutions were not bad, I only switched one or two items for a version my kid should have versus a version I should buy. In the moment, I probably would have trusted a bot to do this, though retrospectively I’m glad it went the way it did

Exactly. If we really wanted AI to help us, we would find a way to fix the inscrutable problem of why we have to enter our ID number over a phone, then do it a second time when we connect to a human. No company in the world has solved this riddle.

That's because you don't trust the agent, and for good reasons considering the article.

But if you trust the agent, why not let it do the final step? You will accept anyways. Imagine you have a car mechanic you trust, you can just ask him "hey, fix my car" and let him buy whatever parts he needs on your behalf. If he quoted you first, you would say "yes" anyways, so skip that step and get your car repaired as soon as possible. Only if you don't trust him you will ask for a quote and review it, which, if the mechanic is trustworthy is a hassle for both of you.

Some purchases are enjoyable, most of them are not. I don't enjoying doing the groceries. And to continue with the car mechanic theme, I don't really enjoy buying new tires, though I know some people do. So I just ask my mechanic: "if the tires are worn, change them, give me the ones you think are the best". I will probably end up with the most boring option: the same model as before, which is the one recommended by the manufacturer, and that's perfect for me.

Yeah, it's a very odd proposition. Even if it were guaranteed not to screw it up (and of course in reality LLMs are experts in screwing stuff up), this still doesn't seem like an appealing idea.

I could see some charm to something to go through intentionally annoying and confusing checkout processes, booking a Ryanair flight, say. I'm fairly sure that an LLM would end up falling for their car hire/insurance/whatever upsells, tho. There's a reason that that checkout process is annoying.

I don't personally have an issue with this use case. It just has to work as well as if you told a trusted assistant or friend to do it for you. Needs discrimination and needs to intelligently include or exclude you from the loop based on the circumstances

I recently bought a blood pressure monitor from Amazon, and it took two days because I couldn't buy it at work, can't buy it while driving, couldn't get it at the gym, and was too tired to look into it when I was at home.

The idea of an agent, not owned by the store (who may try to upsell me) that could look into the product and buy one sounds great. Instead of waiting two days I could have just told the AI to run the errand for me while I was at work. I don't know anything about blood pressure monitors and I don't want to learn, so as long as it's <$50 any choice is fine.

Imagine an agent being a roommate. They see that toilet paper is running out, they go to the supermarket, they buy more, they charge you money. All without you saying a word. Sure, it might not be your favorite brand, or the price might not be optimal, but realistically, the convenience of not having to think about buying toilet paper is definitely worth the price of having your roommate choose the details. After all, it's unlikely they'll make a catastrophically bad decision.

This idea has been tried before and it failed not because the core concept is bad (it isn't), but because implementation details were wrong, and now we have better tools to execute it.

> How is agent buying groceries superior to have a grocery list set as a recurring purchase?

I could see an interesting use case for something like "Check my calendar and a plan meals for all but one dinners I have free this week. One night, choose a new-to-me recipe, for the others select from my 15 most commonly made dishes. Include at least one but at most 3 pasta dishes. Consider the contents of my pantry, trying to use ingredients I have on hand. Place an order for pickup from my usual grocery store for any ingredients necessary that are not already in the pantry"

The proper way to do this is to first perfect AI at spotting all the dark patterns and ads that exist today, and automatically filter all of that shit (including never buying anything ever from companies that have done SPAM a single time in their entire history).

Then figure out what the real human wants ahead of time, and it can go out and find the best deal / best value / best long term reliable company / whatever the HUMAN wants...

Of course it will never be done properly

If you were a lawyer, you’d think something slightly different when you heard the word agent than you would if you were a computer guy. The delta is the fact that under the law of agency, an agent has the power to bind the principal to a contract.

If the lawyers didn’t have this definition in their head there would be no drive to make the software agent a purchaser, because it’s a stupid idea.

You'd expect a human assistant to handle the task fine. People buying into the hype would reasonably expect the AI to handle it.

> I don't understand why we would ever want an agent to buy stuff for us.

Why not? Offload the entire task, not just one half of it. It's why many well-off people have accountants, assistants, or servants. And no one says "you know, I'm glad you prepared my taxes, but let me file the paperwork myself".

I think what you're saying isn't that you like going through checkout flows, just that you don't trust the computer to do it. But the approach the AI industry is "build it today and hope the underlying tech improves soon". It's not always wrong. But "be dependable enough to trust it with money" appears to be a harder problem than "generate images of people with the right number of fingers".

No doubt that some customers are going to get burned. But I have no doubt that down the line, most people will be using their phones as AI shoppers.

I think it's also more a generic wish to have agents do things without review, this would open up a lot bigger window of possibilities. If it fails at easy shopping, then more crucial decision making is out of the order.

Limited time to buy would be one reason. Another one would be dynamic nature of certain merchendize. Recurring purchase is static, but if I want tomato of specific kind, there can be endless array of options to choose from.

It’s what wealthy people use human assistants for. If AI could do it as reliably, people would use that.

Procurement for large companies. An entire world exists outside your home.

I mean, my fridge keeping an eye on the food and order fresh milk and butter in a timely (preprogrammed) manner would be quite nice.

Or if I have a long term project I am building, but waiting for some material needed to drop in price again.

All scenarios where I would like agents, if I could trust them. I think we are getting there.

Consumers don’t need to want it; VCs just need to imagine making money off it.

One other ancillary benefit is no more “impulse” buying. Unless of course the AI gets incentivized to do it, it will then bubble that impulse buy up to the consumers UI.

Lots of senior executives, celebrities, etc have other people buy stuff for them all the time - flights, gifts, lunch, etc. The problem is this is very expensive so not available to most people. If agents reduce the cost and are mostly reliable, there will be a significantly large market for this service.