It's almost like every recent silicon valley product is designed by multi-millionaires whose problems are so out of touch with regular-people problems. "I have so much money and don't know what to spend it on, it would be great if AI could shop for me!" Or "I have so little time, it would be great if an app could chauffeur me around and deliver food for me." Or "It's Christmas again, I need to write heartfelt, personalized letters to 1,000 important clients, partners, friends, and relatives. Why not have an AI write them?"

> Most people either never make restaurant reservations, or do so infrequently for special occasions, in which case they probably already know where they want to go and how to book it.

And even if they don't know, they likely either live in a small place, in which case there's not going to be a huge amount of choice, or a big place, in which case there will be actual guides written by people whose actual job it is to review restaurants. It really seems like a solution in desperate need of a problem.

This is fascinating to me, as I basically never go to a restaurant without a booking.

But I think you're underestimating this use case, as the data you linked shows that Google is the top referral used by people to find the restaurant/booking website, and once SEO is overtaken by ChatGPT-like experiences it would make sense that "book this for me" would be a one-click (or one-word) logical next step that Google never had.

An app/AI that makes a list is fine. But what poor person would allow the robot to spend money directly?

Correct: as soon as you start using an AI to buy things for you, influence over the choices that AI makes becomes an incredibly tantalizing fruit to be auctioned off. And you don't control that AI, a for-profit entity does. It doesn't matter whether it's working well and acting in your best interest now, it's abundantly clear that it won't be very long before it's conspiring against you. You are the product.

The ultimate problem is the incentives. Web stores are already forcing us to use their proprietary (web)apps, where they define all of the software's capabilities.

For example, subscription purchases could be a great thing if they were at a predictable trustable price, or paused/canceled themselves if the price has gone up. But look at the way Amazon has implemented them: you can buy it once at the competitive price, but then there is a good chance the listing will have been jacked up after a few months goes by. This is obviously set up to benefit Amazon at the expense of the user. And then Amazon leans into the dynamic even harder by constantly playing games with their prices.

Working in the interest of the user would mean the repeating purchase was made by software that compared prices across many stores, analyzed all the quantity break / sale games, and then purchased the best option. That is obviously a pipe dream, even with the talk of "agentic" "AI". Not because of any technical reason, but because it is in the stores' interest to computationally disenfranchise us by making us use their proprietary (web)apps - instead of an effortless comparison across 12 different vendors, we're left spending lots of valuable human effort on a mere few and consider that enough diligence.

So yes, there is no doubt the quiet part is that these "agents" will mostly not be representing the user, but rather representing the retailers to drive more sales. Especially non-diligent high-margin sales.

> then it goes downhill until you finally do it yourself again

Good news, usually by the time you reach this point in the cycle, the do-it-yourself option has become super-niche and the stores themselves might not even make that available.