[jaimebuelta]

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.

[lynndotpy]

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."

[JKCalhoun]

I want an AI agent that returns stuff that my other AI agent bought.

[andrepd]

It's kinda funny how so much "capitalist innovation" turns out to be basically fraud lol.

[rsynnott]

> When Amazon came out with the "dash" button and then the "Alexa" speakers

Both of those things failed, tho.

[hbn]

That only really follows if you look at "producers" as a homogenous unit, but the companies hyping up their AI browser agents aren't really in the business of running online goods stores

The real answer here is the same as every other "why is this AI shit being pushed?" question: they want more VC funding.

[kjok]

> 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.

This. Humans are lazy and often don’t provide enough data on exactly what they are looking for when shopping online. In contrast, Agents can ask follow up questions and provide a lot more contextual data to the producers, along with the history of past purchases, derived personal info, and more. I’d not be surprised if this info is consumed to offer dynamic pricing in e-commerce. We already see dynamic pricing being employed by travel apps (airfare/uber).

[jordanb]

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.

[potatolicious]

> "I suspect part of this is rich people coming up with use cases."

Yes. Having been in the room for some of these demos and pitches, this is absolutely where it's coming from. More accurately though, it's wealthy people (i.e., tech workers) coming up with use cases that get mega-wealthy people (i.e., tech execs) excited about it.

So you have the myopia that's already present in being a wealthy person in the SFBA (which is an even narrower myopia than being a wealthy American generally), and matmul that with the myopia of being a mega-wealthy individual living in the SFBA.

It reminds me of the classic Twitter post: https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888?lan...

I honestly see this as a major problem with our industry. Sure, this has always been true to some extent - but the level of wealth in the Bay Area has gotten so out-of-hand that on a basic level the mission of "can we produce products that the world at large needs and wants" is compromised, and increasingly severely so.

[smelendez]

I think that's right.

It's like the endless examples around finding restaurants and making reservations, seemingly as common a problem in AI demos as stain removal is in daytime TV ads. But it's a problem that even Toast, which makes restaurant software, says most people just don't regularly have (https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/data/restaurant-wait-times-and...).

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.

[JKCalhoun]

Dreamt of a labor-saving future of AI and robots, ended up instead a destitute hoarder of crap from Amazon.

[geoduck14]

Thinking about grocery shopping makes me think this need is real, but for poor people.

The amount of time that goes into "what food do we need for this week" is really high. An AI tool that connected "food I have" with "food that I want" would be huge.

[s1mplicissimus]

Also, consider what enshittification in this area will look like: First year, all the choices are good, second year, it starts picking worse price/value items, then it goes downhill until you finally do it yourself again. Nope thanks

[xnx]

Definitely true, but basic goods and services we have today (e.g. every song nd every movie ever made in your pocket) were unimaginable luxuries even 50 years ago.

Uber started as a chauffeur service, but is now available to everyone and is (mostly) a huge improvement over taxis.

[dumbfounder]

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.

[feoren]

> Agent, I need some vitamin D, can you find me the best deal for some rated in the top 5?

Ok we found a bottle with a 30 day supply of <producer that paid us money to shill to you>, a Well-Known Highly Rated and Respected Awesome Producer Who Everyone Loves and Is Very Trustworthy™, from <supplier that paid us money to shill to you>, a Well Respected And Totally Trustworthy And Very Good-Looking Merchant™. <suppressing reports of lead poisoning, as directed by prompt>

[everdrive]

>Agent, I need some vitamin D, can you find me the best deal for some rated in the top 5?

"I have picked the best reviewed vitamin D on Amazon."

(and, it's a knockoff in the mixed inventory, and now you're getting lead-laced nothing)

[kace91]

Does anyone actually buy this way? For anything that isn’t groceries, I check, particularly now that Amazon has roughly the same trust as temu.

Vitamin d? I’m going to check the brand, that it’s actually a good quality type. It’s a 4.9 but do reviews look bought ? How many people complain of the pills smelling? Is Amazon the actual seller?

As for the groceries, my chain of choice already has a fill order with last purchases button, I don’t see any big convenience that justifies a hallucination prone ai having the ability to make purchases on my behalf.

[AlexandrB]

Enjoy it while you can. Messing with which products get purchased by these agents is such a no-brainer revenue stream for AI companies.

[hkpack]

> but I also need to make a pumpkin pie so can you get me what I need for that

Have you actually baked a pumpkin pie? There are numerous versions, and the distinction between them is cultural. There is zero chance an AI will understand what kind of pumpkin pie you want, unless you are talking about the most general case in your region. In this case why even bother doing it yourself?

Yes, you can teach it the recipe beforehand, but I think it is too complex to tech the AI the details of every task you want it to perform. Most likely what will happen is AI will buy you whatever is more profitable for corporations to sell.

And there will be number of ways (and huge amount of money to make) to ensure that your open-weights self-hosted model will make the right choices for the shareholders as well.

[juxtaposicion]

Yeah, agree most daily purchases are humdrum and shouldn’t command all of my attention.

Incidentally, my last project is about buying by unit price. Shameless plug, but for vitmain D the best price per serving here (https://popgot.com/vitamin-d3)

[chasd00]

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.

[rsynnott]

That's kinda backwards, tho. You don't, or at least shouldn't, say "we have this thing, and we need to make people use it, so let's make up use cases even if they make no sense and will fail". (People do this all the time, of course; it's more or less the sunk-cost fallacy.)

[jayd16]

It will certainly happen but it seems like a shady kickback unseen by the the end-user is well beyond relevant ads colocated with search results.

Seems like something that should really be illegal, unless the ads are obvious.

[inerte]

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.

[sebastiennight]

The issue of course is that true-deodorant-x.com is not a trustworthy website and will sell you knock-offs, "Deodorant X-Killer-Y" is a separate brand that LLMs might mistake for Deodorant X upon purchase, and Amazon mixes the supply of Deodorant X with fake products anyway.

You're basically rolling the dice with every single refill.

[a_c_s]

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.

[lubujackson]

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.

[nmcfarl]

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

[sebastiennight]

> an antigenic browser

Sounds very prone to injection problems

[GuB-42]

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.

[darepublic]

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

[anal_reactor]

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.

[taormina]

The idea has been tried before and it failed because people don’t actually want this product at the scale the inventors thought. Amazon has never stopped doing this. Adding an element of indeterminism to the mix doesn’t make this a better product. Imagine what the LLM is going to hallucinate with your credit card attached.

[Paradigma11]

Sure, but why would you use a nondeterministic LLM for that? LLMs can do things that we cant reasonably do with deterministic software. But everything that can be done deterministically should be done deterministically.

[nemomarx]

if my roommate charged me for toilet paper they picked out I would want to talk to them about the brand they go for and other details, at which point a lot of the overhead is back isn't it?

[guywithahat]

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.

[OkayPhysicist]

> 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"

[mandevil]

This has been the dream driving smart refrigerators for literally decades: if you know what food they have, you could sell them ingredient li so they could take their existing theta and digeut and make dish sha. Advertisers have wanted this for a long time. But no one has found a use case that is actually compelling to customers to get them to buy such a refrigerator. This is actually similar to the Alexa: Amazon invested in the project expecting there to be a lot of purchases through it, but mostly it gets used as a timer or to play music and not much purchase volume goes through it.

Maybe people will accept ubiquitous digital surveillance enough that they accept someone else knowing what they have in their pantry and refrigerator, but so far it isn't a thing.

[strange_quark]

This seems like something that won't ever work because there's like 10 decisions that the computer has to make that it can't possibly know unless it's either a mind reader or has a crazy level of surveillance on your life. How does it know what's in your fridge or pantry and the quantities of each item? How does it know how many people you're cooking for? What if your kids or spouse aren't going to be home a given night -- do they all have their own calendars that are impeccably maintained and synced to yours? What's your budget and do you really trust it spending your money? What if there are several options for each ingredient, how does it know your preference? Perhaps you prefer to buy certain ingredients at Costco and were planning on making a trip tomorrow, how does it know not to order stuff you buy from Costco in your grocery order?

Even if it could figure everything out, is this a problem that people actually have? I'm not even being facetious, but you're describing someone who cares enough to spend time cooking and clearly has a preference on what they want to make, but doesn't care enough to actually select the specific dishes.

[rsynnott]

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.

[beefnugs]

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

[singleshot_]

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.

[otterley]

I am a lawyer. I understood your first paragraph but didn’t understand the second. It reads like a drive-by shitpost, utterly lacking substance.

[jayd16]

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

[xenotux]

> 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.

[tsimionescu]

Comparing regular people's shopping to the super-wealthy is absurd. Regular people care, possibly quite a lot, about costs and cost/benefit ratios. To the super wealthy the cost of most regular goods is entirely irrelevant. Whether their yogurt supply is 10 dollars a month or 200 dollars a month makes no difference to them. But it makes a huge difference to the vast majority of people. Even people who would be happy to pay the premium for very good yogurt will want a very good experience from this.

[AlexandrB]

> It's why many well-off people have assistants or servants.

AI agents have only one master - the AI vendor. They're not going to make decisions based on your best interests.

[wouldbecouldbe]

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.

[majkinetor]

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.

[layer8]

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

[tsimionescu]

Key being wealthy. The kind of wealth that has no idea how much a banana costs, and couldn't care less whether it's 10 dollars or 1.

[jsheard]

It's not looking good so far. When OpenAI introduced product searches back in April I tried running one of their own example queries from the announcement post, and it obliviously cited "reviews" and "recommendations" from LLM-generated affiliate link farms. I just tried it again and it still falls into the same trap.

[bongodongobob]

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

[lukan]

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.

[justcallmejm]

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

[jkrom3]

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.

[tsimionescu]

I imagine the exact opposite is far more likely - there will be a button for "get your AI agent to consider us!" that will be even easier to just click, since you know it won't just lead to an immediate purchase - but they know very well it will lead to a purchase down the line.

[takinola]

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.

[mh-]

I agree. I'm confused that this idea is even controversial. I would absolutely use it in the way you're describing. I've wanted something like this since around when Alexa/Echo launched.

[LtWorf]

There is a 100% chance that companies paying a fee to the owner of the agent will be picked by the agents.