[krackers]

Fun read but

>Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars

No one [^1] price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences (and people often have a preferred brand anyway), but they probably do for $2k laptop.

>once AI agents equipped with MLS access

The data is the moat here, I'm sure even today individual consumers would be happy to have direct access to MLS to find properties and cut out the middleman. The fact that MLS is gatekept seems to be deliberate, so I don't think they'll hand over the only thing keeping them in business. Even Zillow couldn't get access to it and they've undoubtedly tried.

Same with the medical industry. I don't think the rent-seeking middlemen that exist today will be dethroned that easily, they have often been codified into law. But who knows maybe all the AI money pouring in will be enough to convince them to make a faustian deal towards their destruction and that'd be a happy byproduct of it all.

[^1] Edit: I erred in making too broad of a statement here, see the response threads.

[vmg12]

If I hand my shopping list to AI, why wouldn't I tell it to price match everything? People will start doing this sooner than you think. I still remember when people were scared to buy things on the internet, this will be faster.

[krackers]

Are you going to choose to buy your protein bar online from mysteryBargainBar[.]com for a $1 savings, or just pick it up as part of your local grocery trip?

> I still remember when people were scared to buy things on the internet

People still /are/ scared to buy things from Amazon for things that go on or in their body.

[dboreham]

In the case of the MLS example, there's also a private market (at least in some places, including where I live). Basically nothing in the MLS on any given day is attractive at the asking price. Only newly listed properties are going to be of interest to a discerning buyer. Some proportion of new listings never make it to the MLS because the agent already knows a suitable buyer.

[jahsome]

> No one price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences (and people often have a preferred brand anyway), but they probably do for $2k laptop.

This is the most "silicon valley" statement I've ever read on this website. Perhaps I'm just being obtuse and misunderstanding, but the assertion people don't price match groceries is so, so wrong. Many, many, many people have no choice. Far more than those regularly purchasing laptops.

[krackers]

>the assertion people don't price match groceries is so, so wrong. Many, many, many people have no choice

I guess I didn't quite say my point clearly, the time and physical cost to get to a grocery store puts up barriers against perfect price matching. You likely are not going to go out of your way to visit a grocery store for just a single item.

And I don't think online delivery will change anything here because shipping is a fixed cost, so price swings less than that will not change any buying habits.

[Tadpole9181]

I'm rather well off and I'll still pay attention to the price of my groceries. Especially luxuries like protein bars. If it's too much, I'll either only get them where they'll cheaper or just outright not buy it.

It's nuts that people genuinely believe statements like this.

[jjmarr]

> > once AI agents equipped with MLS access

> The data is the moat here, I'm sure even today individual consumers would be happy to have direct access to MLS to find properties and cut out the middleman.

Prior to agentic AI, businesses could price discriminate between human access and machine access to a database. Browser automation tools let humans arbitrage between the two but require investment in developers.

Now that Claude can browse the web, any consumer can engage in that arbitrage.

[botusaurus]

companies can also have a Claude on the receiving end to sniff if its a poor or rich Claude browsing

[nightski]

I don't think commodity means what you think it means. Protein bars are not indistinguishable from one another, there exists significant differences between various products.

[__d]

Yes, but.

When you’re broke and hungry, those differences become immaterial compared to the protein-bar/no-protein-bar tradeoff.

[jmye]

I’m not clear what you think AI changes in healthcare, or which middlemen you mean? Is it the thousands of start-ups pretending you can use AI for better care? Or are you suggesting the middle men are the doctors?

[jstummbillig]

> No one price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences

Everyone will prize match all the time – for protein bars and absolutely everything else, when AI can do it for them for ~free, and the ai-meta-shopping experience is the best that you can get anywhere.

Thinking about this task from todays perspective misses the point: You simply won't be considering it. AI will. It's backend optimization. It just happens.

[formerly_proven]

The current AI-meta-shopping-research experience (using e.g. ChatGPT Deep Research) is largely garbage, especially for goods where the infosphere is dominated by the manufacturers and they're also using SKU-spraying, e.g. white goods. DR is of course fairly decent (if rather slow) at comparing hard-facts, but that's often easy for most goods anyway ("find me a motherboard with features X, Y, Z" goes _way_ quicker using a site like skinflint than chatgpt). Meanwhile it sucks at comparing stuff that are also annoying to compare manually. So the gain here is very low in my experience.