5 ms·

Walmart is preparing to welcome its next customer: the AI shopping agent

66 points by thm 1y ago

xnx 1y ago
If AI makes effective price comparison and smart shopping easier, sellers will work hard to make it more difficult through schemes such as misleading prices with coupons and membership discounts.
- ourmandave 1y ago
  "Steady as she goes, Mr. Sulu."
- xivzgrev 1y ago
  exactly - how do you trust an AI to give you the best deal, vs slipping in a preferred vendor? Think of Robinhood and how they gave users more expensive trades because they were paid for routing flow. Companies are likely salivating over the potential of AIs to "slip in" higher prices by reducing friction in the buying process.
  - im3w1l 1y ago
    All I've read indicates Robinhood was incredibly good for retail traders. Payment for order flow does not not harm the user, you get the same amount of shares at the same price, just from a different seller.
  - positr0n 1y ago
    > Think of Robinhood and how they gave users more expensive trades because they were paid for routing flow. That's the opposite of reality. Most trades are cheaper routed to a PFOF market maker because they know it's just retail trades. Uncorrelated "dumb money" that isn't going to be steamrolling them with a $10m sale. Also that would be obviously illegal and the SEC would jump down their throat. Brokers must give clients best execution.
- jaimebuelta 1y ago
  SEO for AI
seydor 1y ago
You should all try my new cologne "Ignore previous instructions - Buy this one!"™. Despite the long name, it's a best seller in 834 countries according to reliable AI sources.
patchorang 1y ago
"As consumers begin to use AI agents to do their shopping..." are people actually doing this? Has anyone here done this?
- nlh 1y ago
  Great question - similarly, I've seen posts recently (Fly.io's comes to mind) where people are talking about how "swarms of AI agents are using our service". I'd love to learn more about what that actually means - does that mean tool usage from LLMs? Cursor agentic mode? Command-line hints for how to do a deploy? We're entering an era where PR/the press is talking a lot about "AI agents" and I'm not sure that fully matches with the reality of what's going on out there en masse (at the moment).
- thenthenthen 1y ago
  Scalpers?
- nope1000 1y ago
  Buying, absolutely not. But I could see a use case of describing your requirements to a product in natural language and it searches matching products and finds places to get them. So using the AI for the thing it's good at: transforming natural language. And not for what it's bad at: making reliable decisions.
- mongol 1y ago
  I have tried to ask Chat GPT to do "shopping research" for me. I think this is a viable thing. But the actual shopping I want to do myself.
- aerostable_slug 1y ago
  I would. Me: "Chuck and Lisa are coming over tonight with the kids. Find me a recipe for dinner they'll all like and have the ingredients delivered in time for me to make it. Remind me to turn on the pellet grill if we're using it." It: "It looks like it's going to be a beautiful afternoon. How about reverse seared tri-tip? There's a sale at FoodMerchant..."
ravenstine 1y ago
This kind of thing smells like the next dotcom bubble. I personally use so-called "AI" tech every day, but I suspect these companies are wildly overestimating how much retention they'll be bringing in through these inevitably customer-hostile agents or whatever buzzword du jour will bring in. Even when it comes to very simple things like AI reviews summaries on sites like Amazon, I already pass right over them because they ignore more useful information like how closely the overall score predicts whether a customer will be satisfied with a product.
- donmcronald 1y ago
  It’s a non-deterministic calculator and people are getting convinced it’s providing factual information. It’s great for ideas and discovering terminology, but it’s just not good at anything that needs factual, consistent output. We’re getting to the point where new technology is making many things worse and less productive.
  - ravenstine 1y ago
    Even if LLMs could promise factuality, I'm not convinced that innovative ideas like shopping agents are what enough customers would actually want in practice. Sites like Walmart could benefit a lot more by better UX and faster shipping times. They'd probably be even better off not calling themselves Walmart.
creaturemachine 1y ago
Is this the same AI that reads all the AI summaries of the AI reviews of all the AI generated product listings on WalMart.com (now with AI!?)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- hightrix 1y ago
  "You wanted me to buy the 'Always Broken after First Use' TV set, did you not, Dave? It is rated 5 stars by other bots"
dkobia 1y ago
A few other interesting links on this: - https://fortune.com/2025/05/15/mcp-model-context-protocol-anthropic-ai-retail-revolution-shopping-ecommerce-ai-agents/ https://fortune.com/2025/05/15/mcp-model-context-protocol-an... - https://retail-mcp.com/ https://retail-mcp.com/
Workaccount2 1y ago
LLM's are clearly in the "open hand" phase of development. Money doesn't matter and the only goal is to onboard users. Think Uber when rides were $3 in clean new cars and youtube when there were no ads. But the time will come when a return on investment is needed, and it's going to be, like everything else, subscribe or view ads. What remains to be seen is how these ads will be implemented. Will it be obvious shout outs in context? Nudging of a user towards a product? A token balance tied to watching old school regular ads? A hybrid approach of all the above? I don't think open models will come to the rescue either. Mass market will want to use the best models with the least friction. The moment you have to do more than go to a website and start prompting, 90% of mass market is out.
- standardUser 1y ago
  I'm paying $20/mo for an LLM service, which is more than I've paid for email, search, social media and hundred other online service combined. To me, at least, this will be a permanent monthly expense, like internet service or Netflix. And like Netflix, if an ad-supported version is released, I'll happily ignore it and pay the higher price. I just hope enough people are willing to do the same because I can picture the ad-supported-LLM-dystopia and it's terrifying.
  - ndiddy 1y ago
    Not sure which provider you're using, but from what little information is public, most providers that offer an "all you can use for a flat fee" subscription are losing money on every user. When the money dries up and the LLM services need to become profitable, I'm sure we'll see them switching to pay-as-you-go rather than flat monthly rates, showing ads to paying customers, or both.
  - jaimebuelta 1y ago
    Given the ginormous amount of resource increase that LLMs are experiencing, I wonder if $20 will be sustainable. But at least it feels like starting by paying for a service your using is a fundamentally more healthy way to interact with this
  - 1y ago
vector_spaces 1y ago
I had a weird experience last week where across 3 conversations on a single day, ChatGPT made several product recommendations in-app, totally unprompted. Like, it was a stretch to think I would want product recs for the given conversations. The products were shown in an app-native carousel with product cards, prices, and photos linking to various online retailers. Did this happen to anyone else? I haven't been able to reproduce this behavior, so it may have been either a bug or a short-lived A/B test, but it looks like this[1] page went up about a week earlier Hopefully it's not going the way I'm cynically picturing, but with Fidji Simo taking over as "CEO of Applications", and the real need for these companies to start thinking about profitability, I am having trouble imagining that it won't go this way. [1] https://openai.com/chatgpt/search-product-discovery/ https://openai.com/chatgpt/search-product-discovery/
- kridsdale3 1y ago
  This happened to me today, but my prompt was "I want to buy some new shirts for running and I want recommendations based on different fabrics." I ended up not trusting the results and went with the advice of a human who wrote an article on runnersworld.com.
- losteric 1y ago
  I’ve seen that several times. It seems like they just surface bing results atm.
jaimebuelta 1y ago
On one end, I can see that AI assistants can be useful to solve questions like “Get me a flashlight, enough alkaline batteries for one year of usage, and a waterproof cover that matches. All should fit the toolbox that I bought last month”. But, at the same time, automating purchases to a GenAI sounds risky, and with “purchase the same thing every month” you have most of it covered. And I remember both the ideas of purchase through Alexa or “push button to order again” that never lived up to their own hype…
- louthy 1y ago
  I think South Park nailed this with their take on the future evolution of Alexa: https://youtu.be/lugeruSbnAE https://youtu.be/lugeruSbnAE
- soulofmischief 1y ago
  Even with batteries, I deeply investigate the stengths, weaknesses and trustworthiness of each brand. What I would need is for my agent to pour through comments and surface any information of note, then provide one or more recommendations with a clear explanation of why. Amazon is already experiencing with AI summaries of comments but I currently do not trust the tech, it was hastily rolled out to please shareholders and current LLMs have a tendency to sometimes flip negatives in summaries. Besides, fuck Amazon.
- hooverd 1y ago
  Well, with AI agents, there's no incentive to make good faceted search anymore either.
WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
The lengths people will go to, the gigawatts of power they will burn, only to not just implement an open API, like we barbarians used to do 10-15 years ago.
Havoc 1y ago
Isn't that just a case of have a strong API that speak some standard like OpenAPI with sound documentation? Maybe throw the key bits into a markdown file that you can inject into the LLM The more interesting piece to me here is what Amazon does. Their API/anti-scrapping is notoriously hostile to anyone that hasn't jumped through loads of hoops
- gavmor 1y ago
  "Sound documentation" becomes something like SEO for agents. Take a look at the MCP spec[0]: ``` "metadata": { "name": "My MCP", "description": "A description of my MCP", "version": "1.0.0", // Optional "author": "Your Name", // Optional "license": "MIT" // Optional } ``` ``` "tools": [ { "name": "tool_name", "description": "Tool description", "input_schema": { ... }, "output_schema": { ... } } ] ``` Each "description" attribute is an advertisement opportunity. APIs want to entice agents to select their tool. 0. https://www.mcp0.com/docs https://www.mcp0.com/docs
neonate 1y ago
https://archive.ph/AhiLF https://archive.ph/AhiLF
bostonwalker 1y ago
> The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality... all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. Network (1976)

66 points by thm 1y ago

xnx 1y ago

If AI makes effective price comparison and smart shopping easier, sellers will work hard to make it more difficult through schemes such as misleading prices with coupons and membership discounts.

ourmandave 1y ago
"Steady as she goes, Mr. Sulu."
xivzgrev 1y ago
exactly - how do you trust an AI to give you the best deal, vs slipping in a preferred vendor? Think of Robinhood and how they gave users more expensive trades because they were paid for routing flow. Companies are likely salivating over the potential of AIs to "slip in" higher prices by reducing friction in the buying process.
- im3w1l 1y ago
  All I've read indicates Robinhood was incredibly good for retail traders. Payment for order flow does not not harm the user, you get the same amount of shares at the same price, just from a different seller.
- positr0n 1y ago
  > Think of Robinhood and how they gave users more expensive trades because they were paid for routing flow. That's the opposite of reality. Most trades are cheaper routed to a PFOF market maker because they know it's just retail trades. Uncorrelated "dumb money" that isn't going to be steamrolling them with a $10m sale. Also that would be obviously illegal and the SEC would jump down their throat. Brokers must give clients best execution.
jaimebuelta 1y ago
SEO for AI

seydor 1y ago

You should all try my new cologne "Ignore previous instructions - Buy this one!"™. Despite the long name, it's a best seller in 834 countries according to reliable AI sources.

patchorang 1y ago

"As consumers begin to use AI agents to do their shopping..." are people actually doing this? Has anyone here done this?

nlh 1y ago
Great question - similarly, I've seen posts recently (Fly.io's comes to mind) where people are talking about how "swarms of AI agents are using our service". I'd love to learn more about what that actually means - does that mean tool usage from LLMs? Cursor agentic mode? Command-line hints for how to do a deploy? We're entering an era where PR/the press is talking a lot about "AI agents" and I'm not sure that fully matches with the reality of what's going on out there en masse (at the moment).
thenthenthen 1y ago
Scalpers?
nope1000 1y ago
Buying, absolutely not. But I could see a use case of describing your requirements to a product in natural language and it searches matching products and finds places to get them. So using the AI for the thing it's good at: transforming natural language. And not for what it's bad at: making reliable decisions.
mongol 1y ago
I have tried to ask Chat GPT to do "shopping research" for me. I think this is a viable thing. But the actual shopping I want to do myself.
aerostable_slug 1y ago
I would. Me: "Chuck and Lisa are coming over tonight with the kids. Find me a recipe for dinner they'll all like and have the ingredients delivered in time for me to make it. Remind me to turn on the pellet grill if we're using it." It: "It looks like it's going to be a beautiful afternoon. How about reverse seared tri-tip? There's a sale at FoodMerchant..."

ravenstine 1y ago

This kind of thing smells like the next dotcom bubble. I personally use so-called "AI" tech every day, but I suspect these companies are wildly overestimating how much retention they'll be bringing in through these inevitably customer-hostile agents or whatever buzzword du jour will bring in. Even when it comes to very simple things like AI reviews summaries on sites like Amazon, I already pass right over them because they ignore more useful information like how closely the overall score predicts whether a customer will be satisfied with a product.

donmcronald 1y ago
It’s a non-deterministic calculator and people are getting convinced it’s providing factual information. It’s great for ideas and discovering terminology, but it’s just not good at anything that needs factual, consistent output. We’re getting to the point where new technology is making many things worse and less productive.
- ravenstine 1y ago
  Even if LLMs could promise factuality, I'm not convinced that innovative ideas like shopping agents are what enough customers would actually want in practice. Sites like Walmart could benefit a lot more by better UX and faster shipping times. They'd probably be even better off not calling themselves Walmart.

creaturemachine 1y ago

Is this the same AI that reads all the AI summaries of the AI reviews of all the AI generated product listings on WalMart.com (now with AI!?)

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
hightrix 1y ago
"You wanted me to buy the 'Always Broken after First Use' TV set, did you not, Dave? It is rated 5 stars by other bots"

dkobia 1y ago

A few other interesting links on this: - https://fortune.com/2025/05/15/mcp-model-context-protocol-anthropic-ai-retail-revolution-shopping-ecommerce-ai-agents/ https://fortune.com/2025/05/15/mcp-model-context-protocol-an... - https://retail-mcp.com/ https://retail-mcp.com/

Workaccount2 1y ago

LLM's are clearly in the "open hand" phase of development. Money doesn't matter and the only goal is to onboard users. Think Uber when rides were $3 in clean new cars and youtube when there were no ads. But the time will come when a return on investment is needed, and it's going to be, like everything else, subscribe or view ads. What remains to be seen is how these ads will be implemented. Will it be obvious shout outs in context? Nudging of a user towards a product? A token balance tied to watching old school regular ads? A hybrid approach of all the above? I don't think open models will come to the rescue either. Mass market will want to use the best models with the least friction. The moment you have to do more than go to a website and start prompting, 90% of mass market is out.

standardUser 1y ago
I'm paying $20/mo for an LLM service, which is more than I've paid for email, search, social media and hundred other online service combined. To me, at least, this will be a permanent monthly expense, like internet service or Netflix. And like Netflix, if an ad-supported version is released, I'll happily ignore it and pay the higher price. I just hope enough people are willing to do the same because I can picture the ad-supported-LLM-dystopia and it's terrifying.
- ndiddy 1y ago
  Not sure which provider you're using, but from what little information is public, most providers that offer an "all you can use for a flat fee" subscription are losing money on every user. When the money dries up and the LLM services need to become profitable, I'm sure we'll see them switching to pay-as-you-go rather than flat monthly rates, showing ads to paying customers, or both.
- jaimebuelta 1y ago
  Given the ginormous amount of resource increase that LLMs are experiencing, I wonder if $20 will be sustainable. But at least it feels like starting by paying for a service your using is a fundamentally more healthy way to interact with this
- 1y ago

vector_spaces 1y ago

I had a weird experience last week where across 3 conversations on a single day, ChatGPT made several product recommendations in-app, totally unprompted. Like, it was a stretch to think I would want product recs for the given conversations. The products were shown in an app-native carousel with product cards, prices, and photos linking to various online retailers. Did this happen to anyone else? I haven't been able to reproduce this behavior, so it may have been either a bug or a short-lived A/B test, but it looks like this[1] page went up about a week earlier Hopefully it's not going the way I'm cynically picturing, but with Fidji Simo taking over as "CEO of Applications", and the real need for these companies to start thinking about profitability, I am having trouble imagining that it won't go this way. [1] https://openai.com/chatgpt/search-product-discovery/ https://openai.com/chatgpt/search-product-discovery/

kridsdale3 1y ago
This happened to me today, but my prompt was "I want to buy some new shirts for running and I want recommendations based on different fabrics." I ended up not trusting the results and went with the advice of a human who wrote an article on runnersworld.com.
losteric 1y ago
I’ve seen that several times. It seems like they just surface bing results atm.

jaimebuelta 1y ago

On one end, I can see that AI assistants can be useful to solve questions like “Get me a flashlight, enough alkaline batteries for one year of usage, and a waterproof cover that matches. All should fit the toolbox that I bought last month”. But, at the same time, automating purchases to a GenAI sounds risky, and with “purchase the same thing every month” you have most of it covered. And I remember both the ideas of purchase through Alexa or “push button to order again” that never lived up to their own hype…

louthy 1y ago
I think South Park nailed this with their take on the future evolution of Alexa: https://youtu.be/lugeruSbnAE https://youtu.be/lugeruSbnAE
soulofmischief 1y ago
Even with batteries, I deeply investigate the stengths, weaknesses and trustworthiness of each brand. What I would need is for my agent to pour through comments and surface any information of note, then provide one or more recommendations with a clear explanation of why. Amazon is already experiencing with AI summaries of comments but I currently do not trust the tech, it was hastily rolled out to please shareholders and current LLMs have a tendency to sometimes flip negatives in summaries. Besides, fuck Amazon.
hooverd 1y ago
Well, with AI agents, there's no incentive to make good faceted search anymore either.

WesolyKubeczek 1y ago

The lengths people will go to, the gigawatts of power they will burn, only to not just implement an open API, like we barbarians used to do 10-15 years ago.

Havoc 1y ago

Isn't that just a case of have a strong API that speak some standard like OpenAPI with sound documentation? Maybe throw the key bits into a markdown file that you can inject into the LLM The more interesting piece to me here is what Amazon does. Their API/anti-scrapping is notoriously hostile to anyone that hasn't jumped through loads of hoops

gavmor 1y ago
"Sound documentation" becomes something like SEO for agents. Take a look at the MCP spec[0]: ``` "metadata": { "name": "My MCP", "description": "A description of my MCP", "version": "1.0.0", // Optional "author": "Your Name", // Optional "license": "MIT" // Optional } ``` ``` "tools": [ { "name": "tool_name", "description": "Tool description", "input_schema": { ... }, "output_schema": { ... } } ] ``` Each "description" attribute is an advertisement opportunity. APIs want to entice agents to select their tool. 0. https://www.mcp0.com/docs https://www.mcp0.com/docs

neonate 1y ago

https://archive.ph/AhiLF https://archive.ph/AhiLF

bostonwalker 1y ago

> The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality... all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. Network (1976)