8 ms·

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 m

• jkrom3 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
• majkinetor 1y ago
  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.
• dumbfounder 1y ago
  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.
  • juxtaposicion 1y ago
    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 https://popgot.com/vitamin-d3)
    • mh- 1y ago
      Those "refine your results" buttons is clever UX. I like the Choose your own adventure feel to it. Nicely done.
  • everdrive 1y ago
    >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)
    • dumbfounder 1y ago
      Yes, if it’s bad it will do that. I can see a path to it being good.
    • mh- 1y ago
      Supposing I accept that's a likely outcome, it's exactly the same thing that would have happened if a typical human shopper searched for Vitamin D and picked the top result, right? The cynicism on these topics is getting exhausting.
      • disgruntledphd2 1y ago
        > Supposing I accept that's a likely outcome, it's exactly the same thing that would have happened if a typical human shopper searched for Vitamin D and picked the top result, right? Yeah sure, but humans (normally) only fall for a particular scam once. Because LLMs have no memory, they can scale these scams much more effectively!
• bongodongobob 1y ago
  Procurement for large companies. An entire world exists outside your home.
• chasd00 1y ago
  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.
  • jayd16 1y ago
    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.
    • sebastiennight 1y ago
      It seems trivial to edit the "[Our model] can make mistakes. Double-check the answers" footer to "[Our model] can make mistakes. Double-check the answers. May insert affiliate links which pay us commission." And I'm speaking as someone building an AI agent. Zero plans of doing this because we have a completely different business model, but still, it wouldn't be the biggest most expensive business decision to make.
  • rsynnott 1y ago
    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.)
• anal_reactor 1y ago
  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.
  • nemomarx 1y ago
    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?
    • ewhanley 1y ago
      That's sort of the tradeoff, though. You get the convenience of having tp show up without having to to through the steps of shopping for it. Except in extreme cases, it seems likely your roommate will pick something that is effectively a commodity at a reasonable price. If you want granular control over brand, features, and pricing, you'll have to pay for it in time and/or money.
  • Paradigma11 1y ago
    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.
    • LtWorf 1y ago
      > why would you use a nondeterministic LLM for that? To trick investors that they are going to get their money back and some more I presume.
• a_c_s 1y ago
  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.
• lynndotpy 1y ago
  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."
  • kjok 1y ago
    > 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).
  • JKCalhoun 1y ago
    I want an AI agent that returns stuff that my other AI agent bought.
    • BizarroLand 1y ago
      I have an AI agent that can make that AI agent for you for $19.95/month or $17.95 with our annual pass
      • htrp 1y ago
        You mean 179.50 for the annual pass?
• wouldbecouldbe 1y ago
  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.
• layer8 1y ago
  It’s what wealthy people use human assistants for. If AI could do it as reliably, people would use that.
  • jsheard 1y ago
    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.
    • layer8 1y ago
      I agree that we don’t seem to be anywhere close that level of reliability.
  • tsimionescu 1y ago
    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.
    • Windchaser 1y ago
      Doesn't have to be "wealthy". Like, I should be able to tell Alexa "put in an order for a large Dominoes pizza with pepperoni. Tell them to deliver it in 2 hours".
• jordanb 1y ago
  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.
  • xnx 1y ago
    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.
  • s1mplicissimus 1y ago
    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
    • feoren 1y ago
      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.
    • mindslight 1y ago
      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.
• xenotux 1y ago
  > 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.
  • AlexandrB 1y ago
    > 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.
    • xenotux 1y ago
      You can say that about 99% of the tech that people use today. Windows and MacOS don't serve you. Your browser doesn't serve you. Heck, Hacker News doesn't serve you - it serves a bunch of VCs! But the reality is that most of the time, this is not an adversarial relationship; and when it is, we see it as an acceptable trade-off ("ok, so I get all this stuff for free, and in exchange, maybe I buy socks from a different company because of the ads"). I'm not saying it's an ideal state or that there are no hidden and more serious trade-offs, but I don't think that what you're saying is a particularly compelling point for the average user.
      • supriyo-biswas 1y ago
        Many people on this forum might agree with the statements that Windows (increasing ads, tracking and bloat) and your browser not serving you (Chrome Manifest V3, etc.) Adversarial relationships can and will happen given the leverage and benefits; one only need to look at streaming services where some companies have introduced low-tier plans that is paid for but also has ads.
• singleshot_ 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
    • mh- 1y ago
      I believe half of the comments here are just dumping on AI-related ideas because they see it as their duty to counter the hyperbolic claims about capabilities being tossed around. I enjoy reading both sides of the argument when the arguments make sense. This is something else.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • mountainb 1y ago
      I think it has more to do with the various new meanings that have been attached to the word "agent" and the concept of "agency" by software and some parts of west coast culture. Those concepts do not really have much to do with the law of agency. Lawyers don't come up with good ideas; their role is to explain why your good ideas are illegal. There's a good argument that AI agents cannot exercise legal agency. At the end of the day, corporations and partnerships are just piles of "natural persons" (you know, the type that mostly has two hands, two feet, a head, etc.). The fact that corporate persons can have agency relationships does not necessarily mean that hypothetical computer persons can have agency relationships for this reason.
      • otterley 1y ago
• takinola 1y ago
  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.
  • LtWorf 1y ago
    There is a 100% chance that companies paying a fee to the owner of the agent will be picked by the agents.
  • mh- 1y ago
    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.
• lubujackson 1y ago
  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.
• jayd16 1y ago
  You'd expect a human assistant to handle the task fine. People buying into the hype would reasonably expect the AI to handle it.
• lukan 1y ago
  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.
• darepublic 1y ago
  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
• OkayPhysicist 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    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.
    • throwway120385 1y ago
      Who follows recipes to produce every meal that they eat, anyway? I just look in the fridge, select some vegetables and a protein, and bang that together into something edible using spices or condiments most nights. But I'm not going to outsource that to my fridge because I'm a lot faster at thinking through all of that then my fridge would be. I do it entirely without thinking.
  • strange_quark 1y ago
    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.
• inerte 1y ago
  I agree with you but there are levels of purchase. This article explains it well https://a16z.com/ai-x-commerce/ 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 1y ago
    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.
• guywithahat 1y ago
  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.
• GuB-42 1y ago
  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.
• justcallmejm 1y ago
  Consumers don’t need to want it; VCs just need to imagine making money off it.
• beefnugs 1y ago
  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
• nmcfarl 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > an antigenic browser Sounds very prone to injection problems
• rsynnott 1y ago
  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.