You Won’t Be Able to Offload Your Holiday Shopping to AI Agents Anytime Soon

Social commerce—or shopping through platforms like TikTok and Instagram—hasn’t been a smash hit in the US, in part due to ongoing distrust of tech giants among consumers and big retailers. To help ensure AI initiatives don’t encounter similar resistance, major payment processors such as Visa and software startups like New Generation, which helps stores develop or partner with chatbots, are trying to broker technical compromises with retail partners. “We do think that a service provider like us will be faster to earn the trust of retailers, which is pretty important,” says New Generation CEO Adam Behrens.

Retailers want in because chatbots have become a crucial tool for consumers researching and validating purchases. Partnerships between AI and ecommerce companies could ensure that chatbots not only present accurate product information, but also consume fewer computing resources when executing online orders. All of that could boost profits for both sides—if they can come to terms.

In one of the frankest comments on agentic shopping made by a top tech boss, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently criticized how agentic shopping currently works on other platforms. “I would say the customer experience is not good,” Jassy said on an earnings call last month. “There’s no personalization. There’s no shopping history. The delivery estimates are frequently wrong. The prices are often wrong. We have got to find a way to make the customer experience better and have the right exchange of value. ”

A task as simple as adding eggs to an Amazon cart took the Opera browser’s AI agent 45 seconds in a WIRED test this month; manually doing so on Amazon’s shopping app took a third of the time.

Opera has been inviting potential partners to workshops to weigh in on security and design choices. “If our agent doesn’t work with the biggest websites people go to, it will be a suboptimal experience,” says Per Wetterdal, an executive vice president who leads Opera’s commercial partnerships. “No one benefits if [a purchase] is ending up at the wrong place or in the wrong quantity.”

Deal Talks

As is often the case in the tech industry, money and data are central to the negotiations. With agentic shopping, the financial exchange could be straightforward. AI companies including Opera want a cut of sales for facilitating purchases. “If we do something that adds incrementality, it’s very fair to be compensated for that,” Wetterdal says. OpenAI is showing a path forward by collecting what it describes as “a small fee” from partners such as Etsy for Instant Checkout purchases.

But data sharing may be more complicated. Retailers guard pricing and availability data, as well as customer information, to maintain an edge over competitors. AI companies want to protect conversation histories to preserve the feeling of intimacy that chatbots can deliver. But chatbots require real-time information to fulfill user requests, and retail brands prefer greater context to develop relationships with shoppers.