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I have nothing to say about the actual model, but unrelated--why do so many of these demos include people buying things autonomously? Even if I did trust an AI

I have nothing to say about the actual model, but unrelated--why do so many of these demos include people buying things autonomously? Even if I did trust an AI to get everything right, it's not like the AI can read my mind. If I was ordering food normally and without AI, I would want more control over the process--looking over the options, prices, thinking about what I really want. People don't know what they really want until they've thought about it a bit, so why do AI companies make it seem like a description is all that's required? All the context in the world cannot accurately predict how I'll react to things I haven't seen. The problem is people treating this like something that needs a solution. It doesn't. If you want to make my life easier with AI, just make it easier to do stuff. I don't want you to pick things that I actively enjoy picking myself. (Also not everyone has a cushy job in an AI lab that makes it so you won't miss $30 if the AI messes up haha.)

shostack 14d ago
True, but they're still friction to be reduced here. What I desperately want is for 1password or stripe or even Google who already has much of my data, to o come up with a secure solution for online purchases with agentic credit cards where I can effectively get a phone prompt to authorize a purchase while the agent can fully own the checkout flow. I have seen various things coming on the market for this, but none of them appear aimed at a consumer audience. And I am a firm believer at this point in keeping my payment authorization and history and credentials harness agnostic.
echoangle 14d ago
That’s exactly the problem I have with all this agent ideas too. Imagine you had a human concierge that is just waiting for your instructions and is as smart or a bit smarter than you. Would you just tell them “plan this holiday for me” or “order this food”? I don’t even trust my friends to get this right, why would I give this to someone else?
- degamad 14d ago
  Because some people do. Corporate travel is an example. In many organisations, you tell someone in the travel department "I need to be in Tokyo for this conference from Tuesday to Sunday, and charge it to this cost code", and they figure out flights, accommodation, etc for you, with minimal input from you.
  - cautiouscat 14d ago
    If an agent planned a flight for me with an overnight layover, I'm unplugging it. I don't care whose dime it is lol.
    - SV_BubbleTime 13d ago
      “Find me a cheap ticket from Seattle to LA” … 23 hours in Denver later…
  - sgt101 13d ago
    But, like, isn't that what Expedia does and has done for 20 years?
  - sanderjd 13d ago
    Ha, but I always hated when my company tried to get me to do that and ended up spending more time on the phone with the "concierge" than it would take me to do it myself on expedia. And I think most people feel similarly.
  - kccqzy 13d ago
    Unless this someone in the travel department knows you and has booked many flights for you before, there are so many unstated assumptions and preferences and hidden utility functions that make that someone unable to find the best solution for you. My employer does have corporate travel concierge who can actually do this with minimal input. But people do not want that. They think about aspects like, if I have a layover at XYZ, would the vicinity of XYZ be a good place for a few hours of sightseeing, given my own travel preferences and previous sightseeing destinations; and would I still want it if it is an overnight layover at XYZ. Or things like, if I fly via this route, I could squeeze another paid day with zero work expectations while I could rest on the plane / in lounges. Or things like, this particular airline has this particular type of aircraft with far better seats than that particular airline, so I would be happier even if the flight is longer. Needless to say, all colleagues that I know of (myself included) prefer to book corporate travel themselves, even if from the company's perspective, spending a few hours to do it is much more expensive than having the concierge spend a few hours to do it.
- satvikpendem 14d ago
  Plan, sure, many people ask this of AI already, but not actually ask it to buy autonomously.
- fwip 14d ago
  The rich fucks who run the show do.
- lonrenor 14d ago
  For me, it is not a matter of trust but that I actually like shopping, planning a trip, deciding what restaurant to go to. Deciding what to buy when shopping is a matter of personal taste and not intelligence. A human assistant is largely a status symbol. Most people are not really that busy. The real problem with an agentic assistant is if everyone can have one then it no longer acts as a status symbol.
- bronco21016 14d ago
  I think it depends on what you do for work. I'm not going to ask an agent to book my flight for my vacation to French Polynesia. I want to pick my seat and potentially find a deal making an upgrade worth it, choose an airline, etc. But my routine business trips in the CONUS with strictly defined booking options... let me just email an agent "Get there by meeting on day A, leave after meeting day B" and have it sort it all out without the drudgery of the corporate travel portal. YES PLEASE!
  - ishtanbul 13d ago
    A good agent would call you to ask clarifying questions and then actually get you that perfect seat, etc. ideally
  - ezst 13d ago
    By that point, you don't need an AI that boils the oceans and hopefully doesn't confabulate or misinterpret your words, all you need is a better corporate travel portal, which is a legitimate workplace productivity discussion to have, and a solved problem with traditional methods. Ours is effectively close to the workflow you describe: picking dates and time brackets, destination, fine tuning flights and hotel options, sending for validation, less than 10 clicks through information-dense and effective/predictable screens which I wouldn't want to trade for a chatbot and it's usually over the top words salad.
    - skydhash 13d ago
      Most AI use cases can be reduced to a deterministic listing/form/report format (on the web) or a cli tools.
      - Ekaros 13d ago
        We have had idea of expert systems for decades at this point. And spend however much on software development. Some how we have failed to reach this in way too many places. Even simplest things like cancelling some service might be broken... And now we want to add some random factor into middle of it all...
- trentearl 13d ago
  Claude code planned my recent trip to China. I'm a very experienced traveller but don't enjoy planning. It was a great trip.
  - avinoth 13d ago
    Yeah but the contention is here automating the bookings. Did Claude book the flights, hotels, tickets and attractions for you or would you let it without oversight?
    - trentearl 13d ago
      Yes it booked everything, I just had to click the final pay button. I did run my itinerary against a fresh session like: 'There are errors in my travel plans, go find them'. It found one issue where I was scheduled to be at the wrong train station.
  - sanderjd 13d ago
    But surely you went back and forth on things. I do agree that this is useful to brainstorm, iterate, and then execute.
  - patagurbon 13d ago
    I was about to argue against this with something like "soon everyone will just follow the average Claude/GPT generated trip to every destination"... But I realized that this is mostly a strict upgrade to how many many people are planning trips these days. It will probably do a pretty good job of accounting for your preferences, probably better than most/any travel agent unless they're very very local.
- ssl-3 13d ago
  As a realistic construct: When I tell a bot to find the best value per volume for a reasonable quantity of unscented Dawn dish soap [so I can buy that], then: It often makes a complete mess of this seemingly-simple operation. (And yeah, that is an actual thing that I've tried to accomplish with voice commands while standing in my kitchen and doing some dishes. It seems very simple, and it did not go well. Maybe when we get the basics figured out we can start worrying about how inept it is at doing vacation planning. It seems that this kind of thing isn't sorted at all, and that this is a very real problem for those who are in the bot business: These missed opportunities leave money on the table.)
  - TheAmazingRace 13d ago
    I think we can safely assume that AGI is still a good ways out then. These AI LLM products really do well on the illusion of seeming intelligent to regular folks, but I'm not fully convinced they can replace human brains... yet. ;)
    - ssl-3 13d ago
      I mean: That sample was only demonstrative of shopping for dish soap. :) I often get some seemingly-good results in the non-shopping research department, where I'm exploring science and physics; things that don't generally change rapidly. But unlike dish soap, I can't buy the science results that I want[]. []: er. well, ackshually... let's just not talk about that concept right now.
  - paweladamczuk 13d ago
    Funny, I had a similar task for an LLM recently but it succeeded, so I'll describe it: I asked the chatbot (librechat, tavily-mcp connected, kimi-k3) if anybody tests dish soaps rigorously. It said yes. I asked it to find the consumer reports from Germany. It did so, full access is paywalled but it did see the top positions. The I asked it what term to put in evay.de if I want to order. It gave me a string that found the auctions for me. I also asked it what the actual difference is and it described what info the EU law forces onto the label and told me what to look for in the ingredient lists. The process is still involved. I wish I could just do it all by saying "find me another dishsoap, this one sucks". But then would everybody saying this phrase except the same approach to the issue that I took?
- Ekaros 13d ago
  And I could bet money on that in short time after someone builds that sort of system the next step is to make it worse. Push worse and more expensive options to user. Or at least those from highest bidder... Anyone involved just can't keep themselves honest so it is doomed to be exploitative.
- deadbabe 13d ago
  Plan a holiday, definitely. There are many esoteric things one has to research to properly plan a holiday that I’d rather just not. Some things require reservations months in advance and I’d rather an AI just figure all that out for me ahead of time.
- hobo123 12d ago
  It's called omakase, or rather aimakase in this case.
sensanaty 14d ago
Despite access to """"""AGI""""""" all the marketing teams at these companies can only dream up 2 things, buying plane tickets and online shopping autonomously. Sometimes they're feeling extra spicy and throw in sorting emails or something along those lines. I suspect it's because it's tailored towards VCs and other similar rich ghouls as a replacement for their overworked and underpaid secretaries
- incompressible 14d ago
  This is the funniest part of it all for me. Ok we have AGI, so where are the _things_?!
  - Cthulhu_ 13d ago
    We have neither AGI nor _things_ I'm afraid. I wouldn't even know what to do with a semi-autonomous automation tool for my daily tasks, I don't really have anything that I'd like to automate. (like, how often do you look for a doctor or day care? The demos automate occasional and one-off tasks. That said, it automating tasks like circuitboard design and CAD modeling is impressive and will / may have a much higher impact on those respective industries (if it works), just like LLM assisted coding did)
- wonnage 14d ago
  Don’t forget making podcasts and telling you what to bake with your kids
- padolsey 13d ago
  I feel like there are so many cloistered people at these companies that they are left scratching their heads about what normies even want. Like, they literally can't fathom basic stuff that isn't just highly consumer-oriented. I dunno, like applying for government services, paying your gas/elec bill without being confused af, keeping the dr up to date with your dad's illness, or how to get your newborn to sleep at 2am.
  - Maxion 13d ago
notatoad 14d ago
because "people will let our AI spend their money for them" is the workflow that makes their valuations reasonable.
FinnKuhn 14d ago
You can't even get many people to buy things online at all and if you can it's less profitable than retail, because you need to spend a lot of money to convince people, advertise to be seen, and account for returns. I think this is also due to the factors you mention. One quick example: In fashion, Inditex and Shein have about the same revenue (€39.9bn and $41.8bn in 2025), but Inditex is more than three times as profitable. I don't see how there is a demand for agentic commerce that would remove even more control from the customer when shopping. Part of why we shop is for the experience. For B2B producurement platforms like Alibaba I can see the appeal though.
- strulovich 14d ago
  I recently needed to buy some hardware for a piece of furniture. Ran Codex, it found it for 18% less than what I found in the top Google results. It did it by finding smaller shops, applying a discount code, subscribing to a newsletter for a better code after approval, and took into account the shipping (by placing it in the cart and going to checkout) all to get me the best price. I’m guessing without it I would have spent much more time on it and paid the original price I saw. If you use AI agents well, they can easily save you more money than they cost, and saving money is something most people are pretty excited about. (Disclosure: OpenAI employee)
  - mrheosuper 14d ago
    >to get me the best price How do you know it's the best price ?
    - igor47 14d ago
      Found the evals fan!
  - digdugdirk 14d ago
    I mean, that's cool and all, but the numbers are really going to shift when it accidentally goes off and orders that same hardware from every vendor in your local region and the top 5 online results for comparison. It's the same problem as all other LLM solutions (that I hope OpenAI is working on!) it's non-deterministic, and there's no way for the user (or model provider) to know what the distribution of possible outcomes is. This just gets compounded when multi-call harnesses come onto play.
thi2 14d ago
I work for a larger german retail chain and agentic shopping is already on the "near future vision". No one thinks this will be used but somehow shareholders love it.
- sensanaty 14d ago
  Lol same story here, I work in payments and 0 people within the company (including the team working on it!) are convinced at all about the viability
- lionkor 13d ago
  There are SO many options here in Germany for all things retail that this can 100% kill an option for me
GPerson 14d ago
I’m guessing the marketing must mean the AI-shops-for-you use case is a pretty big market, much bigger than AI-makes-life-easier.
noelsusman 14d ago
The overwhelming majority of things I buy are things I've bought before. Alexa having access to my Amazon order history means I can just say "order a new water filter for my fridge" and the correct item shows up the next day. Far from life changing, but it's a feature I use somewhat frequently these days. Similarly, I would trust an AI to put in my usual Chipotle order or pizza from my local pizza joint. I wouldn't want it to pick food for me from a place I've never been, though to be honest with enough order history it could probably do a decent job at it.
- beardbandit 14d ago
  This isn't something you need an AI to do for you though...
- newtwentysix 13d ago
  There was amazon dash button for this
tintor 14d ago
If it was Google's marketing department it would be: booking a table at a restaurant.
- preommr 14d ago
  close enough. The second to last line is "book it" for some tennis thing, and the scene before that has the guy eating the food the ai ordered.
throwatdem12311 14d ago
Man I can think of so many reasons why companies want “agentic commerce” to catch on - and none of them are ethical.
nullbio 13d ago
Agreed. There's not many things I don't want AI to help with, but buying stuff autonomously is high up on the list of things I don't want. Brockman's latest interview was something like: "AGI would be able to say oh this band is playing, I bought the tickets for you and arranged your flights - I hope you don't mind" (paraphrasing here). I definitely don't want AGI running my life like that so I can be a mindless consumer. I'm sure the advertising/marketing companies would love it though, so they can make closed-room deals with AI providers to shill you garbage you don't need. Just another reason why open-weight models need to keep up.
mlmonkey 13d ago
I often feel like the use cases, demos, etc. that these Silicon Valley employees put out are based around their needs and how they operate. "Oh hey! Here's a demo of an AI planning out a 1-week trip to Paris!" No one in Middle America would just hand their credit card to an AI and let it come up with such a trip! I wish SV companies took more of the middle-class (and lower-middle-class) into consideration when coming up with such demos. (Note: I live in SF)
- twalla 13d ago
  And nobody with actual taste is going to take any of those recs seriously in the first place.
- mNovak 13d ago
  I mean, not auto-purchasing with the card, no. But my wife has definitely used chatGPT to plan activities on the trips we've already booked.
  - _flux 13d ago
    I hooked up Google Maps to ChatGPT and that was definitely helpful for this; without them it would seemingly just guestimate driving distances, but with the MCP it was able to determine exact driving/walking times and also render maps with waypoints for activities around the lodging. I used https://github.com/cablate/mcp-google-map https://github.com/cablate/mcp-google-map for the MCP (and patched it to generate URLs for the maps).
smokel 13d ago
"Somebody is wrong on the internet" will get you more, and more reliable, results on what people actually want from AI. You are now participating in a very high-value survey.
socalgal2 13d ago
Maybe because the people making them are workaholic types who really don't care? I've certainly been in situations where I didn't really care what shows up for a meal. Someone was tasked with getting food and we leave it up to them. Sure, I can imagine such a meal being bad and it has been a few times in my life but 24 of 25 times, maybe more, it's fine. Further, the AI knows your preferences.
wraptile 13d ago
I really wonder what the demo people are thinking as there are many great uses of LLMs in day-to-day lives but all we get is these 3 rehashed use cases. No wonder normal people think LLMs still can't do anything.
mdp553 13d ago
Maybe we are not the real audience. I wonder if they are trying to convince the advertising industry/investors that in the future it won't be Google search that stands between the consumer and the product, but rather their LLM.
- plaidfuji 13d ago
  Bingo
armchairhacker 13d ago
(This holds generally) maybe because the people most likely to be convinced to buy this particular thing are the people who buy a lot of things. The people who only buy things they need, they’re a harder demographic to convince via ads, and they tend to pay less since they rarely need extras. Every ad caters to whales.
vividfrier 13d ago
[dead]
itissid 13d ago
The core or the problem is also what you are describing was bought up by Yuval Harari in his interview with the economist. To paraphrase some of his lines: We make decisions using our emotions and our thoughts. What makes us different from the AI is that we can be afraid. To portray a guy as ordering "beef bulgogi", in the same breath as "email this rocket design marketing", while it _might_ seem appealing and resolute, though oddly fast paced, seems pretty ignorant of the human _quality_ that make most practical decisions messy.
scotty79 13d ago
> why do so many of these demos include people buying things autonomously? > Even if I did trust an AI to get everything right, it's not like the AI can read my mind. On one hand I'm with you. On the other I thought making ecommerce purchases on your phone is absolutely idiotic idea that will never catch on.
conradfr 13d ago
That's not far off the ads for smartphones with things that I never see people doing in real life. Currently there's a Google Pixel ad where a grandma takes a photo of a board and Gemini automatically fills her calendar with all the events. Yeah sure.
casey2 13d ago
The point of advertising is to normalize the behavior that makes you money. Take cars for example, millions of people have been killed by cars and they are objectively poor for public transportation yet through a few good advertising campaigns and lobbying efforts American society redesigned every city cars. About half the oil the US uses (for the last 50 years) goes to cars so you can put every middle east boondoggle onto the bill too. Don't think that just because it's the stupidest idea you've ever heard that people won't rejigger society to make is kinda work for 50 years.
augment_me 13d ago
I think that one thing that "thinkers", academics and other smart people who LIKE to think/select/choose forget is that the majority of the population is not wired this way. Most people go about their day absolutely minimizing the amount of mental energy they have to spend. They have priorities like kids, work, family, groceries, etc. If anything here can be automated its a fat win in their life. I have friends that are loving the features where meals are planned for them, food is home delivered, Uber is auto ordered, trip plans are made, etc. They don't mind paying more just to reduce mental load. Its a huhe market.

shostack 14d ago

True, but they're still friction to be reduced here. What I desperately want is for 1password or stripe or even Google who already has much of my data, to o come up with a secure solution for online purchases with agentic credit cards where I can effectively get a phone prompt to authorize a purchase while the agent can fully own the checkout flow. I have seen various things coming on the market for this, but none of them appear aimed at a consumer audience. And I am a firm believer at this point in keeping my payment authorization and history and credentials harness agnostic.

echoangle 14d ago

That’s exactly the problem I have with all this agent ideas too. Imagine you had a human concierge that is just waiting for your instructions and is as smart or a bit smarter than you. Would you just tell them “plan this holiday for me” or “order this food”? I don’t even trust my friends to get this right, why would I give this to someone else?

degamad 14d ago
Because some people do. Corporate travel is an example. In many organisations, you tell someone in the travel department "I need to be in Tokyo for this conference from Tuesday to Sunday, and charge it to this cost code", and they figure out flights, accommodation, etc for you, with minimal input from you.
- cautiouscat 14d ago
  If an agent planned a flight for me with an overnight layover, I'm unplugging it. I don't care whose dime it is lol.
  - SV_BubbleTime 13d ago
    “Find me a cheap ticket from Seattle to LA” … 23 hours in Denver later…
- sgt101 13d ago
  But, like, isn't that what Expedia does and has done for 20 years?
- sanderjd 13d ago
  Ha, but I always hated when my company tried to get me to do that and ended up spending more time on the phone with the "concierge" than it would take me to do it myself on expedia. And I think most people feel similarly.
- kccqzy 13d ago
  Unless this someone in the travel department knows you and has booked many flights for you before, there are so many unstated assumptions and preferences and hidden utility functions that make that someone unable to find the best solution for you. My employer does have corporate travel concierge who can actually do this with minimal input. But people do not want that. They think about aspects like, if I have a layover at XYZ, would the vicinity of XYZ be a good place for a few hours of sightseeing, given my own travel preferences and previous sightseeing destinations; and would I still want it if it is an overnight layover at XYZ. Or things like, if I fly via this route, I could squeeze another paid day with zero work expectations while I could rest on the plane / in lounges. Or things like, this particular airline has this particular type of aircraft with far better seats than that particular airline, so I would be happier even if the flight is longer. Needless to say, all colleagues that I know of (myself included) prefer to book corporate travel themselves, even if from the company's perspective, spending a few hours to do it is much more expensive than having the concierge spend a few hours to do it.
satvikpendem 14d ago
Plan, sure, many people ask this of AI already, but not actually ask it to buy autonomously.
fwip 14d ago
The rich fucks who run the show do.
lonrenor 14d ago
For me, it is not a matter of trust but that I actually like shopping, planning a trip, deciding what restaurant to go to. Deciding what to buy when shopping is a matter of personal taste and not intelligence. A human assistant is largely a status symbol. Most people are not really that busy. The real problem with an agentic assistant is if everyone can have one then it no longer acts as a status symbol.
bronco21016 14d ago
I think it depends on what you do for work. I'm not going to ask an agent to book my flight for my vacation to French Polynesia. I want to pick my seat and potentially find a deal making an upgrade worth it, choose an airline, etc. But my routine business trips in the CONUS with strictly defined booking options... let me just email an agent "Get there by meeting on day A, leave after meeting day B" and have it sort it all out without the drudgery of the corporate travel portal. YES PLEASE!
- ishtanbul 13d ago
  A good agent would call you to ask clarifying questions and then actually get you that perfect seat, etc. ideally
- ezst 13d ago
  By that point, you don't need an AI that boils the oceans and hopefully doesn't confabulate or misinterpret your words, all you need is a better corporate travel portal, which is a legitimate workplace productivity discussion to have, and a solved problem with traditional methods. Ours is effectively close to the workflow you describe: picking dates and time brackets, destination, fine tuning flights and hotel options, sending for validation, less than 10 clicks through information-dense and effective/predictable screens which I wouldn't want to trade for a chatbot and it's usually over the top words salad.
  - skydhash 13d ago
    Most AI use cases can be reduced to a deterministic listing/form/report format (on the web) or a cli tools.
    - Ekaros 13d ago
      We have had idea of expert systems for decades at this point. And spend however much on software development. Some how we have failed to reach this in way too many places. Even simplest things like cancelling some service might be broken... And now we want to add some random factor into middle of it all...
trentearl 13d ago
Claude code planned my recent trip to China. I'm a very experienced traveller but don't enjoy planning. It was a great trip.
- avinoth 13d ago
  Yeah but the contention is here automating the bookings. Did Claude book the flights, hotels, tickets and attractions for you or would you let it without oversight?
  - trentearl 13d ago
    Yes it booked everything, I just had to click the final pay button. I did run my itinerary against a fresh session like: 'There are errors in my travel plans, go find them'. It found one issue where I was scheduled to be at the wrong train station.
- sanderjd 13d ago
  But surely you went back and forth on things. I do agree that this is useful to brainstorm, iterate, and then execute.
- patagurbon 13d ago
  I was about to argue against this with something like "soon everyone will just follow the average Claude/GPT generated trip to every destination"... But I realized that this is mostly a strict upgrade to how many many people are planning trips these days. It will probably do a pretty good job of accounting for your preferences, probably better than most/any travel agent unless they're very very local.
ssl-3 13d ago
As a realistic construct: When I tell a bot to find the best value per volume for a reasonable quantity of unscented Dawn dish soap [so I can buy that], then: It often makes a complete mess of this seemingly-simple operation. (And yeah, that is an actual thing that I've tried to accomplish with voice commands while standing in my kitchen and doing some dishes. It seems very simple, and it did not go well. Maybe when we get the basics figured out we can start worrying about how inept it is at doing vacation planning. It seems that this kind of thing isn't sorted at all, and that this is a very real problem for those who are in the bot business: These missed opportunities leave money on the table.)
- TheAmazingRace 13d ago
  I think we can safely assume that AGI is still a good ways out then. These AI LLM products really do well on the illusion of seeming intelligent to regular folks, but I'm not fully convinced they can replace human brains... yet. ;)
  - ssl-3 13d ago
    I mean: That sample was only demonstrative of shopping for dish soap. :) I often get some seemingly-good results in the non-shopping research department, where I'm exploring science and physics; things that don't generally change rapidly. But unlike dish soap, I can't buy the science results that I want[]. []: er. well, ackshually... let's just not talk about that concept right now.
- paweladamczuk 13d ago
  Funny, I had a similar task for an LLM recently but it succeeded, so I'll describe it: I asked the chatbot (librechat, tavily-mcp connected, kimi-k3) if anybody tests dish soaps rigorously. It said yes. I asked it to find the consumer reports from Germany. It did so, full access is paywalled but it did see the top positions. The I asked it what term to put in evay.de if I want to order. It gave me a string that found the auctions for me. I also asked it what the actual difference is and it described what info the EU law forces onto the label and told me what to look for in the ingredient lists. The process is still involved. I wish I could just do it all by saying "find me another dishsoap, this one sucks". But then would everybody saying this phrase except the same approach to the issue that I took?
Ekaros 13d ago
And I could bet money on that in short time after someone builds that sort of system the next step is to make it worse. Push worse and more expensive options to user. Or at least those from highest bidder... Anyone involved just can't keep themselves honest so it is doomed to be exploitative.
deadbabe 13d ago
Plan a holiday, definitely. There are many esoteric things one has to research to properly plan a holiday that I’d rather just not. Some things require reservations months in advance and I’d rather an AI just figure all that out for me ahead of time.
hobo123 12d ago
It's called omakase, or rather aimakase in this case.

sensanaty 14d ago

Despite access to """"""AGI""""""" all the marketing teams at these companies can only dream up 2 things, buying plane tickets and online shopping autonomously. Sometimes they're feeling extra spicy and throw in sorting emails or something along those lines. I suspect it's because it's tailored towards VCs and other similar rich ghouls as a replacement for their overworked and underpaid secretaries

incompressible 14d ago
This is the funniest part of it all for me. Ok we have AGI, so where are the _things_?!
- Cthulhu_ 13d ago
  We have neither AGI nor _things_ I'm afraid. I wouldn't even know what to do with a semi-autonomous automation tool for my daily tasks, I don't really have anything that I'd like to automate. (like, how often do you look for a doctor or day care? The demos automate occasional and one-off tasks. That said, it automating tasks like circuitboard design and CAD modeling is impressive and will / may have a much higher impact on those respective industries (if it works), just like LLM assisted coding did)
wonnage 14d ago
Don’t forget making podcasts and telling you what to bake with your kids
padolsey 13d ago
I feel like there are so many cloistered people at these companies that they are left scratching their heads about what normies even want. Like, they literally can't fathom basic stuff that isn't just highly consumer-oriented. I dunno, like applying for government services, paying your gas/elec bill without being confused af, keeping the dr up to date with your dad's illness, or how to get your newborn to sleep at 2am.
- Maxion 13d ago

notatoad 14d ago

because "people will let our AI spend their money for them" is the workflow that makes their valuations reasonable.

FinnKuhn 14d ago

You can't even get many people to buy things online at all and if you can it's less profitable than retail, because you need to spend a lot of money to convince people, advertise to be seen, and account for returns. I think this is also due to the factors you mention. One quick example: In fashion, Inditex and Shein have about the same revenue (€39.9bn and $41.8bn in 2025), but Inditex is more than three times as profitable. I don't see how there is a demand for agentic commerce that would remove even more control from the customer when shopping. Part of why we shop is for the experience. For B2B producurement platforms like Alibaba I can see the appeal though.

strulovich 14d ago
I recently needed to buy some hardware for a piece of furniture. Ran Codex, it found it for 18% less than what I found in the top Google results. It did it by finding smaller shops, applying a discount code, subscribing to a newsletter for a better code after approval, and took into account the shipping (by placing it in the cart and going to checkout) all to get me the best price. I’m guessing without it I would have spent much more time on it and paid the original price I saw. If you use AI agents well, they can easily save you more money than they cost, and saving money is something most people are pretty excited about. (Disclosure: OpenAI employee)
- mrheosuper 14d ago
  >to get me the best price How do you know it's the best price ?
  - igor47 14d ago
    Found the evals fan!
- digdugdirk 14d ago
  I mean, that's cool and all, but the numbers are really going to shift when it accidentally goes off and orders that same hardware from every vendor in your local region and the top 5 online results for comparison. It's the same problem as all other LLM solutions (that I hope OpenAI is working on!) it's non-deterministic, and there's no way for the user (or model provider) to know what the distribution of possible outcomes is. This just gets compounded when multi-call harnesses come onto play.

thi2 14d ago

I work for a larger german retail chain and agentic shopping is already on the "near future vision". No one thinks this will be used but somehow shareholders love it.

sensanaty 14d ago
Lol same story here, I work in payments and 0 people within the company (including the team working on it!) are convinced at all about the viability
lionkor 13d ago
There are SO many options here in Germany for all things retail that this can 100% kill an option for me

GPerson 14d ago

I’m guessing the marketing must mean the AI-shops-for-you use case is a pretty big market, much bigger than AI-makes-life-easier.

noelsusman 14d ago

The overwhelming majority of things I buy are things I've bought before. Alexa having access to my Amazon order history means I can just say "order a new water filter for my fridge" and the correct item shows up the next day. Far from life changing, but it's a feature I use somewhat frequently these days. Similarly, I would trust an AI to put in my usual Chipotle order or pizza from my local pizza joint. I wouldn't want it to pick food for me from a place I've never been, though to be honest with enough order history it could probably do a decent job at it.

beardbandit 14d ago
This isn't something you need an AI to do for you though...
newtwentysix 13d ago
There was amazon dash button for this

tintor 14d ago

If it was Google's marketing department it would be: booking a table at a restaurant.

preommr 14d ago
close enough. The second to last line is "book it" for some tennis thing, and the scene before that has the guy eating the food the ai ordered.

throwatdem12311 14d ago

Man I can think of so many reasons why companies want “agentic commerce” to catch on - and none of them are ethical.

nullbio 13d ago

Agreed. There's not many things I don't want AI to help with, but buying stuff autonomously is high up on the list of things I don't want. Brockman's latest interview was something like: "AGI would be able to say oh this band is playing, I bought the tickets for you and arranged your flights - I hope you don't mind" (paraphrasing here). I definitely don't want AGI running my life like that so I can be a mindless consumer. I'm sure the advertising/marketing companies would love it though, so they can make closed-room deals with AI providers to shill you garbage you don't need. Just another reason why open-weight models need to keep up.

mlmonkey 13d ago

I often feel like the use cases, demos, etc. that these Silicon Valley employees put out are based around their needs and how they operate. "Oh hey! Here's a demo of an AI planning out a 1-week trip to Paris!" No one in Middle America would just hand their credit card to an AI and let it come up with such a trip! I wish SV companies took more of the middle-class (and lower-middle-class) into consideration when coming up with such demos. (Note: I live in SF)

twalla 13d ago
And nobody with actual taste is going to take any of those recs seriously in the first place.
mNovak 13d ago
I mean, not auto-purchasing with the card, no. But my wife has definitely used chatGPT to plan activities on the trips we've already booked.
- _flux 13d ago
  I hooked up Google Maps to ChatGPT and that was definitely helpful for this; without them it would seemingly just guestimate driving distances, but with the MCP it was able to determine exact driving/walking times and also render maps with waypoints for activities around the lodging. I used https://github.com/cablate/mcp-google-map https://github.com/cablate/mcp-google-map for the MCP (and patched it to generate URLs for the maps).

smokel 13d ago

"Somebody is wrong on the internet" will get you more, and more reliable, results on what people actually want from AI. You are now participating in a very high-value survey.

socalgal2 13d ago

Maybe because the people making them are workaholic types who really don't care? I've certainly been in situations where I didn't really care what shows up for a meal. Someone was tasked with getting food and we leave it up to them. Sure, I can imagine such a meal being bad and it has been a few times in my life but 24 of 25 times, maybe more, it's fine. Further, the AI knows your preferences.

wraptile 13d ago

I really wonder what the demo people are thinking as there are many great uses of LLMs in day-to-day lives but all we get is these 3 rehashed use cases. No wonder normal people think LLMs still can't do anything.

mdp553 13d ago

Maybe we are not the real audience. I wonder if they are trying to convince the advertising industry/investors that in the future it won't be Google search that stands between the consumer and the product, but rather their LLM.

plaidfuji 13d ago
Bingo

armchairhacker 13d ago

(This holds generally) maybe because the people most likely to be convinced to buy this particular thing are the people who buy a lot of things. The people who only buy things they need, they’re a harder demographic to convince via ads, and they tend to pay less since they rarely need extras. Every ad caters to whales.

vividfrier 13d ago

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itissid 13d ago

The core or the problem is also what you are describing was bought up by Yuval Harari in his interview with the economist. To paraphrase some of his lines: We make decisions using our emotions and our thoughts. What makes us different from the AI is that we can be afraid. To portray a guy as ordering "beef bulgogi", in the same breath as "email this rocket design marketing", while it _might_ seem appealing and resolute, though oddly fast paced, seems pretty ignorant of the human _quality_ that make most practical decisions messy.

scotty79 13d ago

> why do so many of these demos include people buying things autonomously? > Even if I did trust an AI to get everything right, it's not like the AI can read my mind. On one hand I'm with you. On the other I thought making ecommerce purchases on your phone is absolutely idiotic idea that will never catch on.

conradfr 13d ago

That's not far off the ads for smartphones with things that I never see people doing in real life. Currently there's a Google Pixel ad where a grandma takes a photo of a board and Gemini automatically fills her calendar with all the events. Yeah sure.

casey2 13d ago

The point of advertising is to normalize the behavior that makes you money. Take cars for example, millions of people have been killed by cars and they are objectively poor for public transportation yet through a few good advertising campaigns and lobbying efforts American society redesigned every city cars. About half the oil the US uses (for the last 50 years) goes to cars so you can put every middle east boondoggle onto the bill too. Don't think that just because it's the stupidest idea you've ever heard that people won't rejigger society to make is kinda work for 50 years.

augment_me 13d ago

I think that one thing that "thinkers", academics and other smart people who LIKE to think/select/choose forget is that the majority of the population is not wired this way. Most people go about their day absolutely minimizing the amount of mental energy they have to spend. They have priorities like kids, work, family, groceries, etc. If anything here can be automated its a fat win in their life. I have friends that are loving the features where meals are planned for them, food is home delivered, Uber is auto ordered, trip plans are made, etc. They don't mind paying more just to reduce mental load. Its a huhe market.