Here are three things I found interesting in the world of AI over the last week.
You tell perplexity what you want and it will search and compare products and prices. You can even complete the purchase without leaving the app if the seller is part of their merchant program.
Here is
one user's experience which sounds like what I'd expect - skip all of the clicking and comparing on different sites and get the LLM to do it for you.
My sense is that search and shopping will go and hand in hand and are going to be fiercely contested. I'm curious to see how the
OpenAI operator shapes up in this space.
Stripe enables agents to spend and earn -
blog post
Imagine if you can give your AI a single-use credit card and send it shopping through any ecommerce website. I think it will be a while before the agents get good enough for folks to let them make the actual purchase decision autonomously, but it does feel solvable and I think a lot of people would love it.
Stripe have released an
api designed for LLM agents to use financial services, which I think is particularly interesting as Perplexity stand up their 'Buy with pro' feature and do the work of integrating merchant by merchant. I think there is a fair chance the agent ecosystem will standardise on more open payment protocols.
It's only a developer preview but it is easy to integrate with all the LLM libraries and will provide a core foundation for making agents useful.
I am fully expecting a social media challenge in the next five years of 'give your day to day agent $100 to buy you a present based off everything it knows about you'.
I know, I know. More agent news but I think this is a good perspective on where things are at. My main take away is that the biggest limitation by far is just getting the agents to work properly (performance quality in the survey).
It's easy to write a marketing page or make a video but in my experience, actually getting the LLM to acceptable levels of quality requires really narrowing the scope of the agent.
I agree that the race is on but like self driving cars, I think the distance will be longer than many people would like. Though I am expecting a shopping agent before I have a car that can drive itself.