When you deputize an AI agent to shop for you, you basically tell the computer program (or “agent”) what you want. Like: find the best running shoes under $150 for someone with wide feet, or the cheapest flight to Venice. The agent then searches multiple retailers, evaluates options based on your preferences, and completes the sale.

This sounds like it could actually be useful, since there’s normally a tradeoff between perfectly optimizing getting the most of what you want at the best price and how much time you have to spend shopping around.

An AI assistant cannot be both a consumer agent and a platform sales channel.

Just needs to be actually independent, ideally locally run, maybe mostly not even AI since you don’t exactly need a LLM to scrape websites and compare prices. Where AI would be useful is times when things are ambiguous, like I often want to buy the cheapest available item, but if you sort by price there are pages of accessory items that just have the same keywords in the title but aren’t the thing I’m actually looking to buy, and it wouldn’t be trivial to automate finding the first one that actually matches using conventional methods.

Nancy has $12.00 and she wants an apple and two oranges that cost $0.5 each. How many apples and oranges can she afford? How much money will she have left?

She can afford one apple and two oranges and she will have no money left. Costco will get it all.

Is anyone surprised by this? I’m pretty sure this was a predicted outcome.