AI shopping agents are coming. No one is ready for them

Summary

Melissa Bridgeford, the cofounder and CEO of Wizard Commerce, which makes AI shopping agents, said that even for product discovery, existing AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT often fall short. She said she thought OpenAI had fumbled its initial efforts to build its chatbot into a commerce platform, pivoting away from its Instant Checkout feature that allowed a user to complete a purchase directly from the chat interface. She also said that she thought the industry was coalescing around allowing agentic commerce to proceed, but allowed that there was still no agreement over how to handle fraud, refunds, and returns—all major issues that could hold back the rollout of shopping agents. “We have a huge online fraud problem, ecommerce problem without agents and agents are only going to magnify the problem exponentially,” Norman Menz, CEO of cybersecurity company Flare, said.

Like Winnick, Leventhal said he thought blockchain technology could help solve this identity issue, but that other solutions might be possible and that existing identity management firms were likely to figure it out. “There is going to be an identity payload that people or their agent will carry with them,” he said.