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It seems like these days, every big e-commerce and AI company is racing to figure out how to make AI agents that can shop just like a human. In the case of Amazon, the company’s version of AI-powered shopping is becoming widespread enough to step on other retailers’ toes—evidence that it’s pulling ahead in the nascent market. Earlier this week, Amazon sparked blowback from some small retailers that noticed they were showing up in a feature displaying items in Amazon search results even if Amazon did not sell them. Some business owners objected, saying the company hadn’t gotten their permission before listing their products, which were available through a feature Amazon calls Buy for Me. Amazon says the feature uses an AI agent to complete purchases on other sites on behalf of Amazon shoppers. Some retailers I spoke with this week said they think Amazon is using AI bots or scrapers to pick up their product listings for its site, and sometimes it has led to errors, like showing out-of-date product information to shoppers. (Amazon says that retailers can opt out of Buy for Me at any time, and that the feature is an experiment aimed at helping sellers reach new customers.) Notably, Amazon is sticking with an approach other commerce and AI firms have mostly abandoned. Last spring, with the release of browser agents from OpenAI and Google, many developers and merchants envisioned personal shopper agents that would visit websites to browse and buy like a human would. But that has proven tough: Many websites treated those agents as bots and blocked them, and those that did get through struggled to shop accurately. More recently, OpenAI has been working on rolling out a checkout feature inside ChatGPT that it bills as an automated, or agentic, tool. Instead of crawling retailer sites, ChatGPT coordinates product data and order information between applications and retailers, mainly through existing systems like application programming interfaces. Retailers currently have to opt in to participate, and it’s been slow going so far for OpenAI, which teamed up with Stripe and commerce software giant Shopify to launch the checkout feature. The companies said in September that millions of shops would soon be shoppable inside the chatbot, but they’re still working on sorting out a bunch of product data and payment complications that the AI component introduces, as I reported earlier today. On one hand, it makes sense for OpenAI and its partners to move cautiously, as AI shopping tools misfiring on purchases would upset shoppers and retailers alike. But Amazon’s Buy for Me is going after Shopify’s bread and butter: small, independent online retailers that don’t sell on Amazon. By taking a more collaborative and slow-rolling approach, OpenAI and Shopify could risk ceding ground to Amazon, especially since it’s still early days for people getting used to the idea of AI doing their shopping. At the same time, Amazon has taken a hard line against other AI search tools and apps that display Amazon-listed products in their search results. The e-commerce giant has blocked most bots and agents of major AI companies from accessing its site, and it has also started to crack down on other, smaller AI apps even if they ultimately instruct customers to complete purchases on Amazon’s site. OpenAI’s and Amazon’s experiences so far show just how challenging building new commerce features can be. In the race to win over consumers and merchants alike, the pressure is on to figure out which strategy will win out. Dell Says People Don’t Care About AI PCs Dell has been one of the loudest proponents of PCs that can summarize text and generate images using specialized AI chips called neural processing units. Now the PC maker is changing its tune. Unlike many of its PC industry brethren, Dell isn’t bombarding attendees of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with marketing about AI features. Dell figured out that PC buyers don’t care that much about built-in AI, Kevin Terwilliger, head of product for Dell’s PC business, told PC Gamer. Meanwhile, Lenovo, HP, Acer and Asus continue to highlight their latest AI PCs at CES. These machines run AI models on the device instead of sending data to the cloud for processing, which boosts performance and battery life while keeping sensitive data secure. Dell’s decision makes sense and could help it stand out. One knock on AI PCs is that AI chatbots can handle the same set of tasks without requiring users to buy new hardware. While AI PCs could appeal to businesses that don’t want to risk sending their data to the cloud, many consumer users don’t have the same level of concern. AI marketing has become impossible to escape, having now cemented its place alongside Viagra advertisements and beer commercials during televised sporting events. And surely by now, many workers (other than coders) have realized that AI capabilities haven’t matched the marketing hype. PC makers used to leverage every new version of Microsoft Windows to get customers excited about upgrading their machines. But due to the rise of mobile computing, Windows no longer has the same cachet, and that prompted Dell and its rivals to jump on the AI bandwagon two years ago.
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