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Millions of Americans will open their laptops to buy gifts this holiday season, but technology companies are racing to turn the task of online shopping over to artificial intelligence agents instead.
Perplexity recently launched an AI-powered shopping agent for its paying customers in the US. It’s supposed to navigate retail sites for you, find the products you’re looking for, and even click the checkout button for you.
Perplexity may be the first major AI startup to offer this, but other companies have been exploring this area for a while, so expect to see more AI shopping agents in 2025. OpenAI and Google These companies are reportedly developing their own AI agents that can make purchases, such as booking flights and hotels. It would also make sense for Amazon, with millions of people already searching for products, to develop its own chatbot, Rufus, to help with checkouts as well.
Technology companies are using a mix of new and old technologies to overcome barriers that retailers have set up to prevent unwanted bots from using their sites. Rabbit launched its LAM Playground app earlier this month, which lets an AI agent navigate through websites for you using a computer in a data center. Anthropic’s PC Agent does the same thing, but it’s hosted on your personal computer.
Meanwhile, Perplexity is partnering with Stripe to leverage some legacy payments features that have been repurposed for AI clients.
Stripe assigns single-use debit cards to Perplexity’s AI agent for spending money online — a repurposed version of Stripe’s Issuing feature. This makes the agent able to purchase a pair of socks without having to access your entire bank account. That way, if it’s a hallucination, the agent buys the wrong socks for a few bucks and doesn’t spend the rent money on the socks.
Google AI Agent It is said that it needs access to your credit card informationwhich may give consumers pause. However, many companies — such as Google, Amazon, Apple, and Shopify — already know your billing information and regularly fill out forms for you when you shop online. This could give these companies an advantage when they ship products in space.
These tools could reshape online shopping — something retailers and advertisers who make a fortune off the status quo may not be happy about.
Just as AI-powered chatbots have proven somewhat useful in displaying information that is difficult to find through search engines, AI-powered shopping agents have the ability to find products or deals that you might not have found on your own. In theory, these tools could save you hours when you need to book a cheap flight, or easily help you find a good birthday gift for your brother-in-law.
There’s a long way to go before AI agents can buy you everything on your holiday wish list, but there are plenty of companies vying to do just that.
Based on our early attempts, Perplexity’s shopping agent takes hours to process purchases and sometimes runs into issues where it can’t purchase items at all. In general, using a dealer today seems more complicated than buying something on Amazon.
Perplexity also says there are human vetting tools involved to ensure its AI agent is performing accurately. Having a “human in the know” is not uncommon for the AI industry – but most AI chatbots don’t see the items I purchase and my billing address. This raises some privacy issues for Perplexity, and whichever company hires its human auditors.
TechCrunch tested Perplexity’s shopping agent by asking it to buy us toothpaste.
After asking Perplexity to say, “I’d like to purchase toothpaste,” the agent returned several options from Walmart, Amazon, and a few smaller websites. For some options, Perplexity offers a button below the product called “Buy with Pro” while other options take you directly to the retailer’s website. Buying with Pro is a Perplexity shopping agent in action.
I picked up a Crest tube from Walmart. Without leaving the Perplexity app, I was able to check out the toothpaste and (seemingly) purchase it. But instead of paying Walmart, my bank statement showed that I paid the Perplexity agent.
Three hours later, I received an email from Perplexity stating that their agent could not purchase the toothpaste for me because it was sold out at Walmart. The next day, I tried to purchase another tube of Crest with my Perplexity shopping agent. Eight hours later, I got confirmation from Perplexity that it worked.
So what gives? Why was my first purchase rejected, and why did both take hours to complete?
While Perplexity Shopping may seem very similar to Amazon or TikTok Shop, where you can buy items from a wide range of merchants who upload and manage storefronts on the platform, it’s actually very different.
Perplexity’s AI agent appears to scan retailers’ websites and give you information about their products. Since this process doesn’t necessarily happen in real time, it can cause a disconnect between what Perplexity tells you and what’s actually in stock in the store, which is what appears to be what happened in my case.
Perplexity declined to comment on whether retailers like Walmart were aware of their products appearing on its app. This indicates that their scraping and purchasing process is not authorized by those companies – something that could complicate the process of purchasing or returning items.
You also don’t actually buy anything when you check out in the Perplexity app. You pay Perplexity the exact amount that the item costs, and you instruct its AI agent to purchase a specific item, asking it to fill in your name and shipping address in the process. After some time, perhaps hours, the agent performs that task, or at least attempts to do so.
“This is the equivalent of giving a small amount of money to an assistant in the real world, and giving them rules about how you’re allowed to spend it,” said Jeff Weinstein, Stripe’s product lead, who helped build Stripe’s AI agent toolkit. In an interview with TechCrunch.
But instead of giving money (in a jar or other) to a real human assistant, whom I trust to buy toothpaste on its own, Perplexity’s AI agent sometimes needs to be monitored by another human. Even then, it doesn’t always work out.
“I can’t reveal details about how purchasing with Pro works, but what I can say is that there is human oversight that provides support from time to time, ensuring that transactions are completed in a timely manner and we avoid issues such as purchasing the wrong product.” Perplexity spokeswoman Sarah Blatnick said in an email to TechCrunch.
These days, hiring human auditors to monitor AI systems has become common. Companies like Scale AI and Turing have built significant businesses around this service. But in this case, Perplexity declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions about how often human monitoring was necessary, how involved humans were in the process, and whether human auditors were watching AI agents make purchases in real time. The lack of transparency here may not bother everyone, but it is certainly worth noting.
If AI shopping agents are a real success, it could mean fewer people going to online storefronts, where retailers have historically been able to boost their sales or promote impulse purchases. It also means that advertisers may not get valuable information about shoppers, so they may be targeted with other products.
For this reason, these advertisers and retailers are unlikely to let AI agents disrupt their industries without a fight. That’s part of the reason why companies like Rabbit and Anthropic train AI agents to use a website’s normal user interface — that is, the bot will use the site just as you would, clicking and typing into the browser in a way that’s largely indistinguishable from a real person. This way, there’s no need to request permission to use an online service through the back end – a permission that can be revoked if you’re hurting their business.
Rabbit CEO Jesse Liu said in a recent interview AI agents are getting better than humans In solving CAPTCHAs, human verification tests that previously prevented bots from shopping online. This means that website owners will need to develop more sophisticated ways to prove their identity online.
It’s possible that AI agents will one day be part of a better online shopping experience than exists today. Perplexity’s shopping agent isn’t that by a long shot, but it does offer an early glimpse of what could be.
Next year, we’ll likely see even better versions of AI shopping agents from Perplexity, OpenAI, and Google. We may be just seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the online retail industry will be reshaped, and what types of issues AI agent developers may face.
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