Millions of Americans will open their laptops to buy gifts this holiday season, but tech companies are racing to hand over online shopping tasks to AI agents instead.
Perplexity recently launched an AI shopping agent for paying customers in the US. They can even browse retail websites for you, find the products you want, and click the checkout button on your behalf.
Perplexity may be the first major AI startup to offer this, but others have been exploring this space for some time, so expect to see more AI shopping agents in 2025. OpenAI and Google are reportedly developing their own AI agents, which can be purchased as follows: Flight and hotel reservations, etc. With millions of people already searching for products, it would make sense for Amazon to develop its AI chatbot, Rufus, to also help with payments.
Tech companies are using a mix of new and existing technologies to overcome barriers put up by retailers to block unwanted bots from using their sites. Rabbit launched LAM Playground earlier this month, which allows AI agents to explore websites using computers in a data center. Anthropic’s computer-enabled agent does the same thing, but is hosted on your personal computer.
Meanwhile, Perplexity is partnering with Stripe to leverage some of its older payment functionality repurposed for AI agents.
Stripe is allocating disposable debit cards to Perplexity’s AI agents to help them spend money online. This is a repurposed version of Stripe Issuing functionality. This allows an agent to purchase a pair of socks without accessing your entire bank account. That way, if you hallucinate, your agent will buy the wrong socks for a few dollars and avoid spending rent on socks.
Google’s AI agents will need access to your credit card information, which they say may give consumers pause. However, many companies, including 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 delivering products to space.
These tools could reshape online shopping. Retailers and advertisers who are making a lot of money from the status quo may not be satisfied.
Just as AI chatbots have proven to be somewhat useful in surfacing hard-to-find information via search engines, AI shopping agents have the potential to find products or deals you might not otherwise find on your own. In theory, these tools could save you time when you need to book a cheap flight or help you easily find a good birthday gift for your brother-in-law.
There’s a long way to go before AI agents can buy everything on your holiday wish list, but there are plenty of companies vying to do just that.
Early attempts showed that Perplexity’s shopping agents took hours to process purchases, sometimes resulting in issues preventing items from being purchased at all. Overall, using an agent today seems more complicated than buying something on Amazon.
Perplexity also says that human inspectors are involved to ensure the AI agents are operating accurately. Having “humans in the loop” is not uncommon in the AI industry. However, most AI chatbots can’t see what I’m buying and my billing address. This raises privacy concerns for Perplexity and for companies that employ human inspectors.
TechCrunch tested Perplexity by asking its shopping agents to buy toothpaste.
“I want to buy toothpaste,” the agent asked Perplexity, which returned several options from Walmart, Amazon, and some smaller websites. For some options, Perplexity provides a “Buy as a Pro” button below the product, while others link directly to the retailer’s website. Buy with Pro is a shopping agent for Perplexity.
I picked up a Crest tube from Walmart. I was able to check out and purchase toothpaste without leaving the Perplexity app. However, my bank statement shows that instead of paying Walmart, I paid Perplexity’s agent.
Three hours later, I received an email from Perplexity saying the agent could not buy me the toothpaste because it was sold out at Walmart. The next day I tried to purchase another tube of Crest through Perplexity’s shopping agent. After 8 hours, I received confirmation from Perplexity that it was effective.
So what gives? Why was my first purchase declined and how many hours did it take for both purchases to complete?
Perplexity Shopping may seem very similar to Amazon or TikTok Shop, where you can purchase items from a variety of sellers who upload and manage their stores on the platform, but they are actually completely different.
Perplexity’s AI agent appears to scrape retailers’ websites and provide information about their products. Because this process doesn’t necessarily happen in real time, there can be a disconnect between what Perplexity tells you and what’s actually in stock in your store. I think this is what happened in my case:
Perplexity declined to comment on whether retailers like Walmart were aware that its products would appear in the app. This means that the company has not approved the scrap and purchase process. This can make purchasing or returning an item complicated.
Additionally, when you check out in Perplexity’s app, you don’t actually purchase anything. You tell Perplexity the exact amount of the item’s price, instruct the AI agent to purchase that specific item, and enter your name and shipping address along the way. After some time, perhaps a few hours, the agent executes the task, or at least attempts to do so.
“This is like giving a real-world assistant a small amount of money and giving them rules for how they can use it,” said Jeff Weinstein, head of product at Stripe, who helped build Stripe’s AI agent toolkit. In an interview with TechCrunch.
But instead of giving money (pots, etc.) to a real human assistant that you can trust to buy the toothpaste for itself, Perplexity’s AI agents sometimes need to be monitored by another human. Nonetheless, it doesn’t always work.
“I can’t reveal the specifics of how Buying with Pro works, but I can tell you that human supervision provides occasional assistance to ensure transactions are completed in a timely manner and prevent issues like purchasing the wrong product. ” Perplexity spokeswoman Sara Platnick said in an email to TechCrunch.
These days, it’s common to hire human checkers to monitor AI systems. Companies like Scale AI and Turing have built large businesses around services. But in this case, Perplexity declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions about how often human supervision is needed, how involved humans are in the process, and whether human checkers are watching the AI agents make purchases in real time. The lack of transparency here might not bother everyone, but it’s definitely worth noting.
If AI shopping agents are truly successful, it could mean fewer people going to online stores, where retailers have historically been able to upsell or promote impulse purchases. This also means advertisers lose out on valuable information about shoppers, who can then be targeted with different products.
That’s why advertisers and retailers won’t let AI agents disrupt their industries without a fight. This is one of the reasons why companies like Rabbit and Anthropic are training AI agents to use a website’s regular user interface. This means that bots use your site as if you were clicking and typing in a browser, in a way that is almost indistinguishable from a user. Real people. This way, you don’t have to ask for permission to use online services through the backend. The permit may be revoked if you are detrimental to their business.
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu said in a recent interview that AI agents are getting better than humans at solving CAPTCHA, human verification tests that previously prevented bots from shopping online. This means that website owners will need to develop more sophisticated ways to prove that they are an individual online.
One day, AI agents may be part of a better online shopping experience than what exists today. Perplexity’s Shopping Agents are a glimpse into what could be, though not in the long run.
Next year we’ll likely see better versions of Perplexity, OpenAI, and Google’s AI shopping agents. How this could reshape the online retail industry, and the kinds of challenges AI agent developers may face, may be just the tip of the iceberg.
