As millions of Americans open their laptops to buy presents this holiday season, tech companies are racing to hand over online shopping tasks to AI agents instead.
Perplexity recently released an AI shopping agent for paying customers in the US. It's supposed to navigate retail websites 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 space for some time, and we expect to see more AI shopping agents emerge in 2025. OpenAI and Google are reportedly developing their own AI agents that can make purchases such as: Flight tickets, hotel reservations, etc. It also makes sense that Amazon, which already has millions of people searching for products, would evolve its AI chatbot, Rufus, to help with checkout as well.
Tech companies are combining old and new techniques to get around the barriers retailers put up to block unwanted bots from using their sites. Earlier this month, Rabbit released LAM Playground, which allows AI agents to navigate websites on your behalf using computers in your datacenter. Anthropic's computer-enabled agent does the same thing, but is hosted on the user's personal computer.
Meanwhile, Perplexity has partnered with Stripe to leverage some old payment functionality repurposed for its AI agents.
Stripe assigns disposable debit cards to Perplexity's AI agents so they can spend money online. This is a reused version of the Stripe publishing functionality. This allows the agent to buy socks without having access to your entire bank account. That way, if a hallucination occurs, the agent can just buy the wrong pair of socks for a few dollars and not have to spend rent money on socks.
Google's AI agents reportedly need access to credit card information, which could give consumers pause. However, some companies, including Google, Amazon, Apple, and Shopify, already have your billing information, and you regularly fill out forms when shopping online. This could give these companies an advantage when shipping products into space.
These tools have the potential to reshape online shopping, but that may not be a blessing for the retailers and advertisers who are making a fortune from the status quo.
Just as AI chatbots have proven to be somewhat helpful in showing you information that is hard to find on search engines, AI shopping agents have the potential to help you find products and deals that you couldn't find on your own. It's hidden. In theory, these tools could help you save time when you need to book a cheap flight or easily find a birthday present for your brother-in-law.
There's a long way to go before AI agents can buy everything on your holiday wish list, but many companies are racing to make it happen.
Our early attempts show that Perplexity's shopping agents can take hours to process purchases, and sometimes run into problems where you can't purchase items at all. All in all, using an agent now seems more complicated than buying something on Amazon.
Perplexity also says that human checkers are involved to ensure the AI agents are working accurately. “Human involvement” is not uncommon in the AI industry. But most AI chatbots don't recognize the product I'm trying to buy or my billing address. This raises some privacy issues for Perplexity and the companies that employ the human checkers.
TechCrunch tested it by asking Perplexity shopping agents to buy toothpaste.
After prompting Perplexity, “I'd like to buy toothpaste,” the agent returned several options from Walmart, Amazon, and several smaller websites. For some options, Perplexity displays a button that says “Buy Pro” under the product, while others take you directly to the retailer's website. Buy with Pro is Perplexity's shopping agent.
Perplexity shopping agent (left), results (middle), and purchase confirmation (right) prompts. Image credit: Perplexity/Maxwell Zeff (screenshot)
I chose the Crest tube from Walmart. I was able to check out and (seemingly) purchase the toothpaste without leaving the Perplexity app. However, my bank statement showed that instead of paying Walmart, I paid the Perplexity agent.
Three hours later, I received an email from Perplexity stating that the toothpaste was out of stock at Walmart and their representative was unable to purchase the toothpaste. The next day I tried to buy another Crest tube at the Perplexity shopping agent. Eight hours later, I received confirmation from Perplexity that it worked.
So what does that give? Why was my first purchase rejected? And why did both take hours to complete?
Perplexity Shopping may seem a lot like Amazon or TikTok Shops, where you can buy products from a variety of sellers who upload and manage their stores on the platform, but it's actually quite different.
Perplexity's AI agent appears to be scraping retailer websites to provide information about their products. This process is not necessarily real-time, so there can be a discrepancy between the information Perplexity tells you and the store's actual inventory, which is what happened in my case.
Perplexity declined to comment on whether retailers such as Walmart were aware that their products were listed on its app. This suggests that the scraping and purchasing process is not authorized by those companies, which can complicate purchasing and returning products.
Also, when you check out on Perplexity's app, you don't actually purchase anything. You pay Perplexity exactly the price of the item and instruct the AI agent to purchase a specific item, entering your name and shipping address in the process. After some time, perhaps hours, the agent will run, or at least attempt to run, that task.
“It's the same as giving a real-world assistant a small amount of money and giving it rules for how it should spend that money,” said Jeff Weinstein, a Stripe product lead who helped build Stripe's AI agent toolkit. states. He said this in an interview with TechCrunch.
But instead of handing over money (pot or otherwise) to a real human assistant that I trust to buy me toothpaste myself, Perplexity's AI agent may need to be supervised by another human. . Still, it doesn't always work out.
“While we can’t go into details about how Buy with Pro works, what we can say is that human oversight provides occasional support to help ensure transactions are completed in a timely manner and to avoid purchasing the wrong product. That means you can avoid problems such as purchasing,” Perplexity spokesperson 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 this service. But in this case, TechCrunch's questions include how often human oversight is needed, how involved humans are in the process, and whether human checkers are monitoring the AI agent's purchases in real time. Perplexity declined to answer questions. The lack of transparency here may not be something everyone cares about, but it's certainly worth noting.
If AI shopping agents truly take off, fewer people may visit online storefronts, where retailers have traditionally upsold and encouraged impulse purchases. This also means advertisers may not have valuable information about shoppers, so they can target them with other products.
As such, advertisers and retailers are unlikely to allow AI agents to disrupt their industries without a fight. This is one reason why companies like Rabbit and Anthropic are training their AI agents to use a website's regular user interface. In other words, bots use your site just like you would, clicking and typing in your browser in a way that's almost indistinguishable from a normal user interface. A real person. That way, you don't have to ask for permission to use online services through the backend. This permission can be revoked if you cause damage to the other party's business.
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu said in a recent interview that AI agents are getting better than humans at solving CAPTCHAs, the human verification tests that previously prevented bots from shopping online. This means website owners will need to develop more sophisticated ways to prove their identity online.
One day, AI agents could be part of a better online shopping experience than it is today. Perplexity's shopping agents offer an early glimpse of what might happen, even if it never will.
Over the next year, we'll see improved versions of AI shopping agents from Perplexity, OpenAI, and Google. We're just seeing the tip of the iceberg as to how this could reshape the online retail industry and what kinds of problems AI agent developers might run into. Maybe.