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

AI shopping agents are coming. But no one is ready.That was the consensus of a panel at Fortune Brainstorm Tech on AI shopping agents.While plenty of people are using AI models to help discover products they might want to buy, a customer cannot easily get an AI agent to complete a purchase on their behalf due to security protocols, a lack of agentic commerce standards, and retailer policies that have sought to block third-party shopping agents, said Matt Maher, the founder and CEO of M7 Innovations, an indepedent tech research and development firm.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 noted that even when a user asks ChatGPT about a product type it might want to purchase, such as ski gloves, it responds with specific product recommendations only 9% of the time. 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. That decision also caused OpenAI’s initial retailers, such as Walmart, to pull out of the relationship. 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.Courtney Robinson, the head of policy and communications at open finance platform Akoya, said that liability in the case of fraud or if an AI agent undertakes a purchase that a customer claims they didn’t intend to make remains one of the biggest unsolved challenges holding back agentic commerce. “Regulation always follows innovation,” she said. “Liability is wide open right now and being negotiated company to company, but there are no standards around where li