We've already ditched our regular shopping trips in favor of home delivery. Why not go one step further and put an AI assistant in charge of running our errands?
That's the premise behind AI-powered shopping, launched this week by two credit card giants. Visa's "Intelligent Commerce" allows AI agents to "find and buy." Mastercard's "Agent Pay" lets users to chat with AI agents to create a shopping list, make the purchases and recommend the best way to pay (the likely recommendation is your credit card).
Once you set your budget and your preferences, an AI agent does the rest — buying everything from a new pair of shoes and a weekly round of groceries to booking a trip and completing your holiday gift list.
“We think this could be really important,” Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, told The Associated Press. “Transformational, on the order of magnitude of the advent of e-commerce itself.”
Other companies have announced similar services. Amazon is testing an AI agent called "Buy for Me." PayPal is jumping on the trend, too.
Consumer advocates aren't as eager. Ben Winters, director of AI and data privacy at the Consumer Federation of America, told NewsNation that AI companies running the services are "hungry for data."
“So, there’s multiple entities using that data for their own benefit in ways that you might not even know," he said.
Visa told The Associated Press that consumers will still have control over their spending by giving their AI agents limits. After all, Americans' credit card balances totaled $1.21 trillion at the end of last year, according to the Federal Reserve of New York.
But in this economy, we might prefer letting an AI bot look at the bill.
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