One of the promises of the next era of generative AI is that the technology will be agentic, or have the ability to perform tasks autonomously on behalf of us chaotic humans. That means AI agents will theoretically be able to “reason” about the next steps they should take, allowing them to execute multiple actions from a single query. The possibilities are endless, if you believe the hype—think maximum efficiency and productivity, plus a host of other buzz word-latent phrases that one might hear during a tech giant’s quarterly earnings call. All I want AI to do for me, however, is to shop.
I understand that some people find shopping to be a pleasurable act, but the options overwhelm me, whether I’m in an actual store or stuck in an endless scroll. In the lead up to the December holidays, the pressure mounts even more: How do you convey to someone exactly how much you’ve appreciated them this year—all the years—and capture that appreciation in something more thoughtful than a soy wax candle? I was ready to let AI take the wheel.
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Over the last few weeks, I’ve offloaded my gift shopping to Perplexity AI, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Amazon’s Rufus to find out whether I could finally delegate one of the tasks I despise the most to AI. I used the apps as pure utilities; for literal fulfillment, means to a commercial end. I set the generative AI bots loose and burned planet Earth in a quest to find the perfect baking equipment.
Spoiler: I quickly learned that none of these apps can autonomously shop, at least not yet. They are glorified search tools that have the ability to parse and summarize product descriptions, as well as compare different items. I still had to write and rewrite prompts for what kinds of gifts I was looking for, and for the most part, I also needed to enter in my payment information and go through the purchasing process on each individual retailer’s website.
I used the bots to shop for five people, ranging in age from 6 months to 49 years old. A close friend who is extremely into baking became one of my primary test cases. I also tried to drum up holiday gift ideas for my 16-year-old niece, who once complimented me in a text message by saying, “Don’t worry, you’re not mid.” (I have the screenshot saved.) Another person on my shopping list was an editor and musician friend with eclectic taste who’s celebrating a milestone birthday just after the new year.
One of the AI apps I tested has a feature specifically designed for shopping. Perplexity AI, a well-funded generative AI search startup that has been criticized for allegedly lifting content from news publishers, rolled out a new service last month called Buy with Pro, which comes with a $20 per month subscription to Perplexity Pro. Buy with Pro is described as a “first-of-its kind AI commerce experience” that promises to make shopping online “10x more easy and fun.” This immediately sounded like an AI hallucination to me, because online shopping isn’t fun in the first place. (In terms of disclosure, Buy with Pro and other AI gift guides are also technically competitors with WIRED, which earns affiliate revenue from our entirely human-produced, human-reviewed, and human-edited gift guides.)
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{Author}Lauren Goode{/Author}
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