Walmart is preparing to welcome its next customer: the AI shopping agent
wsj.com
wsj.com
But the time will come when a return on investment is needed, and it's going to be, like everything else, subscribe or view ads.
What remains to be seen is how these ads will be implemented. Will it be obvious shout outs in context? Nudging of a user towards a product? A token balance tied to watching old school regular ads? A hybrid approach of all the above?
I don't think open models will come to the rescue either. Mass market will want to use the best models with the least friction. The moment you have to do more than go to a website and start prompting, 90% of mass market is out.
Using Netflix as the pricing model, when VCs eventually say no to anymore Softbank style free lunches to buy market share - then ad free LLM services could go from $19.99 to $35.99 and possibly $49.99 at the high end (i.e. unlimited) per month.
I expect it to be at least this high or even higher so that < 3-5% people can afford that. It seems to be one of those things where few people paying lot > lot of people paying few dollars.
I think even ad supported versions will evolve to be applicable to enterprise requirements instead of being ad-free by default.
Just opening netflix gives you a huge ad banner at the top of the page. I've seen netflix advertise certain shows and movies with full screen ads you have to click past or scroll down past just to get to the "continue watching" category.
I've seen large half-screen sized vertical ads for certain shows shoved between two categories while scrolling down the page, and the same movies and shows are aggressively shoved into category after category to advertise them to you as you try to look for what you want to watch.
Categories like "trending" or "popular" are intended to sound objective, but the shows featured in them will change depending on who is logged in because they're actually just targeted ads.
Netflix's "ad-free" tier is filled with ads and unfortunately they're still less ad-infested than most streaming services.
Give me technology with an honest business model instead of the bait-and-switch nonsense that's everywhere in tech these days.
I interpret this as you saying that we need saving from the eventual predations of the shopping AI agent industry on helpless consumers. Honest question, why won't competition come to the rescue? Any number of startups hungry for customers will be competing to provide the best version of the product that they can afford to provide, and will eventually settle into some fair equilibrium, absent the government picking some kind of winner or imposing binding price controls.
It's true that Uber used to offer outrageously good prices to acquire users, and nowadays charges what some people consider outrageously high prices ($80 to get me to the airport??). But a closer look at the economics of the situation reveals that the prices that rideshare services have settled on are the pretty-much-sane ones, accounting for the market value of the driver's time and uber's cost to develop and maintain the app. Why wouldn't the end result of the AI shopping agent market be the same?
Why hasn't competition come to our rescue in any other product category or industry.
There will always be more money in selling out your customer base at every opportunity and as long "everyone" is already doing it "everyone else" will be at a disadvantage if they don't. Since shareholders demand endless growth and won't tolerate huge piles of cash being left on the table they'll eventually insist on it.
A company starting out looking to attract a userbase might be able to hold off for a while, but inevitably enshittification will start and then accelerate until we're all worse off than we were.
As just one example: when I first signed up for netflix it was $5.00 a month and there were zero ads. There isn't a single competitor that offers anything close to that today. I can't even think of one without ads.
In terms of price versus content/quality (subjective of course) ratio or just price?
Dropout is relatively cheap compared to others and completely ad-free. The most interesting thing is perhaps that they recently announced a very small price increase to keep up with inflation, but it was implemented in a way that would a) only affect new subscribers and b) only after a date a few months ahead, so current subscribers _and_ people subscribing within the next month or so would keep the current price.
It's interesting to see the number of people threatening to cancel their subscription just so they could re-subscribe at a higher price and then buy more merchandise just so they can give their favourite streaming service more money.
That kind of genuine goodwill seems out-of-reach for the larger streaming services, however Dropout is also pretty niche content-wise and even with their back catalogue it's nowhere near the seemingly infinite amount of video on the major platforms.
Competition has a very poor track record of rescuing people from terrible but profitable business practices. It's more likely that they'll adopt those same practices themselves and help normalize them.
The only competition under our current economic order is who can make the most money by any means necessary. Even and especially illegal or immoral means.
The market will never save consumers from unethical businesses because the market favors unethical businesses by design.
This feels like such a weird but also 'natural' extension of the current model where the timing of an ad is not guaranteed except for at least at the beginning of, say, a video. Instead of ads being inserted at times that may or may not correlate with some kind of 'pause' point, being able to opt-in to a number of duration of ads that equal payment
Taken _directly_ from Google's AI Overview of a search I did (to make sure I remembered correctly):
"In the fictional world of the Netflix series "Maniac", an "Ad Buddy" is a person who is assigned to follow another person around, delivering advertisements for them. Essentially, it's a human-powered advertising campaign, where someone is paid to be a walking billboard."
We’re getting to the point where new technology is making many things worse and less productive.
I'd love to learn more about what that actually means - does that mean tool usage from LLMs? Cursor agentic mode? Command-line hints for how to do a deploy?
We're entering an era where PR/the press is talking a lot about "AI agents" and I'm not sure that fully matches with the reality of what's going on out there en masse (at the moment).
Me: "Chuck and Lisa are coming over tonight with the kids. Find me a recipe for dinner they'll all like and have the ingredients delivered in time for me to make it. Remind me to turn on the pellet grill if we're using it."
It: "It looks like it's going to be a beautiful afternoon. How about reverse seared tri-tip? There's a sale at FoodMerchant..."
Don't get me wrong, I truly agree there will probably be a point things will be an agentic future. The same chain of events could have been said about booking travel arrangements a couple of decades ago. But until the rest of meatspace actually moves towards those things being normal these things are still in the realm of fantasy on average.
"I apologize for any misunderstanding. How about an entire loaf of sourdough?"
Simple quality variance examples: banana ripeness. Or size of items that can only be ordered by each instead of by lb. Or one of the two onions you needed looking mostly fine on the outside but rotten on the inside.
As an experiment, try ordering all the ingredients to make a specific recipe several days in a row. You'll tend to hit an failure rate between 15-30%. That failure rate is usually fine if you're just restocking for home -- you can always pick up milk/sugar/whatever tomorrow -- but it's pretty awful if it means that something like 1 in 5 of your dinner plans are ruined or you have to leave your guests to rush to the store to pick up some missing ingredient
Also: the LLM will need to be aware of your home inventory, unless you're fine with it ordering lots ingredients you already have
So there's lots of hidden complexity here. If they turn this on, it will be a fun party trick that will work once in a while, but getting burned with ruined plans causes people to churn out fast.
None of this is to say that LLMs have nothing to offer here. There would still be value in being able to tell an agent "Here's my list, get this ordered for me". But being able to say "find me a recipe for dinner that my guests will like and have the ingredients delivered in time for me to make it" without getting burned every other time is actually a much harder problem.
But, at the same time, automating purchases to a GenAI sounds risky, and with “purchase the same thing every month” you have most of it covered. And I remember both the ideas of purchase through Alexa or “push button to order again” that never lived up to their own hype…
Amazon is already experiencing with AI summaries of comments but I currently do not trust the tech, it was hastily rolled out to please shareholders and current LLMs have a tendency to sometimes flip negatives in summaries. Besides, fuck Amazon.
I haven't been able to reproduce this behavior, so it may have been either a bug or a short-lived A/B test, but it looks like this[1] page went up about a week earlier
Hopefully it's not going the way I'm cynically picturing, but with Fidji Simo taking over as "CEO of Applications", and the real need for these companies to start thinking about profitability, I am having trouble imagining that it won't go this way.
I ended up not trusting the results and went with the advice of a human who wrote an article on runnersworld.com.
Think of Robinhood and how they gave users more expensive trades because they were paid for routing flow.
Companies are likely salivating over the potential of AIs to "slip in" higher prices by reducing friction in the buying process.
That's the opposite of reality. Most trades are cheaper routed to a PFOF market maker because they know it's just retail trades. Uncorrelated "dumb money" that isn't going to be steamrolling them with a $10m sale.
Also that would be obviously illegal and the SEC would jump down their throat. Brokers must give clients best execution.
The more interesting piece to me here is what Amazon does. Their API/anti-scrapping is notoriously hostile to anyone that hasn't jumped through loads of hoops
``` "metadata": { "name": "My MCP", "description": "A description of my MCP", "version": "1.0.0", // Optional "author": "Your Name", // Optional "license": "MIT" // Optional } ```
``` "tools": [ { "name": "tool_name", "description": "Tool description", "input_schema": { ... }, "output_schema": { ... } } ] ```
Each "description" attribute is an advertisement opportunity. APIs want to entice agents to select their tool.
- https://fortune.com/2025/05/15/mcp-model-context-protocol-an...
Network (1976)