I don’t enjoy clothes shopping, because I hate trawling through stuff and spending hours not finding anything. I’d love to have a personal shopper who could judge my style, my size and my needs to curate a list of things to buy.

Right now AI can probably do the buying part, but seems to be absolutely no where near the curation part. Maybe that’s a good thing for humans, so I’m not too fussed.

Because people want to participate in activities that cost money. It's easy to see use cases like an AI agent notifying someone that a band they like is coming to town and asking if they want to secure tickets to the show.

The provided example is really bad and ignores why customer service is sometimes a good idea. I guess it's been so bad and corrupted by disingenuous marketing for so long that people have forgotten.

Suppose you need to buy some stuff for an upcoming project or vacation, but don't want to go down a research rabbit hole for the next hour(s) to cure your ignorance. Suppose you don't even want to have a conversation with the AI. You just want it to build a shopping cart. At most, hopefully, your effort is just pruning the cart before placing the order (if even that).

I'm not saying AI wouldn't be corrupted like human customer service. I'm saying that we're actually pretty close to this already on Amazon with their AI, but not all ecommerce can be or has to be Amazon.

the sad thing is we need AI for shopping because it has been in the interests of online sellers to make a hostile experience on purpose - when I go to Amazon and search, the first organic result is almost scrolled off the screen past all the sponsored ones, or when want to buy from a random seller I'm almost definitely getting shunted through an account signup I didn't want or fooled into an affiliate purchase some other hostile experience beyond just "buying the thing".

So now we have AI to overcome the hostile sellers, but the fact the sellers introduced the friction in the first place strongly suggests it will just come back again in some other form. It wasn't there by accident, it was serving people's interests and once AI vendors have finished getting consumers hooked in, they will then turn around and enshittify by giving the sellers back some of the friction - for a cut. So you won't be able to just order what you want without the "would you like fries with that?" or "what about this other brand?" coming back.