The competition to have AI agents shop for you online is fierce.

This holiday season, millions of Americans will open their laptops to purchase gifts, but tech businesses are rushing to have AI agents handle online shopping in their place.

An AI shopping agent was just made available to Perplexity’s paying US consumers. It is designed to help you browse retail websites, locate the items you want, and even complete the checkout process.

Although Perplexity was the first significant AI firm to do this, other companies have been investigating the market for some time, so other AI shopping agents should be available by 2025. According to reports, Google and OpenAI are creating their own AI agents that are capable of making transactions, including reservations for hotels and flights. Millions of customers currently shop on Amazon, so it would make sense for the company to develop Rufus, its AI chatbot, to assist with checkout as well.

Retailers have put up barriers to prevent unwelcome bots from utilizing their websites, and IT companies are overcoming these obstacles by combining old and new methods. Earlier this month, Rabbit debuted the LAM Playground, which enables an AI agent to use a data center computer to surf websites on your behalf. The computer use agent from Anthropic does the same function, but it runs on your own PC.

In the meanwhile, Perplexity and Stripe are collaborating to take advantage of some outdated payment functionalities that have been modified for use with AI agents.

Stripe is repurposing the Stripe Issuing tool to provide Perplexity’s AI agent with single-use debit cards to utilize for online purchases. Because of this, the agent can purchase a pair of socks for you without having to access your whole bank account. In this manner, in the event that it hallucinates, the agent will just spend a few dollars on the incorrect socks and avoid using your rent money for socks.
Customers may be concerned if they learn that Google’s AI agent requires access to their credit card information. Nonetheless, a number of businesses, including Google, Amazon, Apple, and Shopify, already have your billing information on file and frequently complete forms on your behalf when you shop online. These businesses may benefit from this when they send their goods in the

Online buying may change as a result of these technologies, which may not sit well with advertisers and businesses that profit greatly from the present quo.

AI shopping agents have the ability to locate goods or discounts that you might not have discovered on your own, just like AI chatbots have shown some utility in surfacing information that is difficult to find using search engines. Theoretically, these apps may help you find a suitable birthday present for your brother-in-law or save you hours when you need to book a cheap airfare.

Though many businesses are striving to do so, it will be a while before AI agents can purchase everything on your holiday wish list.

The shopping agent for Perplexity

Our initial attempts indicate that Perplexity’s shopping agent takes hours to complete transactions and occasionally encounters problems that prevent it from making any purchases at all. In general, it appears that utilizing the agent now is more difficult than making an Amazon purchase.

Additionally, Perplexity claims that human checks are used to make sure its AI agent is operating correctly. Although it’s usual for the AI sector to have a “human in the loop,” most AI chatbots are blind to the products I’m buying or my billing address. For Perplexity and whichever business is employing its human checkers, this presents certain privacy concerns.

TechCrunch asked Perplexity’s shopping agent to purchase toothpaste for us in order to test it out.

When Perplexity was asked, “I’d like to buy toothpaste,” the agent sent back a number of choices from Amazon, Walmart, and a few smaller websites. Perplexity provides a “Buy with Pro” button beneath the product for a select few selections, while other options direct you to the retailer’s website. Perplexity’s shopping agent at work is called Buy with Pro.

I decided on a Crest tube from Walmart. I was able to check out and (ostensibly) buy the toothpaste without ever leaving the Perplexity application. However, my bank statement indicated that I had paid Perplexity’s agency rather than Walmart.

Three hours later, I got an email from Perplexity informing me that the toothpaste was sold out at Walmart and that their agent could not get it for me. I attempted to buy another tube of Crest with Perplexity’s shopping agent the following day. I received confirmation from Perplexity that it was successful eight hours later.

What gives, then? Why did both take hours to complete, and why was my initial order rejected?

Perplexity Shopping is entirely different from Amazon or the TikTok Shop, despite the fact that both allow you to purchase goods from a variety of merchants who publish and run stores on the platform.

It appears that Perplexity’s AI agent is scraping the websites of retailers to provide you with product details. There may be a discrepancy between what Perplexity indicates and what a store actually carries because this procedure isn’t always real-time, which seems to have happened in my instance.

Regarding whether companies such as Walmart knew their products were showing up on its app, Perplexity declined to comment. This implies that those businesses have not approved their scraping and purchasing procedure, which could make purchasing or returning goods more difficult.

Additionally, when you check out using the Perplexity app, you aren’t really purchasing anything. By instructing Perplexity’s AI agent to purchase a certain item and instructing it to enter your name and shipping address, you are paying Perplexity the precise amount that item costs. The agent carries out that mission, or at least attempts to, hours later.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Stripe product lead Jeff Weinstein, who contributed to the development of Stripe’s AI agent toolkit, said, “This is the equivalent of giving a small pot of money to an assistant in the real world, and giving them rules about how they’re allowed to spend it.”