[maeil]

> But I don’t seek out sales people unless I desperately need what they have already.

In case you don't because you prefer to do the research yourself, I'm sure that holds for the large majority of HN users, including me. But why do we prefer to do the research ourselves? Because we don't trust the salesman's incentives, objectivity and breadth of knowledge. If we had a utopian salesman who only cared about getting the right product for us and has intimate knowledge of every relevant product, it'd be a fools errand to do the research ourselves other than as a genuine hobby.

I think the parent comment is hoping for the creation of AI Chatbots who at least get close enough to such a salesman. And while for-profit companies will surely attempt to instill perverse incentives, unlike with humans we only really need one AI salesman without them and we can all use that one. This might sound idealistic ("if everyone just used Linux..") but the barrier of usage is low enough that I see Google and MS having a much harder time competing with agents without perverse incentives than they've had competing with e.g. Linux or Firefox - especially if Google (the search engine) loses its moat.