[jordanb]

I suspect part of this is rich people coming up with use cases. If you're rich enough money means nothing but product selection feels like a burden so you have an assistant who does purchasing on your behalf. You want your house stocked with high quality items without having to think of it.

For the rest of us, the idea of a robot spending money on our behalf is kinda terrifying.

[potatolicious]

> "I suspect part of this is rich people coming up with use cases."

Yes. Having been in the room for some of these demos and pitches, this is absolutely where it's coming from. More accurately though, it's wealthy people (i.e., tech workers) coming up with use cases that get mega-wealthy people (i.e., tech execs) excited about it.

So you have the myopia that's already present in being a wealthy person in the SFBA (which is an even narrower myopia than being a wealthy American generally), and matmul that with the myopia of being a mega-wealthy individual living in the SFBA.

It reminds me of the classic Twitter post: https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888?lan...

I honestly see this as a major problem with our industry. Sure, this has always been true to some extent - but the level of wealth in the Bay Area has gotten so out-of-hand that on a basic level the mission of "can we produce products that the world at large needs and wants" is compromised, and increasingly severely so.

[ryandrake]

It's almost like every recent silicon valley product is designed by multi-millionaires whose problems are so out of touch with regular-people problems. "I have so much money and don't know what to spend it on, it would be great if AI could shop for me!" Or "I have so little time, it would be great if an app could chauffeur me around and deliver food for me." Or "It's Christmas again, I need to write heartfelt, personalized letters to 1,000 important clients, partners, friends, and relatives. Why not have an AI write them?"

[smelendez]

I think that's right.

It's like the endless examples around finding restaurants and making reservations, seemingly as common a problem in AI demos as stain removal is in daytime TV ads. But it's a problem that even Toast, which makes restaurant software, says most people just don't regularly have (https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/data/restaurant-wait-times-and...).

Most people either never make restaurant reservations, or do so infrequently for special occasions, in which case they probably already know where they want to go and how to book it.

[rsynnott]

> Most people either never make restaurant reservations, or do so infrequently for special occasions, in which case they probably already know where they want to go and how to book it.

And even if they don't know, they likely either live in a small place, in which case there's not going to be a huge amount of choice, or a big place, in which case there will be actual guides written by people whose actual job it is to review restaurants. It really seems like a solution in desperate need of a problem.

[sebastiennight]

This is fascinating to me, as I basically never go to a restaurant without a booking.

But I think you're underestimating this use case, as the data you linked shows that Google is the top referral used by people to find the restaurant/booking website, and once SEO is overtaken by ChatGPT-like experiences it would make sense that "book this for me" would be a one-click (or one-word) logical next step that Google never had.

[JKCalhoun]

Dreamt of a labor-saving future of AI and robots, ended up instead a destitute hoarder of crap from Amazon.

[geoduck14]

Thinking about grocery shopping makes me think this need is real, but for poor people.

The amount of time that goes into "what food do we need for this week" is really high. An AI tool that connected "food I have" with "food that I want" would be huge.

[int_19h]

An app/AI that makes a list is fine. But what poor person would allow the robot to spend money directly?

[wiether]

Poor people convinced that having an (AI) assistant working for them is a status symbol they need.

[s1mplicissimus]

Also, consider what enshittification in this area will look like: First year, all the choices are good, second year, it starts picking worse price/value items, then it goes downhill until you finally do it yourself again. Nope thanks

[feoren]

Correct: as soon as you start using an AI to buy things for you, influence over the choices that AI makes becomes an incredibly tantalizing fruit to be auctioned off. And you don't control that AI, a for-profit entity does. It doesn't matter whether it's working well and acting in your best interest now, it's abundantly clear that it won't be very long before it's conspiring against you. You are the product.

[mindslight]

The ultimate problem is the incentives. Web stores are already forcing us to use their proprietary (web)apps, where they define all of the software's capabilities.

For example, subscription purchases could be a great thing if they were at a predictable trustable price, or paused/canceled themselves if the price has gone up. But look at the way Amazon has implemented them: you can buy it once at the competitive price, but then there is a good chance the listing will have been jacked up after a few months goes by. This is obviously set up to benefit Amazon at the expense of the user. And then Amazon leans into the dynamic even harder by constantly playing games with their prices.

Working in the interest of the user would mean the repeating purchase was made by software that compared prices across many stores, analyzed all the quantity break / sale games, and then purchased the best option. That is obviously a pipe dream, even with the talk of "agentic" "AI". Not because of any technical reason, but because it is in the stores' interest to computationally disenfranchise us by making us use their proprietary (web)apps - instead of an effortless comparison across 12 different vendors, we're left spending lots of valuable human effort on a mere few and consider that enough diligence.

So yes, there is no doubt the quiet part is that these "agents" will mostly not be representing the user, but rather representing the retailers to drive more sales. Especially non-diligent high-margin sales.

[sebastiennight]

> then it goes downhill until you finally do it yourself again

Good news, usually by the time you reach this point in the cycle, the do-it-yourself option has become super-niche and the stores themselves might not even make that available.

[xnx]

Definitely true, but basic goods and services we have today (e.g. every song nd every movie ever made in your pocket) were unimaginable luxuries even 50 years ago.

Uber started as a chauffeur service, but is now available to everyone and is (mostly) a huge improvement over taxis.