The race is on to have AI agents do your online shopping for you

Millions of Americans will be opening their laptops to buy gifts this holiday season, but tech companies are trying to leave the job of online shopping to AI agents instead.

Perplexity recently released an AI shopping agent for its paying customers in the US. It’s designed to navigate retail websites for you, find the products you’re looking for, and even click the checkout button on your behalf.

Perplexity may be the first major AI startup to offer this, but others have been exploring the space for some time – so expect to see more AI purchasing agents in 2025. OpenAI and Google are reportedly developing their own AI agents that can make purchases such as booking flights and hotels. It would also make sense for Amazon, where millions of people already search for products, to further develop its AI chatbot Rufus to also help with the checkout process.

Tech companies are using a mix of new and old techniques to bypass the barriers retailers have erected to prevent unwanted bots from using their sites. Rabbit released its LAM Playground earlier this month, which allows an AI agent to navigate websites on your behalf using a computer in a data center. Anthropic’s Computer Use Agent does the same thing, but is hosted on your PC.

Meanwhile, Perplexity is working with Stripe to leverage some legacy payment features repurposed for AI agents.

Stripe provides Perplexity’s AI agent with disposable debit cards to spend money online – a repurposed version of the Stripe Issuing feature. This allows the broker to buy you a pair of socks without needing access to your entire bank account. That way, in the event of a hallucination, the agent will simply buy the wrong socks for a few dollars and not spend your rental money on socks.

Google’s AI agent reportedly needs access to your credit card information, which could give consumers pause. However, some companies already know your billing information—like Google, Amazon, Apple, and Shopify—and will regularly fill out forms for you when you shop online. This could give these companies an advantage when shipping products in this space.

These tools could transform online shopping — something that retailers and advertisers who make fortunes off the status quo may not be happy about.

Just as AI chatbots have proven to be somewhat useful in surfacing information that is difficult to find in search engines, AI shopping agents have the potential to find products or offers that you might not have found otherwise . In theory, these tools could save you hours when you need to book a cheap flight or help you easily find a good birthday gift for your brother-in-law.

There’s still a long way to go before AI agents can buy everything on your vacation wish list, but there are plenty of companies vying for it.

Based on our initial attempts, Perplexity’s purchasing agent takes hours to process purchases and sometimes encounters issues where it is unable to purchase items at all. Overall, using the product today seems to be more complicated than buying it on Amazon.

According to Perplexity, human reviewers are also involved to ensure that the AI ​​agent is working correctly. In the AI ​​industry, it’s not uncommon to have a “human in the loop” – but most AI chatbots don’t see the items I buy or my billing address. This raises some privacy issues for Perplexity and any company that employs its human auditors.

TechCrunch tested Perplexity’s purchasing agent and asked him to buy us toothpaste.

After prompting Perplexity with “I’d like to buy some toothpaste,” he returned several options from Walmart, Amazon and a few smaller sites. For some options, Perplexity provides a “Buy with Pro” button under the product, while other options take you directly to the retailer’s website. Buy with Pro is Perplexity’s purchasing agent at work.

I chose a tube of Crest from Walmart. Without leaving the Perplexity app, I was able to checkout and (apparently) purchase the toothpaste. But instead of paying Walmart, my bank statement showed that I had paid Perplexity’s agent.

Three hours later, I received an email from Perplexity saying the representative couldn’t buy me the toothpaste because it was sold out at Walmart. The next day I attempted to purchase another tube of Crest from the Perplexity purchasing agent. Eight hours later, I received confirmation from Perplexity that it worked.

So what is there? Why was my first purchase declined and why did it take hours to complete both?

While Perplexity Shopping may look a lot like Amazon or TikTok Shop, where you can purchase items from a wide range of retailers who upload and manage storefronts on the platform, it’s actually completely different.

Perplexity’s AI agent apparently crawls retailers’ websites and gives you information about their products. Because this process isn’t necessarily real-time, there can be a discrepancy between what Perplexity tells you and what a store actually has in stock, which seemed to be the case in my case.

Perplexity declined to comment on whether retailers such as Walmart were aware that their products were appearing on the company’s app. This suggests that the scraping and purchasing process is not authorized by these companies – which could make it difficult to purchase or return items.

You also don’t purchase anything when you checkout in the Perplexity app. You pay Perplexity exactly how much the item costs, give the AI ​​agent instructions on how to purchase a specific item, and ask it to include your name and shipping address when doing so. Some time later, perhaps hours, the agent performs this task, or at least attempts to.

“It’s like giving a real-world assistant a small pot of money and giving him rules about how he can spend it,” said Jeff Weinstein, head of product at Stripe, who helped build Stripe’s AI agent toolkit contributed. in an interview with TechCrunch.

But instead of giving money (in a pot or otherwise) to a real human assistant who I would trust to buy toothpaste itself, Perplexity’s AI agent needs to be occasionally monitored by another human. And even then it doesn’t always work.

“I can’t reveal details about how Buy with Pro works, but I can say that there is human oversight that provides occasional assistance, ensuring transactions are completed in a timely manner and we avoid issues like buying the wrong one “Avoid product,” Perplexity spokeswoman Sara Platnick said in an email to TechCrunch.

Nowadays, it is commonplace to assign human controllers to monitor AI systems. Companies like Scale AI and Turing have built large companies around the service. But in this case, Perplexity declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions about how often human oversight was necessary, how involved humans are in the process, and whether human controllers observe AI agents shopping in real time. The lack of transparency here may not bother everyone, but it’s definitely worth mentioning.

If AI shopping agents really take off, it could mean fewer people visiting online stores where retailers have historically been able to upsell or encourage impulse purchases. This also means that advertisers may not receive valuable information about shoppers so they can be targeted with other products.

For this reason, these same advertisers and retailers are unlikely to let AI agents disrupt their industry without a fight. This is one of the reasons why companies like Rabbit and Anthropic train AI agents to use a website’s normal interface. That is, the bot would use the website the same way you do, clicking and typing in a browser in a way that is largely indistinguishable from a real person. This way, there is no need to ask for permission to use an online service through a backend – permission that could be revoked if you harm their business.

Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu said in a recent interview that AI agents are becoming better than humans at solving CAPTCHA, the human verification tests that previously prevented bots from shopping online. This means website owners need to develop more sophisticated methods to prove their identity online.

It’s possible that AI agents could one day be part of a better online shopping experience than exists today. Perplexity’s buying agent is far from it, but it offers a first glimpse of what could be.

Next year, we’ll likely see better versions of AI shopping agents from Perplexity, OpenAI, and Google. We may only be seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how this could change the online retail industry and what problems AI agent developers might encounter.