“Chatbot developers and retail giants are battling over user data as they lay the foundation for a future in which AI agents can do all your online shopping for you.”
It’s strange how we’ve moved from mall shopping to online shopping to now AI shopping for us
Sigh. This article is all over the place.
The headline suggests that payment processors/AI companies/retailers are fighting about the collection of shopper data.
AI obviously doesn’t collect the kind of data that would be useful to the retailers or even the payment processors. So it does stand to reason that the retailers would be a little miffed about “agentic AI” insinuating itself as the middle man between them and shoppers, effectively cutting them off from that data flow.
But that’s not actually what’s happening. It seems like (potentially), the AI companies want to sell “agentic AI shopping” to the retailers and possibly payment processors? But these entities want information about the shoppers that the AI doesn’t collect and the quibble is over whether the AI can be made to collect that data?