Agentic commerce?

One of the hot topics that everyone is talking about is agents doing your shopping for you. Popular apps like Muse by Meta and Instinct can now log into (most) places with your credentials and handle your shopping for you.

In the last few days, I’ve read that DoorDash and UberEats discussed the agents in food deliveries and both have mentioned miniscule amounts of orders by agents.

I’m personally trying to figure out these agents doing my shopping for me. For the most part, I’m not completely seeing it. When it comes to my food, I take joy in searching for something that I actually want to eat. Yes, it can get overwhelming and take longer than expected but that’s because of my own indecision. If I know what I want and I want to order quickly, it takes me about 30 seconds now. Is the agents benefit here really saving you that minute?

On the other end of the spectrum, I completely get the benefit of having an agent book flights for you. That is something that always takes me more time and I will probably start using that use case first. But once again, I’m still running into the problem that if I know exactly which flight I want then it only takes me 5 minutes to book it. It takes me longer solely because I’m trying to make a decision on the best flight.

Perhaps I’m just getting old, but I’m not fully seeing the gigantic benefit of an agent going through a checkout for you. At the end of the day, I still want to make the decision of what I want to wear, what I want to eat, and what flight I want to take. That’s the thing that takes the longest.

All that said, I do see the major benefit of an agent doing my research for me and that so far has been the biggest win for me.