AI "agents" can do your shopping. Should you let them?

Artificial intelligence “agents” promise to do everything from tidying up your email like Marie Kondo declutters a closet, to buying you a pair of heels based on your budget and style preferences.

Yet technology experts warn that outsourcing key decisions to AI exposes consumers to risks, potentially leading to communications errors and costing people money, while also potentially handing hackers the keys to their data. This is particularly true when it comes to so-called agentic commerce, or relying on AI agents to make purchases for you. 

“It isn’t mainstream yet and it’s pretty risky right now, because there aren’t enough guardrails in the system for people to feel comfortable with agents autonomously buying things for them,” Matt Kropp, an AI expert with Boston Consulting Group, told CBS News. “It could potentially go buy a car, but I wouldn’t say, ‘Here’s my credit card.'”  

Such concerns aren’t keeping some of America’s biggiest companies from charging ahead with AI commerce, which they see as a new way to engage customers and to drive more sales by letting AI do the legwork for shoppers.  

For example, American Express this week announced new services and protections for cardholders who make purchases using specified AI agents. That includes verifying the identity of an agent when it makes a purchase, according to the credit card issuer. The service “will protect eligible customers from charges related to AI agent error,” Amex said in a statement. 

Amazon’s agentic AI assistant, dubbed “Rufus,” can track the price of products on the online retailer’s platform, alert customers when the price hits a prescribed level and complete the purchase. 

Walmart, the biggest U.S. retailer, has deployed what it calls a “conversational” AI agent named Sparky that the company says can help consumers find products, provide customer reviews and help with ordering. 

Roughly a quarter of Americans between the ages of 18 and 39 say they have tried using AI to research products or to shop, according to November data from market research firm Statista. 

The accelerating adoption of AI is also leading to mishaps. 

Consider what happened to Sebastian Heyneman, the founder of a San Francisco-based tech startup. According to the New York Times, he instructed an AI agent to secure him a speaking opportunity at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The bot succeeded in landing him a coveted slot at the annual gathering of powerbrokers — for $30,000, a fee he couldn’t afford.

Heyneman used a bot by Tasklet, a company that lets businesses automate routine business tasks with AI agents. Andrew Lee, the founder of Tasklet, told CBS News that such problems can arise when a user prompt gives the AI conflicting instructions.

Lee also said agentic AI today is fully capable of shopping for people and doing “normal things consumers can do.” But just because tech can do something doesn’t mean it should be used in that fashion, he warned.

“The specific use case of shopping is not a good thing to use these systems for — yet,” he told CBS News. “The agents are fundamentally hard to trust. Personally, I am not super comfortable with that yet. I like to control where my money goes myself, and as a business, we don’t recommend that.”

The reason: Bad actors can lure AI agents into turning over a consumer’s personal information, Bretton Auerbach, founder of a New York-based tech startup, told CBS News.

“If you give an agent your credit card and say, ‘Go to this website and buy me something online,’ there are ways to trick the agent,” he said. “It might mistake a legitimate website for a phishing website that says in big, bold, text, ‘Paste your credit card number here.'”  

Consider what happened to Sebastian Heyneman, the founder of a San Francisco-based tech startup. According to the New York Times, he instructed an AI agent to secure him a speaking opportunity at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The bot succeeded in landing him a coveted slot at the annual gathering of powerbrokers — for $30,000, a fee he couldn’t afford.