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Major AI companies are picturing a future where people share credit card information with chatbots and then trust those bots to become personal shoppers. The companies have been lining up deals to make that vision a reality, like one last week between Visa and OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. NPR's Alina Selyukh explores the next frontier of shopping.
ALINA SELYUKH, BYLINE: One analogy for where we are now in the arc of shopping with AI was offered recently by the CEO of Amazon. Here's Andy Jassy on his latest call with investors.
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ANDY JASSY: Today, it reminds me, in some ways, the stage we're in of what we saw in the early days of search engines.
SELYUKH: Back when people didn't even know how to ask Yahoo or WebCrawler or Ask Jeeves the right question to find the right answer - like, what's a good home printer?
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SELYUKH: I'm looking for a combination printer and scanner to...
OK, so this wasn't really a hypothetical. I did ask this of ChatGPT. And then I tested the boundaries.
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SELYUKH: Can you actually buy it for me? It says, no, I cannot place or complete purchases for you, and I also don't have the ability to enter payment details.
So today, you cannot check out through ChatGPT. You can only browse. In fact, most of the popular AI tools are not there yet, though shopping fully through AI is clearly a goal envisioned by Amazon and Google and OpenAI. This has all kinds of companies scrambling to build themselves into this future - case in point, Visa trying to embed its payment system within ChatGPT.
EMILY PFEIFFER: Everyone has this feeling that they're already behind.
SELYUKH: Emily Pfeiffer is a principal analyst at Forrester, where she advises retailers and brands on digital commerce strategy, which includes AI. And lately, that means cooling a lot of big emotions about the AI race among her clients.
PFEIFFER: A lot of my job right now is saying, everything's OK. You're going to be fine. No one has this figured out.
SELYUKH: It's still really early days. As Amazon's Jassy pointed out, so far, chatbots are kind of messy.
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JASSY: They're not often able to get the pricing right or the product information right.
SELYUKH: And so even among confident users of AI, people tend to mostly use it like I did - to research and compare different options. If you think about how often people abandon their shopping carts on established shopping websites, Pfeiffer says it's even worse with chatbots. And lots of questions have to be sorted out before we march into a future of trusting AI to shop for us - like, what if it buys the wrong thing?
PFEIFFER: We don't currently have any protocols for disputing a payment that's made on our behalf by an agent.
SELYUKH: For example, Target recently updated its terms to say that for now, whatever you buy with the help of AI is on you. You cannot blame AI for your shopping mistakes. In surveys, when shoppers get asked about a scenario where they might give their credit cards to AI to shop on their behalf, the vast majority still say they would not feel comfortable doing that. And there's another thing that this vision of an AI future seems to overlook, Pfeiffer says, which is that for a lot of people, shopping is not a chore to outsource.
PFEIFFER: It's as though we forgot. We just forgot - right? - that shopping is fun. But some shopping intents are not fun. Sometimes I need just the cheapest thing to show up on my doorstep. I'm almost out of paper towels. That's not fun to shop for. Sorry, paper towels. You're not fun.
SELYUKH: And that's the unfun kind of shopping where AI might shine someday.
Alina Selyukh, NPR News.
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