Personal agents already work on Gladly. Don’t buy the hype.

Personal agents can already shop with brands that run on Gladly. An agent like Muse goes to a brand’s site the way a person would. It opens the chat window or calls the phone line and talks to the same Gladly AI agent every other shopper talks to, so it can ask whether a jacket runs small, put something in the cart or fix a shipping address before the box leaves the warehouse. Nobody had to turn anything on. The agent goes through the same identity checks and runs into the same limits as any shopper would.

A lot of you have spent this week getting emails about how personal agents are the biggest thing to happen to commerce since the shopping cart, and a few of you have asked us whether you’re already behind. You’re not, because those agents can already reach you. That being said, agent-to-agent commerce isn’t the revolution it’s being sold as, and there are three big problems with it.

1. It’s mostly marketing

Every few months the AI industry finds a new thing to get excited about, and right now it’s personal agents. Muse is making headlines, two standards got announced in the same week, and a lot of ecommerce and CX vendors would love for you to believe this is innovation you need to buy. A personal agent is basically ChatGPT or Claude with access to your accounts and your credit card. It reads websites and fills in forms and asks questions in chat windows, the same way those tools already do.

The only new part is that the agent is acting on your behalf, and that raises a lot of security and privacy questions. When an agent shows up asking to change the shipping address on an order, the brand has to figure out whether it’s working for the real shopper or for someone who got hold of that shopper’s email address, whether the shopper agreed to this specific thing or to something murkier three weeks ago, who’s on the hook when it buys the wrong thing, and where everything it learned about that shopper goes when the conversation is over. On Gladly, an agent gets treated like the shopper it says it’s working for, with the same identity verification and the same limits. Your team decides request by request what your AI is allowed to do (courtesy of our AI Steering), and that applies to every agent that talks to it.

2. It only works if every tech giant agrees

For a personal agent to shop for you the way the pitch decks describe, it has to get into every store you buy from, and every one of those stores has to want it there. When has every tech giant ever agreed on anything? We’re almost twenty years into the iPhone and we still have families being torn apart over the green bubble vs blue bubble debate. Amazon took Perplexity to court over an AI agent that shopped on Amazon for Perplexity’s users. In March a federal judge sided with Amazon, finding the agent was there “with the Amazon user’s permission, but without authorization by Amazon.” Amazon is never going to let an agent built by Meta crawl its site comparing prices. TikTok isn’t going to let an Amazon-powered agent price-check TikTok Shop either. This will always be a problem, and if these revolutionary personal agents can’t actually work for the biggest websites that people do a bulk of their shopping and browsing on, consumers aren’t gonna use them for your brand’s website either, sorry ‘bout it.

3. Shoppers don’t want it

The people most excited about an agent doing your shopping are tech billionaires, and tech billionaires don’t represent actual people. A lot of them seem to think shopping is a low-vibration non-efficiency-maxxing chore that’s beneath them. This summer Sam Altman suggested parents have ChatGPT make a daily podcast about their kids’ soccer games and birthdays to play on the drive to school. The bemused replies boiled down to “what if you just talked to your children, you insane person?” Agents that shop for you come from the same kind of thinking.

Real people like shopping. Accenture surveyed more than 25,000 consumers in 16 countries and found 9% are open to letting an agent shop for them on its own. The same report found people hang on to some choices because “the search itself is part of the pleasure.”

Gartner found willingness to let AI make the purchase decision topped out at 11%, and that was in low-stakes categories like personal care and household supplies. Walmart tried selling through checkout inside ChatGPT, and it converted about three times worse than Walmart’s own website. People will hand an agent the errands, like reordering paper towels or chasing a late package. The shopping itself, where they ask whether something will fit and whether it’s worth it and what goes with it, they still want to do, but they want help doing it.

Keep your traffic

The most valuable thing you own in all of this is the shopper who comes to your site on purpose. The brands that come out ahead will meet that shopper with a conversation that knows what they bought last time and can answer the question that decides whether they buy this time, which is what we built Gladly to do.

Some of the biggest companies in the world would love for shopping to happen inside their apps, where they keep the shopper and the data and the relationship and you get the order minus their commish.

Anyone telling you it’s inevitable that you hand your shoppers to someone else’s agent or someone else’s app is a charlatan, and they usually have something to gain from you believing it.