101–110 of 300 posts
You can either have AI be honest or AI become a marketing tool. The two are fundamentally incompatible. You won't get it to push your products when users ask what's the best XYZ - either because it'll be too honest to lie or because it'll be too expensive for you.
I’m currently using Gemini to research components for a remote controlled plane. I have the frame of the plane and now need to buy correctly specced servo motors, an engine, battery, etc etc. It has saved me so much time and educated me tremendously on how the different components interact and the options available.
If I could just press “buy” from within Gemini and pay via Google Pay (or better still, Apple Pay) I’d do it in a heartbeat.
If ChatGPT can do this today, I need to try it.
I’ve been running e-commerce systems for 30 years (tech, marketing, etc). This was going to fail from the start for one reason: intent. Most people using AI chat are exploring ideas and solutions. They’re doodling, not shopping. Or in old timey parlance, they’re looky-loos or tire kickers at best. Anyone who’s had to justify ad spend in e-commerce can tell you that some sources produce huge traffic with absolutely te…
I'm confused by the comment that it failed because it forced single item purchases. Most of my "ecommerce" use is researching and buying one item at a time.
I’ve been running e-commerce systems for 30 years (tech, marketing, etc). This was going to fail from the start for one reason: intent. Most people using AI chat are exploring ideas and solutions. They’re doodling, not shopping. Or in old timey parlance, they’re looky-loos or tire kickers at best. Anyone who’s had to justify ad spend in e-commerce can tell you that some sources produce huge traffic with absolutely te…
This is from one of the links in the article > Why this is happening. Two forces are slowing agentic commerce, according to Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush: infrastructure and trust. Real-time catalog normalization across tens of millions of SKUs is a decade-scale problem Google already solved with Merchant Center, and consumers still default to checkout flows they trust — Apple Pay, Google W…
What the hell would AI even bring to the table here? Already your favourite e commerce site has all your data. You can switch on the "buy this automatically" feature.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they're operating beyond their current (human) capacity, trying to test out too many things at a time. But a dreamer in me entertains another idea: perhaps they're just holding back, because they realize that actually succeeding at this will instantly kill (or at least mortally wound) e-commerce as we know it. (This is a more narrow version of my belief that general AI tools like LLMs fundamentally don't fit…
> This is a more narrow version of my belief that general AI tools like LLMs fundamentally don't fit as additions to products, but rather subsume products That seems reasonable, its just yet to be seen if LLMs are a form of artificial intelligence in any meaningful sense of the word. They're impressive ML for sure, but that is in fact different from AI despite how companies building them have tried to merge the terms…
A software product (whether bought or rented as a service) is defined by its boundaries - there's a narrow set of specific problems, and specific ways it can be used to solve those problems, and beyond those, it's not capable (or not allowed) to be used for anything else. The specific choices of what, how, and on what terms, are what companies stick a name to to create a "software product", and those same choices also determine how (and how much) money it will make for them.
Those boundaries are what LLMs, as general-purpose problem solvers, break naturally, and trying to force-fit them within those limits means removing most of the value they offer.
Consider a word processor (like MS Word). It's solving the problem of creating richly-formatted, nice-looking documents. By default it's not going to pick the formatting for you, nor is it going to write your text for you. Now, consider two scenarios of adding LLMs to it:
- On the inside: the LLM will be able to write you a poem or rewrite a piece of document. It could be made to also edit formatting, chat with you about the contents, etc.
- From the outside: all the above, but also the LLM will be able to write you an itinerary based on information collected from maps/planning tool, airline site, hotel site, a list of personal preferences of your partner, etc. It will be able to edit formatting to match your website and presentation made in the competitor's office tools and projected weather for tomorrow.
Most importantly, it will be able to do both of those automatically, just because you set up a recurring daily task of "hey, look at my next week's worth of calendar events and figure out which ones you can do some useful pre-work for me, and then do that".
That's the distinction I'm talking about, that's the threat to software industry, and it doesn't take "true AI" - the LLMs as we have today are enough already. It's about generality that allows them to erase the boundaries that define what products are - which (this is the "mortal wound to software industry" part) devalues software products themselves, reducing them to mere tool calls for "software agents", and destroying all the main ways software companies make money today - i.e. setting up and exploiting tactics like captive audience, taking data hostage, bundled offers, UI as the best marketing/upsale platform, etc.
(To be clear - personally, I'm in favor of this happening, though I worry about consequences of it happening all at once.)
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How would they mortally wound the software industry as of today? I find their software to be of subpar quality and resilience anyways.
By embracing adversarial interoperability - instead of chasing hundreds of integration deals across industries that put LLMs in products, they focused fully on integrating product access into chat, by combination of business deals, apps/MCPs, and engineer/designer support for users, all directed towards the goal of having the LLM become the "superapp" where work is done, gradually replacing product classes in order o…
These are also the same companies allowing their AI to make decisions in war, have no qualms about the mental issues they’re causing in people, and have abused workers in 3rd world countries for years.
But you think they’re holding out on “destroying the software industry” out of the goodness of their hearts? Come on
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Reliable information on this does not exist on vendor sites, though. It exists on Reddit and in books and in med/physio papers and bunch of other places a SOTA model has read in training or can (for now) access via web search. LLMs are already very good for shopping, but only as long as they sit on the outside.
We are talking about a hypothetical sales chatbot which would be built alongside the business, so they absolutely have the capacity and information necessary to train the chatbot to advise their own clients.
That doesn't follow. In fact, having this capacity and information creates a moral dilemma, as giving customers objectively correct advice is, especially in highly competitive markets, bad for business. Ignorance is bliss for businesses, because this lets them bullshit people through marketing with less guilt, and if there's one thing any business knows, is that marketing has better ROI than product/service quality anyway.
That doesn't seem terribly surprising, a human can quickly look through a grid of shirts to find one they like. ChatGPT would be guessing what they might want and the human would probably get a bad experience there with some regularity.