Will You Let AI Shop For You?

Dear Reader,

The first thing Abhishek, a 30-year-old manufacturing professional, does when he wants to buy something: consult Gemini.

“I feed in the parameters. It goes through all the online reviews and saves a lot of grunt work on my part,” he said.

Like him, consumers are increasingly replacing Google searches with LLMs. 

Nearly two-thirds of Indian consumers now use AI as part of their shopping journey, according to Boston Consulting Group.

The upsides are clear: you save time, potentially find better deals, and get more personalised recommendations.

But here’s the catch: you don’t always know why AI shows you certain products over others.

If you’re buying a phone, your ‘choice architecture’, meaning the factors that shape your decision, might involve things like price, model, brand and colour. But with AI, that architecture can change depending on how you interact with it, said Prof Animesh Mukherjee, who researches responsible AI at IIT Kharagpur.

In other words, the old SEO rulebook for mastering Google is gone.

An ever-shifting mix of on-site content, third-party chatter and conversation context now shapes what AI recommends.

That opacity cuts both ways. Brands can’t easily force their way in. And consumers don’t know why AI shows certain results over others.

“There have been times where I’ve felt brand-pushing by AI, even when they didn’t fit the prompt,” Abhishek said.

For now, he's willing to accept that trade-off.

But what happens when AI moves beyond recommending products and starts buying them for us?

AI Agents can search, compare, choose and pay for products with far less input from us. What does that mean for the way we shop?

Tune in to the latest episode of The Signal Brief to hear from consumers and experts on this.

You can find The Signal Brief on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Thank you once again for listening and supporting us. We’d love to hear from you; write to us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram or X at @thesignaldotco.

Best,
Kudrat
on behalf of The Core

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