#25: When AI Buys Your Groceries

AI, commerce, and the future of daily decisions

Visa recently announced Intelligent Commerce, a new AI product that enables AI to shop and pay on behalf of a customer. Check out this quote from Visa’s Chief Product Officer Jack Forestell on their new product launch.

“Now, with Visa Intelligent Commerce, AI agents can find, shop and buy for consumers based on their pre-selected preferences. Each consumer sets the limits, and Visa helps manage the rest.”

Yep, the future is here.

But Visa isn’t the only company redefining how humans engage in commerce. Mastercard released Agent Pay in partnership with Microsoft, another AI product that streamlines product discovery and payments. There’s also a rumored partnership between OpenAI and Shopify, with speculation that we’ll soon be able to make purchases directly through the ChatGPT interface.

AI will soon not only help you decide what to buy, but it will also make the purchase for you, all within your pre-defined spending guardrails. Very soon, it will be common to shop for products without even heading to a brand’s website (massive implications for SEO).

Say you want to make lasagna for dinner tonight but don’t know which ingredients you’ll need. It’ll soon become instinct to ask ChatGPT (or Claude, or Perplexity) what you need from the grocery store to make lasagna. The LLM output will give you a specific grocery list and a recommendation for picking up the ingredients at nearby stores. Or if you want to really automate the process, ChatGPT will communicate with your Instacart account to add the ingredients to cart and then make the grocery purchase for you (of course, using your credit card details).

Boom, lasagna ingredients delivered to your door 30 minutes later. Type in another prompt and you’ll have a detailed recipe walkthrough too.

The lasagna example is just one way AI makes commerce more efficient. No endless browsing or guessing what you may need. One clear list of ingredients and you didn’t need to jump from website to website or tab to tab on your phone or desktop. The experience happened all within your ChatGPT app.

Taking a step back, there is a growing resentment towards AI. Many believe it will create a dystopian world that lacks human connection. Others believe it’ll lead to drastic job loss given AI’s automation capabilities.

Although I mostly disagree with these points as I believe technological innovation leads to a net gain for society (emphasis on “net”), I believe some use cases of AI will be more effective for society today than others.

The intersection of AI and commerce is one of them. In general, I believe that AI will be best enabled by automating low-stakes decisions, freeing up time for humans to focus on solving personal and societal problems.

Figuring out the lasagna recipe and buying the ingredients? Low stakes (unless you’re a chef at a restaurant). And there are countless other examples of small decisions that can be automated by AI in the commerce world.

I think typical day-to-day commerce can be automated as the downside is minimal. But you’ll probably want to reserve more mental energy for high-ticket purchases, like furniture, a TV, or even a house.

In AI + Brand (Part I), I walked you through my wardrobe choice for an event I attended. The thing is, I didn’t really make a choice, I let ChatGPT tell me what to wear based on the context that I provided it. Thankfully I had the outfit in my closet, but if I didn’t, the shirt would have been easy to buy based on ChatGPT’s recommendation. The decision was automated by AI.

Furthermore, I’m curious how far humans will be willing to push the boundaries of AI and commerce. Deferring day-to-day decision-making to AI gives us space to focus on what really matters: relationships with each other. Imagine having an extra hour or two back every day to spend with family and friends because AI was able to automate the monotonous tasks and low-stakes decisions that take up way too much time and energy. Automating low-stakes commerce decisions is a great place to begin.

Now, imagine this scenario.

Your alarm clock goes off at 7AM. You immediately regret going to bed late last night and choose to hit the snooze button.

After nine minutes go by and another ring goes off, you check your phone to see a weak sleep score on your Whoop app.

Ping! You get a few more notifications on your phone coming from Instacart, Starbucks, and Peloton.

Instacart adjusts your grocery delivery order today, adding in more fruits and vegetables since your sleep score was low and your Starbucks also changes your typical latte to a red eye given you are dragging. Then Peloton swaps your heavy lifting session to cardio and stretching as your body’s strain level is too high for the former. You’ve provided pre-approval on spend limits, so the apps can work in sync with each other and execute transactions so that you can be optimized in the way that you prefer.

Now, this is a hypothetical scenario as I highly doubt Whoop is legally allowed to share health data, however I believe we are much closer to this scene becoming reality than we realize (my guess is within the next two years).

As neat as this scenario sounds to a technology enthusiast being myself, it’ll take more than fans like me embracing AI to automate low-stakes decisions. We’ll have to trust that information can be passed through by AI agents to many different applications in a safe and secure way. Cybersecurity will remain critical as automated workflows expand, creating new vulnerabilities that bad actors could exploit. If I really do want my Whoop to adjust my grocery list, morning coffee, and workout plan, I need to be confident in my data being stored and transmitted securely.

But most importantly, we will all have to want to automate parts of our lives. Not everyone will want their coffee order or grocery list to be adjusted based on how they slept the night before. People do cherish the day-to-day low-stakes decisions as they provide a sense of choice and identity.

So, I’ll pose the question: what do you wish was automated in your life and what are you holding on to doing yourself? The answers will differ for everyone. And that’s exactly the point.