Perplexity AI, developers of the popular “answer engine” of the same name, recently debuted a shopping agent designed to purchase items through the chatbot interface. However, tests conducted by TechCrunch show just how far the agent has to go before it becomes a reliable online shopper.
The company released its AI shopping agent, dubbed Buy with Pro, in mid-November and made it available to Perplexity Pro subscribers in the United States. The agent is built to search e-commerce websites like Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart for the product you’re looking to purchase, return information and price comparisons on their relative offerings, and even put the item in your cart before completing the transaction on your behalf.
At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. During its experimentation with the agent, TechCrunch found that the AI system took hours to actually make a purchase, if it could at all. Per TechCrunch:
I chose a tube of Crest from Walmart. Without leaving the Perplexity app, I was able to check out and (seemingly) purchase the toothpaste. But instead of paying Walmart, my bank statement showed that I had paid Perplexity’s agent.
Three hours later, I received an email from Perplexity that its agent was not able to buy me the toothpaste, because it was sold out at Walmart. The next day, I tried to purchase another tube of Crest with Perplexity’s shopping agent. Eight hours later, I got a confirmation from Perplexity that it worked.
It should be noted that you’re not buying directly from these websites when using Perplexity’s agent. For one thing, the agent isn’t actively searching these websites upon your request, but rather are returning information scraped from them previously, which can lead to the “out of stock” errors TechCrunch ran into. For another, your purchase order is not being made in real-time. You’re essentially paying Perplexity the cost of the item, giving the agent instructions to navigate to a given website and authorization to purchase that item, a task that the AI may sit on for hours at a time before actually executing it.
“I can’t disclose specifics around how Buy with Pro works, but what I can say is that there is human oversight providing occasional support, which ensures that transactions are completed in a timely manner and we avoid issues like purchasing the wrong product,” a Perplexity spokesperson told TechCrunch.
Perplexity is not alone in its AI agent ambitions. Microsoft plans to release Copilot Actions in early 2025, while Google’s agent system is slated to arrive with the next update to Gemini by the end of the year. Anthropic released its Computer Use feature.
Source: TechCrunch
