Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
Retailers' hold on real-time product data limits what Instinct and Muse can buy for you
Instinct and Meta's Muse are shipping to consumers, but the retailers holding the price and product feeds have their own plans, and the only conversion figure on the record is Walmart's unhappy one.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Instinct, a startup drawing interest from the tech set, is offering consumers an agent that will buy groceries or book flights on their behalf.
- Meta has debuted Muse, an agent making the same pitch as Instinct to a consumer audience.
- Del Rey said one reason agentic shopping stalled is that companies were building the products without really knowing what problem they were solving.
- Reported Instinct failures include a user who says the agent mishandled a flight refund at a cost of hundreds of dollars and another who lost his Resy account after it hammered a reservation site.
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Why it matters
- constraint An agent's usefulness is decided inside other companies' data policies: where the largest catalog holders withhold detailed real-time pricing, coverage is capped no matter how good the model gets.
- contradiction The rollout is real and the only conversion evidence on the record is negative, so a plan built around the buyer who skips your storefront currently rests on vendor pitches.
- exposure Because these agents act under a shopper's own credentials, the loss from a bad transaction lands on the individual account holder, including bans from the site the agent was using.
- cost If agent-mediated orders scale, Amazon loses the surface where it shows shoppers other things to buy, the part of the business Kafka described it forfeiting by becoming a dumb pipe.
What limits an agent that shops is access to data. Jason Del Rey, who covers retail full-time at his newsletter The Aisle, told Business Insider that getting detailed pricing and product data in real time has been one of the hard parts. Real time, he said, is one of the things AI is particularly bad at right now [7]. He also said some retailers, Amazon among them, do not want to make that data easy to get [8]. An agent's usable catalog is therefore set by which merchants tolerate it.
The one measured result on the record runs against the pitch. OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT last year, letting a shopper buy without leaving the chat [4]. A few months later, according to Del Rey, Walmart said "The conversion on this was awful" [5]. His explanation was about how people shop: "People don't want to buy one item at a time. They want to build a shopping cart," he said [6].
Del Rey expects the incumbents to build inward. "I think a lot of these companies are just going to try building this stuff internally and making their sites smarter and be able to do complex things more easily ... not to be agent-friendly, because they're worried about disintermediation," he said [15]. His open question was whether Muse and Instinct have enough leverage to get those companies to the table at all [23].
Amazon's answer has been the same for a while. Andy Jassy has taken the question on roughly every earnings call for six quarters, which is eighteen months at three months a quarter [17][20]. Del Rey's rendering of the answer: "We will eventually do business with some of the third-party AI companies, but right now the experience they give shoppers for shopping is [bad]" [18]. Del Rey added, "I don't think he's been wrong" [19].
Peter Kafka, who conducted the interview, wrote that the change in shopping could be at least as big a deal as the move from brick-and-mortar stores to the internet [21]. In the same piece he wrote that "These are still niche ideas, and it's entirely unclear where this goes" [3]. Asked whether Instinct and Muse actually work, Del Rey said, "That is the big question" [22].
The decision available this quarter is narrower than the strategy question. Instinct and Muse tell users that if they hand over login credentials for a site that requires them, the agent will go ahead and do the task [11]. Del Rey said a lot of sites and retailers already run bot-fighting technologies [10]. So the first contact most merchants have with agent demand arrives at the fraud and abuse rules. Someone there has to decide whether traffic that logs in as a customer and behaves like a script gets blocked, throttled or served. That call gets made long before anyone signs a product feed agreement, and Del Rey said he has not seen any horror stories about Muse yet [14].
What to watch
- Whether Instinct or Muse publishes a completion or conversion figure that can be set against Walmart's Instant Checkout result.
- Whether Amazon signs a deal with a third-party agent company, and what product and pricing data it agrees to expose.
- Whether a large retailer states publicly that credentialed agent traffic is permitted, and how it tells that traffic apart from abuse.