hi bud buds,
saw a few major “ai agents for consumers” product releases come through this week:
microsoft released copilot web actions, which now lets it take actions on “most websites” like booking tickets, reserving restaurants
amazon launched buy for me, which lets its ai shop for third-party stores on your behalf (???) through the amazon app
seems… like a terrible customer experience waiting to happen.
i’m generally pretty skeptical of fully agentic consumer experiences. ai-assisted search? super bullish — feels like it can supercharge how people already shop. but i think it’s critical that i still have final say over what i buy. there’s a huge difference between 99% automated and 100% automated. the moment ai crosses that line and actually makes the purchase, the dynamic shifts completely.
to play devil’s advocate against myself, in the pre ai world 🦖, there are a couple consumer patterns that validate the “agentic consumer” paradigm: (1) business exec who outsources birthday present shopping to executive assistant, or (2) celebrity who lets their stylist handle their entire wardrobe. so you could argue that “agentic consumer” products are democratizing this luxury lifestyle for the rest of us.
however, one big gap: what happens when you’re unhappy with the shirt the ai picked out, or the dinner reservation it made?
if you’re rich as hell, it doesn’t matter. toss the shirt. book another $600 dinner tomorrow. but for regular people, a bad purchase—or a bad experience—actually stings. financially and emotionally. imagine you and your partner finally get a night away from the kids… and your ai sends you to an absolute dog crap restaurant with fantastic seo. i also cannot imagine a worse consumer experience than having to drive to a store irl and physically return some weird ass shirt that dumb dumb alexa ordered for me.
time will tell, but for now: consider me bearish on agentic consumer products.
love you bud buds, talk to you soon
xxo,
dj
last week’s product launches
sick
tiktok launched tiktok for artists, a performance + promo dashboard for musicians. absolutely love this space (analytics for creators)
spotify added gen ai ads + programmatic buying, enabling real-time voiceover generation and ad scripting. this seems like the future of advertising: fully autonomous (self-optimizing via gen ai) digital ads
:-)
lost the plot
substack debuted a tiktok-like video feed in-app to help creators get discovered beyond just newsletters
open ledger released pokétax, a gamified tax tool where you battle “tax trainers” for deductions
meh+
anthropic launched claude for education, offering a school-focused version of claude. includes “learning mode” for critical thinking …. lol …. whatever that means
apple launched priority notifications, an ai system that highlights time-sensitive alerts…
bye bye, love you,
dj