After a long week at work, the perfect Saturday for some people involves grabbing coffee with friends and walking around, spending the hard-earned money they toiled all week to earn. Shopping can be a form of therapy—it’s something even Cher Horowitz understood in Clueless. But Silicon Valley has a different idea: Shopping is a chore best handed to artificial intelligence.
On Tuesday, Meta became the latest tech giant to join the AI shopping rush, with Muse: a personal agent that can use years of social activity to understand a consumer’s taste, search for products, navigate checkout, and prepare a purchase for final approval. It joins a rapidly expanding crowd of AI personal shoppers from Amazon, Google, Walmart, Disney, Uber, and OpenAI, all competing to control the increasingly valuable journey between wanting something and paying for it.
