50 companies told Wired that AI shopping agent sales are tiny: Reveneau

Why it mattersTeams rebuilding sites to be read by agents are preparing for a future their customers have not reached yet. The spend decision this week is unchanged.

Meta told investors this month that Muse is already a shopping force. Wired then called the companies on the other end. Across roughly 50 earnings calls and interviews, named retailers, banks and hotels said agentic traffic was close to nothing. Paresh Dave reported it in Wired.

What companies told their investors

DoorDash said orders from Muse and other agents were in the "hundreds". T-Mobile said it had seen "nothing of significance". Hilton called bookings from agents "insignificant". Ally Financial said activity was "quite low". eBay called it "very, very small". The Indian delivery firm Eternal said agentic commerce was "close to zero".

Wall Street had expected a different story. Analysts predicted that shopping agents would weaken brand loyalty, start price wars and cut margins. Life Time Group, Public Storage and Hartford Insurance Group each said they had seen no cancellations from agents at all.

The one number Meta put forward

Mark Zuckerberg spoke on Meta's earnings call this month. He said more than 10 million people in the US and Canada had activated Muse. He said more than 25 percent used it for shopping, which was above the company's expectations. Meta said it has retail partnerships for Muse with ten companies. Walmart, Best Buy and Gap are three of them. Many of those retailers last reported earnings before Muse launched, Wired noted. Meta declined to comment beyond the call.

What a few companies are already doing

Chipotle digital officer Arlie Sisson said Muse's debut lifted agentic orders by a single-digit percentage, Wired reported. She said agents were failing at Chipotle checkout. Loyalty codes did not apply cleanly. After-hours orders stopped partway through. Chipotle is now editing its site code so agents can finish a purchase.

Costco and Extra Space Storage said sales from AI chatbots were rising fast. Gemini and ChatGPT were the two Wired named. Both companies plan to do the same optimisation for AI agents. DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, who sits on Meta's board, called the current agent hype "delusional" on his own call.

Zuckerberg told investors Meta will charge businesses a fee for transactions that Muse completes. He predicted that income could one day top Meta's advertising business, Wired reported.

Where buyers are already drawing a line

Bank of America became the latest big bank to warn customers about handing login details to AI assistants, Wired reported. Its chief client care officer Ashley Ross wrote the account holder owns whatever an agent does with those credentials. InterContinental Hotels CEO Elie Maalouf said he had reached no conclusions on an eventual Meta deal. Amazon blocked Muse last month, Wired said. Amazon's own position was that Alexa would serve users better. Amazon told Wired this week it now expects to work with outside agents. The marketplace Insurify blocked Muse and then reversed course. It added technology to make sure agents saw accurate offers.

A team paying today for a dedicated agent gateway is building for traffic that is not there. The companies in this story cannot see that traffic yet. The read-only parts are useful either way. Clean product data and a checkout that answers an agent's calls are two of those. The parts that only earn a return at scale can wait. Wait until a Hilton or a Life Time reports real numbers.

Source

Wired, by Paresh Dave.

This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.