The bots are coming for your customers’ shopping carts—and with it, your digital strategy.

Maxwell Zeff from TechCrunch wrote a great thinkpiece about the race among marketing tech companies to develop AI agents that can take over online shopping for consumers.

If successful, marketers and retailers might face a major disruption. Rather than browsing product pages themselves, consumers could soon delegate the entire shopping process to AI—shifting how products are bought and sold.

A new frontier in e-commerce

Perplexity, an AI startup, recently released an AI shopping agent for its U.S. customers, which can browse retail sites, find products, and even handle checkout.

Other companies, including OpenAI and Google, are also rumoured to be developing AI shopping agents, with plans to handle purchases like booking flights and hotels.

Behind the bots

To bypass retailers’ bot-blocking measures tech companies are using a mix of new and old techniques.

• Rabbit’s LAM Playground lets AI agents navigate websites on your behalf.

• Anthropic’s agent does the same thing, but runs on your personal computer.

Meanwhile, Perplexity is partnering with Stripe to let AI agents make purchases with single-use debit cards, giving the agents limited access—just enough to buy products without tapping into users’ entire bank accounts.

Google’s AI agent, on the other hand, reportedly requires access to credit card info, raising privacy concerns. That said, several companies, like Google, Amazon, Apple, and Shopify already store this data often auto-filling online forms for shoppers, which could give them an edge in the AI shopping space.

Perplexity’s shopping agent

While the concept of AI shopping agents sounds promising, like all new tech, there are still a lot of challenges to work through.

TechCrunch tested out Perplexity’s shopping agent by asking it to buy toothpaste.

• The result: In early attempts, the agent took hours to process purchases and sometimes couldn't even complete them. Overall, using the agent seemed more complicated than buying on Amazon.

• The issue: Perplexity’s agent doesn’t make real-time purchases. Instead, it seems to be scraping retailer websites for product info, which can lead to discrepancies between what it shows and what’s actually available.

Perplexity declined to comment on whether retailers were aware of their products appearing on the app, suggesting the scraping process might not be authorized.

What’s next?

The competition is heating up, and AI agents are getting smarter. Some are already better than humans at solving CAPTCHA, the security tests designed to prevent bots from shopping online.

E-commerce managers may soon need to rethink how they distinguish between bots and real users.

The Top Three 🥉

The industry’s most important stories today.

1
FFS: Experts predict brands may reduce messaging on social and environmental issues during Trump's second term. more

• With political pressure mounting, brands might prioritize caution over progressive initiatives to avoid consumer backlash.

• Some companies, like Walmart, are already scaling back diversity and inclusion (DE&I) efforts, with concerns over legal risks and boycotts. Cause who needs inclusion?

2
Google’s new generative AI video model, Veo, is now live. more

• Like other video creation tools, it can create “high-quality”1080p resolution videos in various visual and cinematic styles from text or image prompts.

• Tread carefully, AI-generated content is already showing up in ads, like Coca-Cola’s recent holiday campaign, which consumers hated.

3
AI-powered media buying is set to take an even bigger slice of media sales in 2025. more 

• Meta's Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns and Google's Performance Max have helped platforms offset ad revenue losses from privacy changes.

• With 60% of U.S. ad buyers having used or planning to use these tools, it’d be nice if we could finally get some transparency and control.

Today’s Other News ☑︎

Everything else that matters.

Advertising & SEO 📣

• Fullthrottle.ai launched a generative AI tool called "Audience Library" that organizes first-party data into audience segments based on demographics, behaviour and purchase intent. more

• Microsoft advertisers can now automate insertion order placement in the platform through Prisma. The integration is now live. more

• Walmart's acquisition of Vizio boosts its ad business with streaming options, joining a growing list of retailers vying for brand dollars. But challenges with measurement and ROI are keeping advertisers cautious. more

• Is it broken? Google’s November core update is still causing ranking volatility, well past its expected two-week completion. Now 23 days into the rollout, Google still hasn’t confirmed it's finished. Or confirmed really anything. more

TikTok 🎵

• Retro is back! TikTok is reviving infomercials with QVC-style live events featuring brands like Crocs and Ninja. Viewers can buy directly through TikTok Shop, blending old-school sales tactics with interactive live streams. (No word if ginsu steak knives will be offered.) more

• TikTok is moving closer to testing "TikTok Minis," small in-stream apps similar to those in Douyin, its Chinese counterpart. These "Mini Programs" could enable transactions like food ordering, ride-hailing, and ticket purchases directly within the app. The everything app — isn’t this what Elon wanted? lol more

• TikTok U.K. shared the year’s top businesses, creators, trends and moments on the platform. more

  • The “Looking for a Man in Finance” woman landed a record deal (?!)

  • Potatoes trended with @thespudbrothers

  • TikTok Shop hosts 5,000+ live shopping sessions daily

Social Media 📱

• Bluesky's momentum is building—publishers report 3-4x higher conversions (yes, conversions!) and triple the traffic and engagement. more

• Instagram creators can now turn on replies in broadcast channels, letting participants respond to messages and each other's comments. It’s actually a pretty popular thing with large influencers these days. more

• Meta has launched a new info hub for Threads brands and creators, offering very basic tips for growing your presence. TBH the advice is pretty generic, but it could help newcomers get started on the platform. more

• YouTube's year-in-review highlights its top trending topics on the app. more

  Trending topics include:

  • The U.S. presidential election (of course)

  • Kendrick Lamar

  • Sabrina Carpenter

Commerce & Analytics 🛒 

• Yowza. TikTok Shop saw a 165% increase in shoppers year-over-year during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend. Sales hit more than $100 million on Black Friday alone—3X last year’s total. more

• We’re not sorry. Podcasting in Canada is thriving, with five million more adults listening monthly since 2019. In five years, monthly podcast listenership increased from 25% to 40% of Canadian adults. more

WTF?! 🤣

• UPDATE: More info about that weird ChatGPT glitch where the platform crashes when asked about certain people. OpenAI now says certain public figures are flagged to protect their privacy. But that doesn’t account for them all… more

• 'Wicked' dolls seem to be holding space for... porn? Mattel was recently sued after a link to a hardcore porn site appeared on packaging for dolls tied to the blockbuster movie "Wicked." The toy brand apologized for the mix-up. more 

Marketing Tool of the Day 🔨

Best kept secrets of the digital marketing world¹

Sociamonials helps you create high-ROI social media campaigns.

• Schedule updates to your brand’s TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Google My Business channels.

• Easy automatic reposts optimized for revenue

• Alternative to: Hootsuite and similar platforms

• Integrate user-generated content, launch engaging contests and sweepstakes, and track your influencers and social media metrics

Today’s Trivia Question 🧠

Tap your guess and you could win!

Spotted on Social 🔍

The social web’s best posts in the last 24 hours.