Autonomous commerce is here

A SHIFT FROM BUYER AT THE CENTRE OF TRANSACTION TO JUST SETTING GOALS AND LEVERAGING AUTOMATION

- ANIL NAIR

THE IDEA OF shopping has now been elevated to a completely different level. E-commerce was a stepup, when shoppers didn't have to visit a store to make purchases. ChatGPT has just launched a pilot, "Instant Checkout", which allows buyers to make purchases directly within the app, without having to visit other websites, enabling the payment process as well. You just use conversational artificial intelligence (AI) to convey what you want, and the AI engine then takes over.

Instant Checkout operates on your behalf and relieves you of all the intermediate work, including research, comparisons, and the final checkout. Earlier, you scanned various sites to figure your options, assessed what's available, perused reviews and comparatives, added the item to a buying cart, clicked the buy button when you were (reasonably) sure that's what you wanted, and then paid up.

What is happening now will be a huge shift from the buyer being at the centre of the transaction to just setting goals and leveraging automation to achieve them. This alters the market dynamics substantially, defying buyer behaviour concepts, and challenging all current models of commerce. While traditional bots played the role of virtual assistants, offering recommendations, operating within the realms of human oversight, agentic buying will involve gauging the need, perceiving the context, figuring outcomes, and executing through multi-step processes, entirely autonomously.