When you're a solution in search of a problem, you'll try to shoehorn your "solution" into everything.

"This isn't what I wanted to buy, I said my feet are a size 10 and these aren't even shoes!"

"You're absolutely right! Shoes go on feet, and each of your 10 feet could wear shoes. Would you like me to research shoes and purchase them for you?"

I disagree, walmart's website isn't nice. a lot of commerce sites are cancer!

if i can just ask chatgpt or gemini to shop I'd love that.

Just navigating their sites for items is a pain, I can imagine an LLM being great at finding items, and facilitating the browsing experience. My only concern would be having to chat with it a lot, and any dark patterns coercing impulse purchases.

Just because you're not the target audience doesn't mean there's not a real target audience.

There a people today learning to use an LLM instead of an actual search engine. For these types of people whatever happens outside of the LLM app is invisible to them. The social media apps did similar where they started letting people purchase directly within the app. People started looking at these shops rather than doing searches for it elsewhere.

Buying things on a social media app is crazy to me, but I don't use the social media apps. Buying things from an LLM app seems crazy to you, (because it's new and it's borked is fixable), but to people that first turn to their LLM app of choice that decision isn't so crazy.

> Why would anyone have an extra layer of friction too where things could go wrong

It sounds like you're excusing AI, what other systems is AI not suitable for?

I'm not promoting "ChatGPT Checkout", however, just because something sucks now doesn't mean it will suck forever. I'm confident they'll iterate and improve. I say this because my 14-year-old niece's entire world seems to be ChatGPT; it's pretty much the only way she interacts with the internet. I don't think she's alone - all her young peers are like this, too. Retailers know this, so they've got no choice but to improve the experience of purchasing crap through an AI chat system.

[dead]

As bad as the idea of a solution looking for a problem, this is peak science. Copernicus who figured out that the Earth was not at the center of the solar system, he had a solution. The general word is called deduction.

Personally I am an inductivist, I imagine you may be too.

Think top down decisioning is deduction. Bottom up is induction.

You might think induction is amazing but if you ask yourself "Are there any black swans?" and your answer is "No I've never seen any so there can't be any black swans." The issue is you've never actually seen every Swan and actually there are black swans in Australia.

Point being, we don't know if this is a good thing until it's tested.

This is an age-old problem.