Maybe the AI Shopping Agent won't have your best interests in mind
I keep seeing takes about how AI shopping agents will help kill the sectors of the economy that extract money by adding enough friction to experiences that people are willing to pay more to avoid the annoyance. If this ends up coming completely true, it'll probably be a good thing (for consumers at least.)
Running an AI model is far from cheap. Yet, many people have already gotten used to having AI features available for free. If people expect the service to be free, but it costs money to run the service, then there's one tried-and-true way to monetize: ads! Also selling user data, but mainly ads!
Expect "free" agentic AI shopping services in the future to buy from the highest advertising bidder, not necessarily getting you the best deal. It'll save you the annoyance of shopping yourself, maybe to the point where everyone will rely on these services like we rely on search engines to browse the web. But don't expect this to actually improve your consumer experience, especially in terms of saving money.
The free agentic AI shopping services may start off nice and actually useful, but they have to make money at some point. In the best case scenario, you're paying directly for the model's compute and training, and in return receive the actual best results, no bias. This is only really true for people willing to pay out of pocket, though, which many "normal" AI users aren't, especially when LLM chatbots are already available online for free.
Hopefully, the future of AI shopping agents is distilled open source model that can be run on-device. More likely, the future of AI shopping agents will (following the trajectory of technology overall) be proprietary models run in data centers that spend your money on the goods or services from the highest-bidding investor/advertiser. Maybe both can coexist, but in that case (also like the current state of technology) only the enthusiasts will have the patience and resources to run the open source models, while everyone else just uses the more convenient free proprietary models.