Artificial intelligence firm Anthropic has published a set of ‘blueprints’ for retailers to build their own e-commerce bots that shop on behalf of customers.
The blueprints contain “the harnesses, patterns, and guardrails” a retailer’s engineering team needs “to get a commerce agent running in days”.
The resulting Claude-based shopping agent is intended to “live inside” a retailer’s app or website, allowing customers to explain their needs, and serve up product suggestions based on the store’s catalogue and the customer’s preference and order history.
The agent is able to build a basket of products and hand it over to the retailer’s own checkout system. It is also able to handle “customer service questions in the same conversation”, such as responding to where an order is, how to return or exchange an item, and what the refund policy says, instead of sending the customer to a support page.
It can also be used internally by the retailer, Anthropic said, to “answer questions about sales performance like what’s selling and what isn’t”; track inventory and proactively flag problems, like an item about to sell out before a promotion starts; recommend pricing and promotions based on the store’s own sales history; and draft marketing campaigns “to move the products that need moving”.
Supermarkets are increasingly focused on how to leverage agentic commerce. Earlier this month, Tesco appointed its first group agentic director, a new role responsible for exploring how the supermarket responds to consumers using AI to do their shopping for them.
Lucy Cooper was last week named the supermarket’s group customer experience & agentic director, joining from THG Ingenuity.
“The most interesting question in commerce right now isn’t how AI helps people shop. It’s what happens when AI starts shopping for them,” Cooper said.
“The weekly shop might be the perfect proving ground… high-frequency, habitual and highly personal. Full of decisions most of us would happily delegate,” she added.
Consumers may take more convincing. While a third of consumers now prefer to start or support shopping in AI chat apps, according to a February Valtech survey, and March research by Kantar found a third of people would buy directly through AI tools rather than click to a retailer website, trust remains low.
March research from Billion Dollar Boy found only 35% of consumers believe AI provides quality product recommendations, while 63% are uncomfortable with AI using their browsing and purchase history to deliver recommendations.
Retailers also need to navigate whether customers prefer an agnostic AI recommending options or a retailer’s own agent guiding them to purchase.
Recent PSE Consulting research across 4,250 consumers in the UK, US, France and Germany found 74% prefer an independent AI assistant for shopping, while only 10% want AI embedded within a single retail or delivery platform.
“Consumers want an agnostic agent at the top of the funnel, helping them search, compare and build a shortlist, before moving to a merchant or marketplace they trust to complete the purchase,” said Chris Jones, managing director at PSE Consulting.
“Anthropic giving retailers the tools to build their own shopping agents marks another step towards AI becoming embedded in the transaction journey,” he added. “Consumers stand to gain greater choice and more useful assistance across the shopping journey. Merchants gain new ways to convert and retain customers, but they will need to compete both for inclusion in independent AI shortlists and for engagement once a shopper reaches their own platform.”
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