Venture money is flooding into AI shopping agents. Payment networks, browser makers and AI labs are racing to define how autonomous agents will shop, compare and buy.
However, the infrastructure behind that race isn’t keeping pace with the capital says Joshua Harvey, CEO of Specno, who says trust, verification and accountability are still unsolved, and the technology is moving faster than the answers.
Specno expects that people will soon stop browsing and start delegating. Instead of opening an app, a consumer will tell an agent what they want. The agent will search, compare and buy – the shopper will never actually touch a storefront.
“The interface of the future isn’t a search bar. It’s a conversation,” says Harvey. “People are going to stop browsing and start delegating. They’ll tell their agent what they want, show it a photo, give it a budget, and expect it to come back with the right thing already found or bought.
“That’s a different relationship between a brand and a customer, and most retailers haven’t touched their systems to account for it.”
If agents do the shopping, retailers need to be visible to agents, not just to people. That means structured, machine-readable product data, pricing feeds that update in real time, and content built for an AI working through hundreds of options in seconds, not a person scrolling a page.
Ranking well in human-facing SEO today guarantees nothing with an AI agent evaluating on different criteria. Specno expects a new discipline, agentic SEO or answer-engine optimisation, to matter as much to commerce as search ranking has for the last 20 years.
Who’s liable when the agent gets it wrong?
The harder problem that nobody has answered is this: If a shopping agent gets fooled by a fake storefront and completes the purchase, who’s responsible? The consumer? The agent developer? The payment provider? The platform that surfaced the fake listing?
“Right now, if someone gets scammed online, there’s a clear chain. You know who clicked the button and who authorised the payment,” says Harvey. “Once an agent makes that call for you, the chain breaks. Did the agent fail to verify the site? Did the marketplace fail to flag it? Did the buyer even see what was purchased before it happened?
“Nobody has answered that, and it will matter a lot more once agents are transacting at scale, not just browsing.”
Specno believes the winners in this category will treat verification, fraud detection and liability as core product features from day one, not something patched on after agentic transactions go mainstream.
“This isn’t a problem you solve with a bigger team,” said Harvey. “It’s a problem you solve with the right specialist who holds the technical, commercial and regulatory picture at once, moving fast enough to build the trust layer before the fraud does.”