If, for example, a store limit is 20 returns within six months, what happens when a bot represents 18,000 shoppers? For that matter, what about those loyalty points often used to encourage sales and bring back customers? Will the bot keep those points (meaning they really go to the bot’s owner, such as OpenAI, Microsoft, AWS, Google or Anthropic)? Or do they accrue to human clients in proportion to the purchases made? Or somewhere else?
For some of these bot-forced issues, there’s no clearcut answer. Bots are software, their clients are human. Each will be shopping with a different set of parameters. There are some shopping elements bots don’t care about at all, such as beautiful high-resolution photographs and dramatic marketing copy extolling the elevated lifestyle indicated by any particular purchase.
But human clients might really care about those elements. Does the bot ignore those elements when shopping, and then download them after a purchase to share with the human client?
This story originally appeared on Computerworld
