Personal AI agents, like Meta’s Muse, Instinct, ChatGPT’s Dots, and others, are kicking off a new wave of consumer AI that involves more than just responding to queries. These AI agents can actually get things done on users’ behalf, like booking flights, making dinner reservations, ordering groceries, and more, all without having to be technical enough to set up OpenClaw or some other agent on your own computer. But consumers adopting these agents are often running into issues when the website on the other end of their request blocks the AI from completing the job.
Most recently, Amazon began blocking Meta’s Muse AI agent from its retail site, meaning that the agent could no longer browse or make purchases from its product catalog. However, the problem is not limited to Amazon or Muse. User complaints across social media indicate their agents are often running into similar blocks.
Some of these are intentional, like Amazon’s, while others are the result of websites’ traditional anti-bot measures designed to protect against spam and malicious activity. What’s not clear to the end user is whether or not the block is accidental on the website owner’s part, which leaves them frustrated with both the service provider or retailer and the agent trying to facilitate the transaction. For instance, TechCrunch has seen a handful of complaints on social media claiming that Muse couldn’t complete a purchase on Walmart’s retail website. (NBC also reported that this was a problem Walmart had faced in its tests of the AI agent.) But a spokesperson for Walmart told us these weren’t intentional.
In fact, Walmart is partnered with Muse, as was announced at Meta’s Connect developer conference in September. The company said it wants to be where its customers are, and that now includes being available through AI agent experiences. The issue that Walmart customers often appear to be running into (see below) is that the website presents a button that has to be clicked to verify the visitor is human.
If that experience is interrupted, the check could fail, and the agent gets booted out. It’s an indication that the current technology we use to verify humans and keep websites safe from spam and bots may not be the best fit for the agent-first era of the web we’re now moving into. To address this problem, industry partners including Meta, Walmart, Stripe, Sierra, Genesys, Rocket, NiCE, and Decagon have begun working on an open standard that would dictate how AI agents can communicate with businesses, helping to separate the good bots acting on behalf of the user and the bad.
This protocol will be specifically focused on agent-to-agent communication for the purposes of online commerce, Meta said in a blog post. In the meantime, consumer confusion abounds. Although Walmart is at least trying to be accessible via AI agents, other companies aren’t so keen on the idea or haven’t fully embraced the technology.
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