Would you give AI your credit card?

TL;DR: A growing number of AI agents and tools are now helping you shop until you drop—from recommending products to completing purchases in one click. It’s a bet AI companies and brands hope will pay off big time—but it could also worsen your impulse buying habit.

What happened: Yesterday, TikTok launched an AI shopping assistant and one-click checkout, making it even easier to snap up that viral magnesium supplement on your For You page. These features arrive weeks after Meta’s splashy release of Muse—with one of its key selling points being its ability to shop for you. Other AI companies are rolling out shopping aids, too, like ChatGPT’s new virtual “try on” tool for clothing and accessories.

What makes TikTok’s and Meta’s shopping push especially significant though, is that they already drive a lot of online shopping. Meta is an advertising juggernaut (take Instagram’s eerily specific ads, for example) and runs Marketplace, while 54 million Americans now say they’ve bought something after seeing it in a TikTok video.

Easy to shop…and spend: Agentic shopping’s big draw is that AI can cut the time it takes to find the perfect slow cooker or pair of jeans. But all that convenience also has a potential cost: Swiping your credit card becomes a little too effortless.

Some early adopters say they’re already shopping way more than they did without a robot assistant. And Instinct, another popular AI agent, apparently keeps sending users product recs they didn’t ask for—in one case, it reportedly bought an unneeded bikini without the user’s approval.

Following the money: The agentic shopping spree comes as AI firms face two realities: Running an AI lab is expensive, but few consumers are paying for the tech—only 2.2% of US households had paid AI subscriptions as of May. (OpenAI, for one, is now trying out other ways to boost revenue, like serving ads alongside images its models generate.)

That might be why Meta is leaning so hard into shopping with Muse—since the company expects most users to stick with the free version. It’s angling to eventually profit by taking a small fee on each Muse transaction, but that only works if people get comfortable handing an AI agent their credit card—and let it talk them into buying the $80 sweater they don’t really need.

Bottom line: If AI shopping takes off, it could become a vivid example of why friction is sometimes good—especially when it comes to spending money. —WK