[AI Magnifying Glass] AI selects items and makes payments… Can I leave my card with you?

(Seoul = Yonhap News) Reporter Shim Jae-hoon = “Please catch a ride from Incheon Airport to Gwanghwamun.”

The artificial intelligence (AI) agent hears this and finds a means of transportation and reserves a vehicle. The user provides the destination and finally approves the payment, and AI handles the rest.

Until recently, the role of AI in online shopping was to recommend products that fit your tastes or compare prices.

However, as AI agent technology developed, the situation changed. Now, attempts are being made to entrust AI with finding products, putting them in shopping carts, and making payments.

The important point is that ‘choosing’ a product and ‘making me spend my money’ are different issues.

It is clear that it is convenient, but it is still unclear to what extent consumers will entrust their cards and accounts to AI.

◇ From “recommend” to “buy”… big tech competition

Recently, the interest in the global e-commerce industry is shifting to 'agent commerce', where AI goes beyond search and recommendations and even replaces purchases.

Existing conversational AI only answers users' questions and shows them products or purchase links, but in agentic commerce, AI identifies users' needs, compares multiple products, and is directly involved in the purchase process.

In September last year, OpenAI introduced 'Instant Checkout' based on the open standard 'Agentic Commerce Protocol' (ACP) developed with payment company Stripe.

However, last March, the strategy was revised, reducing stand-alone instant checkout where payment is made directly within ChatGPT, focusing on product exploration, and turning to allowing actual purchases to be made on a website or app operated by the seller.

‘Muse’, a personal AI agent released by Meta last month, can directly browse the website, find products, fill out forms, and process payment with the user’s approval right before purchase.

Looking at this trend, the focus of industry competition is not yet on whether to entrust the entire card to AI. The extent to which AI is given authority and at what stage it must be verified by humans is emerging as a key issue.

◇ Naver to pilot agent payment within the year… Even domestic actual transactions

Domestic companies are also speeding up.

Naver released a beta version of its shopping AI agent on the ‘Naver Plus Store’ last February. In June, a function was added to recommend products of interest first by analyzing user clicks and shopping cart records.

Within this year, we plan to pilot introduce a function to pay directly within the agent for some product groups.

The number of users also increased rapidly.

According to Naver, the number of monthly active users (MAU) and average daily conversations of the shopping AI agent last August increased approximately five times compared to March, when it was first launched. The average daily transaction amount through agents approximately quadrupled during the same period.

Digital and home appliances accounted for the largest transaction amount by item at 40%. This means that there was a great demand to utilize AI in fields where different specifications and functions of each product had to be compared.

There were also cases where AI actually paid money instead of people.

Mastercard announced that it completed the first domestic AI agent actual transaction using its payment solution 'Agent Pay' in March.

The AI ​​agent searched for a means of transportation on the global mobility platform 'Hoppa', reserved a vehicle from Incheon Airport to a hotel in Gwanghwamun, Seoul, and completed the payment.

In the same month, Shinhan Cardo, along with Mastercard, also announced that it had demonstrated, for the first time in the domestic card industry, real transactions of 'AI Agent Pay' linked to global mobility services.

The AI ​​searched for and reserved a means of transportation, and the user approved the payment once.

◇ “It’s okay to choose, but I have to pay”

The problem is consumer choice.

Consumers are relatively favorable to AI selecting candidates, but are negative to handing over the purchase decision itself to AI.

According to a survey of 322 U.S. consumers conducted by market research firm Gartner in January of this year, the response that they would entrust their purchasing decisions to AI did not exceed 11%, even for items such as household goods where the burden is relatively small if selected incorrectly. There were more responses saying that it was okay for AI to narrow down the options.

A similar trend was found in surveys of payment companies.

According to a World Pay survey of 8,000 consumers in the US, UK, France, Brazil, China, Singapore, and Australia, 80% of respondents interested in AI shopping responded that they could give AI some role in the payment process.

However, 59% said they would like to personally approve each purchase.

Even if you leave cumbersome tasks such as searching or price comparison to AI, you will check it yourself at the last moment when the money is spent.

◇ Who is responsible for incorrectly purchased items? Personal information protection is also a challenge

As technology advances, there are many institutional problems that need to be solved.

If the AI ​​misunderstands the instructions and buys the wrong product or orders a product that is more expensive than the user wanted, it must be decided who will bear the damages.

If the seller's advertising costs or commissions affected the AI's recommendation results, it should be considered whether this can be considered a 'customized recommendation'.

When refund disputes or fraudulent payments occur due to hacking, it is not clear to what extent the AI ​​developer, seller, payment agency (PG), and credit card company are each responsible.

Personal information protection is also an issue.

In order for an AI agent to select a product on behalf of a user, it must know purchase history and tastes, and in order to make an actual transaction, it must handle location, delivery address, and payment-related information.

An IT industry official said, “For agentic commerce to take hold, consumers must be able to clearly demonstrate when a dispute arises how much authority they have entrusted to AI.”

AI, which has been limited to shopping assistants, has now reached the payment button.

Technically, the era where AI uses money instead of people has already begun. However, we must keep in mind that it is up to us as consumers whether to hand over the authority to press that button to AI.