Transcript
A (0:00)
Amazon is suing Perplexity over its Agentic shopping tool. Wow, okay. That's the response. According to Reuters, Amazon sued Perplexity AI last Tuesday over the startup's Agentix shopping feature, which uses automation to place orders for users, saying it covertly covertly accessed Amazon customer accounts and disguised automated activity as human browsing. In the complaint, Amazon accused Perplexity's Comet AI agent of degrading customers shopping experiences and interfering with its ability to ensure customers who use the agent benefit from the tailored shopping experience Amazon curated over decades. Based on what Wakas said, I'm curious what he thinks about Amazon's quality of curation. Third party apps making purchases for users should operate openly and respect businesses decisions on whether to participate, Amazon said in a statement. Wakas, is Amazon taking the right approach in suing Perplexity and attempting to thwart unauthorized bots from scraping its site?
B (1:01)
So I think this is, this is just the first salvo in a long series of legal and otherwise challenges that I think that are bound to come up. I think if you look at Perplexity's answer to this, I think it sheds some light on their point of view. But I do believe that new technologies, when they come in, they do push the limits. Perplexity has faced some challenges from the likes of Cloud Flare in a prior lawsuit, but the idea really is that, you know, the, the engagement model of the consumer is changing. Now Amazon on the other side, exactly as we said earlier, I think, and you were saying that Amazon has a Rufus, you know, of, you know, agent of its own. Now my agent goes to talk to your agent and then, you know, the agents get together and figure this thing out. There are, it's a very cluttered space. You want the customer to have as seamless an experience as possible. Right now it's full of friction. You have to think of advertising. So there is, you know, you click on an ad and you have to go to the advertiser's website and then place another order. If you don't have a profile set up, it's a mess. Now for Amazon, it's actually a problem in multiple ways. One is they've certainly developed a very large multibillion dollar ad business and that ad business relies on them to be able to sort of, you know, provide you recommendations and offer you certain products at a certain placement. It's just like shelf placement, right? So this directly threatens that business. And I can understand that they're trying to make sure that it's done on their terms. On the other side, what you'll also see is that there is a multitude of protocols out there. OpenAI has its own protocol. Google has its own shopping protocol. There is shopping protocols from Visa, from MasterCard. There are so many of these protocols out there that you don't know how to interact. So even as a retailer, it's a mess for you to manage. What kind of MCP server do you install? How do you navigate all this? Do you keep updating your software all the time to accommodate every new protocol that comes out? So it's a difficult space to operate. I think Amazon's position is a bit defensive, to be honest. If I'm a consumer, an agent that I use is representing me. If I give the agent the right authorizations, the right passwords and everything else, I would expect that agent to go and purchase on my behalf. I can have five things open on my website. Amazon has had some challenges where sellers who are selling on Amazon got sort of replicated through a product that Amazon put out that looked very similar and felt very similar to them. So even, even sellers have had some mixed experiences in the past. So this is a messy space. I think eventually this will settle down. I think there will be some agreement that will be, that will be reached between the entities. For now, Perplexity is taking a very hard position. They've used words like Amazon is bullying us. They've used some challenging wor there. So I think it's a, it's a, it's a start of a long, long exchange that we can expect. I, I would imagine that, that, that, you know, there are, there are saner minds on the other side who are trying to get to an agreement, but I think it's a discussion of protocols. I think it'll get settled, but it will be messy until it gets settled.