Walmart and McDonald’s Reveal the
Real Risk of Letting an Agent Shop for You
Can a
consumer’s AI agent navigate powerful price-setting agents on the other side of
transactions?
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD
TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH
INVESTORS @TULLMAN
Oct 6,
2026
As we enter the Agentic
age, each and every day some tech vendor, social media site, or software
provider is offering us free, simple and painless tools that will allow us to
have more and more of our boring, repetitive and largely mindless day-to-day tasks
and activities handled for us, without taking up more than a few minutes of our
precious time.
Whether it’s Muse from
Meta, dots from OpenAI or Instinct AI from some 23-year-old guy that no one’s ever heard
of (with billions in funding), the onslaught of AI-infused assistants, agents
and enablers has begun in earnest and shows no signs of slowing down any time
soon. I’m not in a position to offer any specific advice at this point or pick
a favorite, because no one really knows what’s behind these officious and
aggressive little operatives—or what exactly they’re doing with whatever data
and other personal information you’re encouraged to turn over to them.
The sizeable lists of
uses, consents and authorizations that you’re asked to agree to in order to get
these things rolling is unclear, way too broad, and a little frightening,
because very few of us even understand what we’d be signing up for. The terms and
conditions are just as dense and unintelligible. But if you’re game to
experiment, I would caution you not to turn more than one of these irritating,
invasive and omnipresent creatures loose on your life unless you are a glutton
for punishment and have nothing else to do with your time beyond constantly
responding to inquiries, requests, updates, suggestions and demands from your
new “time-saving” assistant.
This whole “trust me”
approach sounds like a slippery slope and a strategy that ultimately depends on
our own laziness, where we get battered down by the incessant flow of requests
for permission and consents and we just bag it and say “do your best” or something
equally perilous. Remember that improved speed, access, and convenience were
the bad trades we made long ago in exchange for our privacy. This new wave of
inquisitive helpers sounds even worse to me.
Letting an agent do your
shopping for you is a whole new can of worms and reminds me of Jeff Bezos’s
observation that consumers don’t want to negotiate the price of things every
time they shop. The unstated predicate for that comment is that you’re supposed
to trust Jeff’s algorithms to get you the best prices. But what if the prices
are moving targets and, worse yet, are based upon some composite persona that
various vendors have developed to describe you, your purchasing behaviors and
your purchase history. How is your agent supposed to deal with powerful
price-setting agents on the other side of transactions? Who’s going to decide
who got the best deal?
All of which brings me
to the latest face-off between Walmart and McDonald’s in regard to their
respective real-time pricing strategies. Walmart takes the high road and says
that the price for the product is the price and it’s the same price for all
customers. McDonald’s is using AI to recommend personalized menu prices which I
would call predatory since—by their own admission—these prices are based on
transaction data and local willingness to pay. Let me know when you find those
folks who are happily willing to pay more for the same product, because I have
plenty of other things I’d love to sell to them.
And, just to add to the
mess, you need to understand that non-human actors are already responsible for
roughly 55 percent of all global web traffic. We’re talking about scripted
agents, automated bots, machine-driven commercial transactions, and, of course,
AI agents. Humans
are already in the minority on the web and now we’re being invited to take
another step back and let our helpers do the job for us. If you think that
these tasks are getting easier or clearer, you haven’t been to the airport
lately.
While gas prices may
seem high, try paying $11 for a single copy of any of the glossy weekly
magazines at the newsstand. Just to be clear, it’s not like any prices are
immutable and fixed objects these days. Amazon’s systems change the prices of
millions of items virtually minute-by-minute to react to competitors pricing
changes. Even the publishers themselves don’t know what’s happening with their
own pricing. Subscribing for a year to The New Yorker at a
discount online site will allegedly save you $253 compared to what they say is
an aggregate newsstand price of $422 (or $9 an issue), even when the cover of
the magazine itself says $10.99. The actual subscription price you’ll be paying
per issue for your 47 issues a year is $3.60.
I’ll leave it up to you
to determine how your shopping agent is going to make sense of pricing schemes
like these, in-store couponing and daily discounting, membership price cuts,
and a host of other promotional offerings in every store and even more
aggressively online.
The bottom line for the
moment is probably a word or two of caution before you turn over the purse
strings to any of your accounts. Saving time may generally be more valuable
than saving a few bucks, but not if you have only the vaguest idea of how intelligently
your cash is being spent.
