Shopping (as we know it) may be a thing of the past

Adam Porowski
Nov 6 · 5 min read

I’m going to preface this by mentioning that this is groundbreaking development in AI with respect to implementing it into our daily lives. It is certainly something I would not have imagined coming into fruition for at least another 3–5 years.

TLDR: I came across a new piece of technology my friend was showing off. Given my background surrounding Artificial Intelligence, I was intrigued when he told me he had developed an Artificial Intelligence that performs ALL HIS ONLINE SHOPPING when given only basic information around what he is looking for. I have provided a number of examples below, however, if you’re interested in trying this technology by having an AI buy you a gift you can click this link:

* Click here to check out Corey the Bot 🤖

Goodbye Grocery Shopping

This technology has completely removed the need for my friend Sam to grocery shop and could very well make grocery shopping a thing of the past.

I sat down next to Sam and his computer as he said: “Watch as I demonstrate how this Artificial Intelligence will do your grocery shopping in just over 60 seconds.” I initially thought, ok this isn’t actually that hard to build as I have a general understanding of how this could potentially work. That’s when Sam blew my mind.

“Adam”, he said. “Give me some basic criteria for an average grocery order.” This is where my ears perked up.

This was my grocery shopping criteria

  1. Number of people: 2
  2. Type of diet: Vegan
  3. How much food do you need: 2 weeks worth
  4. Max Spend: $300

Sam fed that information to the Artificial Intelligence, started a timer, and then click a button.

40.6 seconds later… I kid you not, 40.6 seconds later a URL appeared to a Walmart Grocery Cart. Had this Artificial Intelligence just completed my grocery shopping? We clicked the URL and were presented with a shopping cart full of groceries.

I started combing through the products, all vegan. I started looking into quantities to see if this was actually enough food for 2 weeks. It looked good enough from what I could tell. It had a very well balanced selection and included items I had never tried before. Total price… $223.96!

Sam went on to explain that the AI could have actually checked out and completed the purchased if he had told it to. I was a little thrown back initially as I started to count the hours I spend grocery shopping each month. He demonstrated a number of different scenarios with various diets including Keto and Vegetarian. The products checked out every single time and the total spend was always around 10% less than the given budget.

What else can it do?

This is where it gets even crazier…

AI is driven through data. The more data, the smarter the AI. My friend Sam went on to explain that he had actually created a retail arbitrage business using this newborn AI he had created. For those who don’t know what retail arbitrage is, it’s essentially buying an item somewhere for less money, and then reselling it somewhere else for more money.

What Sam had done is trained AI to shop for deals. It processes product data, similar to what it did for the grocery order, however, it then analyzes sales trends to predict the resale value of an item over the next 6 months. It would then find where those items were sold at a price much lower than the predicted resale value. Genius, I thought. Sam’s AI would upload all the products it found to a website which he could view to see the cost and resale value of each item the AI had found. Sam would then simply select which items he wanted the AI to purchase.

Not only would the AI purchase the items it would even relist them on various websites.

Say “Hello” to Corey the Bot

Sam took his retail arbitrage AI and created a product he calls “Corey the Bot”. It’s available to the public at www.coreythebot.com. Corey the Bot is a user interface built on Shopify that takes an order and passes the information to Sam’s AI. A customer provides “Corey” with some basic information such as the type of person “Corey” would be shopping for and provides a budget that Sam has currently set to $25, $50, and $100 respectively.

The AI (in this case called Corey) takes the given information, processes millions of products to essentially find the best “bang for your buck” and has the product (aka Gift) shipped to the customer. A pretty neat concept in my opinion.

Screenshot capture shows data collected on www.coreythebot.com

The exciting part about Corey the Bot is that it uses the data from Sam’s retail arbitrage application to find products for the AI (Corey) to buy which tend to always worth 2–4 times the given budget!

Whether you trust an AI (Corey) to send you a surprise gift is completely up to you but I’d recommend at least checking it out. I did it myself for a gag and truly have to hand it to Sam. Very impressed, to say the least.

* Click here to check out Corey the Bot 🤖

Adam Porowski

Written by

Neuroscience Nerd and Software Engineer

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