3 things home depot wants from AI shopping agents - The News International
Your AI agent is welcome at Home Depot, as long as it shows ID. That's the message from Angie Brown, the retailer's executive vice president and chief information officer, in an interview with Business Insider.
Home Depot wants to support agents that search for and buy products on your behalf. First, Brown says it needs to know two things: that the agent isn't just a bot and that it's really you behind it.
Brown says Home Depot is in active conversations with Meta about how its Muse agent should introduce itself to websites. Self-identification, she says, is something Meta is working on now.
Muse and Spear Street Technology's Instinct AI promise to scan the web, compare products, fill carts and buy with little input from you.
Amazon barred Muse from its marketplace, saying the bots didn't identify themselves properly. Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora and Shopify have announced integrations or openness to agents. In October, Meta said it co-developed an agent protocol with Sierra AI to standardise identification.
Contractors and remodelers who shop often belong to the Pro Rewards platform, where they get discounts. Brown says Home Depot doesn't want to lose contact with those customers. She says there's openness on both sides, because Meta wants Muse to grow.
The last week saw companies scrambling to address severe vulnerabilities that have been discovered in PHP, the language powering 70% of websites.Β
The researchers used OpenAI to locate those vulnerabilities, and US cybersecurity authorities advised the relevant organisations to update or, in certain cases, disconnect their systems.
Brown, whose purview encompasses cybersecurity issues, described the period right after the advisory came out as a little hectic. She noted that the organisation's main website was not affected. Some small, recently acquired units had to patch vulnerabilities, and the internal job application system was down for one hour.
The company has also joined Anthropic's Project Glasswing, which provides select organisations with access to Claude Mythos Preview. However, Home Depot did not participate in the first batch, Brown says.Β
They managed to find several issues, as well as some false positives. The bottom line is that it is crucial to reduce the patching time to just hours.
