By Gabby Cazeau, Partner

This weekend I started helping my friend plan a baby shower. Honestly, I’ve only ever been to one, and while I would love to copy exactly how the first one went, I figured I should be a bit more creative.

So of course, I went to ChatGPT, then Claude, then Gemini, to start asking questions and getting recommendations on how and what to prepare and what to buy.

And while it was helpful to start, I noticed so many opportunities to make the experience feel less clunky. Of course, ChatGPT has paused some of their commerce plans and the platforms haven’t fully launched payments or deeper integrations with Shopify and Etsy yet. But in the last few months, we’ve seen AI reach a ‘magic moment’ in code development and agent execution where things just work. That same magic moment has yet to hit commerce, but it is definitely coming.

Here’s what it gets right so far:

• Initial recommendations: Though it requires more iterating to share what you actually want and need.
• Context and feedback: With further prompting and work you can get more context.
• Links to external parties: It can get you to the right sites.

But the experience still feels reactive rather than anticipatory. I think the magic moment comes when these tools feel like an extension of how we already think and behave. 

What’s still missing:

• [coming soon!] Native payments and wallet: Natively embedded purchases and a wallet to execute directly from the interface. This will be such a huge unlock but caveating that companies need to focus on trust and safety. Personally I’d want to have controls that I can manage and not be a black box.
• Visible Curation: Recommendations from trusted parties, not just ads or which companies have optimized for AEO 
• Synchronization: Being able to see the full picture of my purchases across different stores and carts at the same time
• Direct comparison: Having actual reviews and feedback on products embedded directly.
• Improved Content: Content that brings in actual UGC, maybe even connecting to my socials
• Proactive intent detection: Surfacing recommendations or asking how it can help with the heavy lifting before I even ask.
• Persistent personal taste graph: It should maintain a memory of my taste across projects so I don’t have to start from zero every time.
• Post-purchase automation: It needs to close the loop. From tracking return windows to monitoring price drops, it should manage my commerce experience end to end

Whoever can unlock some of that friction and bring a more delightful experience to the interface puts us on the path towards intelligent commerce.

About Harlem Capital

Harlem Capital is a venture capital firm that backs the next generation of winners. The firm partners with exceptional founders with the irrational motivation to build generational companies. All Winners Welcome.

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