AI Shopping Agent Goes Free for All

Perplexity has reintroduced its AI-powered shopping agent, now accessible to everyone without a subscription fee. This virtual assistant is designed to save shoppers time by offering personalized product recommendations and facilitating quick purchases, leveraging its large language model capabilities for natural language interaction and task completion.

The agent's features include retrieving past user interactions, searching websites for product information, and processing purchases through PayPal integration. Unlike traditional search engines, it guides users through refining their needs with follow-up questions and presents findings as "product cards" with key details and AI-generated descriptions.

This expansion coincides with a broader industry trend towards autonomous AI agents. However, Perplexity's approach has drawn scrutiny, notably from Amazon, which has threatened legal action over alleged unauthorized data scraping. Perplexity has dismissed these claims as intimidation tactics.