Amazon, ChatGPT, and the AI race to shape our most personal consumer decisions

Good morning. Part of the beauty of running my own media business is that I can be more candid than I would be if I were employed by, well, an employer. So here’s my most candid admission in a while: This wasn’t an easy week to sit down and write. It’s been a heavy few days for many, and in the Del Rey household my wife and I have just been trying our best to answer our children’s questions about what’s been happening in Minnesota.

Still, I’m building The Aisle to make sense of how AI is changing the ways in which the world buys and sells. And this week, like every week since launch, I’m going to attempt to do just that. But this time I’ll be peering outside of core retail and into an area of consumer spending that sometimes has life-or-death consequences. More on that in a bit.

Before I do, I want to flag a funding announcement that caught my eye yesterday from an AI shopping startup called Phia. The New York City-based company makes a browser extension and app that uses AI to help shoppers automatically compare prices on a given product, or similar ones, across both retail and secondhand shopping sites. One of the founders is Phoebe Gates; yes, the daughter of Bill and Melinda. But that, to me, is not why it’s worth paying attention to; the startup’s early traction is, including more than a million users in less than a year and millions of sales referred out to retailers and brands on a monthly basis.

The startup raised a $35 million Series A investment led by Notable Capital’s Hans Tung, a top consumer investor I’ve gotten to know over the years who has also backed companies like Quince, Poshmark, StockX, and Affirm. I’ve long appreciated Tung’s low-hype, level-headed analysis of consumer startups, including even the ones he funds. So I look forward to chatting with him, and the Phia team, for The Aisle in the future.

Now on to the good stuff…

This is a story about medical care. About AI and medical care. But more than that, it’s about AI attempting to assist us in making some of the most important consumer decisions of our lives. My version of this story starts in a hotel room.

For my earliest subscribers, you may recall that back in December I dealt with freak shoulder pain that put me out of commission for a few days.

During the worst of it, I paced my hotel room in San Francisco late one evening debating whether to head to the ER. I had just gotten back from a dinner with some Fortune colleagues to celebrate the close of a successful Brainstorm AI conference I cohosted, and the pain was bad enough that I had to embarrassingly ask my editor for help getting my arm into my coat sleeve before leaving the restaurant.

When the shoulder pain started radiating down my left arm, my fear spiked. I knew left arm pain could be a warning sign of a heart attack. In the back of my mind were my dad and his two brothers, all three of whom died from some type of heart ailment. One uncle in his early 50s, my dad in his mid-60s, and my other uncle just a few months later in his mid-70s. I’m younger than all of them were, but still, some sad and scary stuff.

While I paced around the room, I did something that felt somewhat embarrassing at the time, but which I’ve since learned is more common than I thought. I consulted a couple of AI apps.

As I provided more details about the symptoms I was and wasn’t experiencing, I became more confident that my pain was musculoskeletal in nature and not heart-related. After a hot shower and a couple of Advil knocked my pain level down from about a nine to a six or seven, I started to relax. Several AI apps, along with a few medical websites, reinforced the same idea that if the pain were heart-related, those actions likely would not have helped.

I got ready for bed, propped up my left arm on a pillow in a way that relieved some more of the pain, and eventually fell asleep. Should I have felt comfortable fully outsourcing a crucial medical decision to AI? No. But combined with what I already knew, it provided the reassurance I felt I needed.