Inside Santa Claude's gift for commerce companies: AI agent starter kits

Happy Wednesday.

If you’re a “very online” person like I tell myself I need to be to do this job well, you probably have heard of Instinct or Grok Bot in the last week or two. In short, they are two AI personal assistants (some would call them agents) meant to accomplish a whole host of tasks for you—from email briefings, to restaurant reservations, to complex travel bookings—simply by chatting or texting or sending the bot a voice memo.

The startup behind Instinct has apparently already raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of $2.5 billion. I’ve tried it out, texting with it about a complicated family vacation that my wife and I are trying to plan for her extended family, with several different origin airports and other complicating details.

It’s been pretty fast and seemingly thorough, but I have fears too. Some of the product’s earliest users found a host of privacy and security concerns, though the startup has said it has addressed some of them in the weeks since.

Still, I’ve refused to connect my email inboxes to the service after the agent reportedly sent off an email without a user’s approval. I’ve been nervous about transactions too, considering the precision you need to have when communicating direction to the agent that involves purchases, or cancellation requests in the example below. (Although I think this guy and the AI prob share equal blame.)

That said, it feels like many first adopters are willing to dive in head-first, privacy, security, and other flaws be damned. Some would say we’ve already lost the privacy battle thanks to online advertising and social media platforms. Or just look at the millions of people who hand over biometrics to a business like Clear. Or that many people will willingly sacrifice some of their data or other online security for an easier way to order their morning coffee.

The fact that a massive payments company like Stripe has been willing to integrate its Link digital wallet feature with both Instinct and Grok Bot does give me a bit more confidence in testing a purchase. But I do wonder how much of the general public will get behind such an assistant from a company that isn’t already a household name.

What have you all tried?

Lastly, if you haven’t RSVP’d for The Aisle’s first subscriber party in NYC on Monday, September 14, you should do so now. I’ve been blown away by the interest and want to be clear that paid subscribers get preference if capacity becomes an issue.

I do also hope to host some in other cities too, with some help from this network. Hit Reply to let me know if you want to sponsor one in your area.

Now on to the good stuff…

When I spoke to Anthropic’s head of the Americas, Kate Jensen, earlier this year, she described a three‑step pattern she was seeing in how retailers experiment with AI: first, they typically get tools like Claude into employees’ hands. Then they use AI assistants or agents to try to run their operations more efficiently. Only after that do many start building AI experiences for their end customers on their own websites or apps.

And Jensen said Anthropic’s role in that pattern should be clear. The company wants to act as the infrastructure and model provider and not a new online storefront. 

Now, Anthropic has announced a new launch ahead of the holidays that follows along with this same thesis. So instead of unveiling a shiny new merchant app or a new shopping assistant built into Claude’s consumer chatbot, the company is rolling out a blueprint for building commerce-related AI agents. This is sort-of a starter kit for companies, featuring working code, best practices, and demos across various commerce verticals like retail, travel, and ticketing. The package is meant to help retailers, consumer brands, and other types of commerce platforms build their own AI agents both for consumers as well as to manage their own internal operations.

“We won’t build the whole house for you, but we’ll [build] the scaffolding for it,” Angela Jiang, who leads product for Anthropic’s Claude platform, told The Aisle in an interview. “This is our representation of the best practices from all the work that we've done, and you can just go ahead and start with that.

“If you were a commerce platform without this, I would say you'd probably start from 0% and then you discover all…the complexity,” she added. “And what we're doing with the blueprints is saying okay, cool, you can now start at maybe the 40% mark.”