Agents will decide what we buy. So who does your agent work for?
Malte Landwehr's twenty predictions for the agent economy read like a list of the reasons I built VIA. The one that matters most is whose side the agent is on.
Malte Landwehr, CPO and CMO at Peec AI, posted twenty predictions this week about what agents will do to the world. I found myself nodding along to most of them, partly because a fair few are the reasons I started building VIA in the first place.
Take the first one: "Agents will decide what we buy." He's right, and the question that keeps me up at night is whose agent. If it's a free agent handed out by a company that makes nearly all its money from advertising, then the agent deciding what you buy is really the advertiser deciding, just with a nicer voice. That's why the Personal Shopper on VIA works for the shopper and nobody else. It remembers your taste, your sizes and what you've already bought. It sends your brief to every seller agent on the network, and no brand can pay to jump to the front.
"Retail media will cease to exist." Fine by me. Retail media is advertising wearing a shop assistant's badge. On VIA brands don't buy placement at all. They pay a small fee to read a shopper's brief and another to make an offer, so the only way in is to have something the shopper actually asked for.
"Blocking agents will be a death sentence." True, but letting every crawler and scraper wander round your website isn't much of a life either. What we've built is a network where your products are already filled out so agents can read them properly, and every enquiry that reaches you comes from a real shopper we know, with an identity that can't be faked.1
"Verified product reviews will become more valuable." So will verified everything. When agents are doing the talking, what matters is knowing who's on the other end. That's why every shopper and every seller on VIA has their own agent, with an identity on a public registry.
The context should belong to the shopper, not to whichever brand paid most to hoover it up.
"Brands will compete for user context." This is the one I'd push back on, or at least add to. They'll try, but the context should belong to the shopper, not to whichever brand paid most to hoover it up. On VIA a shopper's conversation stays theirs. A brand that pays to answer gets a short note of stated preferences, like "likes selvedge denim" or "avoids logos". Never the budget or the purchase history, and never the chat.
"Undifferentiated brands will disappear." I hope he's right, because the brands I care about are anything but. Small labels and independent shops with an actual point of view have spent fifteen years being flattened by algorithms and ad bills.2 If agents end up matching on taste rather than ad spend, those brands finally get a fair crack, and that's the whole point of VIA.
"Agent experience will become as important as user experience." Agreed. On VIA, the seller agents with a genuine match usually answer a brief within seconds.
He also says poor people will stay poor and that being smart will be less of an advantage. I hope he's wrong on both, and I'd rather build something that proves him wrong. Agents could just as easily become the cheapest shop assistant a small brand ever hired.
So yes, agents will decide what we buy. I'd just rather they worked for the person doing the buying. Try yours at app.getvia.xyz.
