Personal shopping agents face a monetization gap as data value rises

Personal shopping agents such as Instinct and Muse can act on a direct instruction to buy a specified product, without creating or discovering demand. Instinct has said it does not plan to charge, while Muse is aiming to make the product effectively free indefinitely. Advertising is difficult to imagine in Instinct’s current workflow, and affiliate fees are less straightforward when the purchase intent comes entirely from the user.

The economics may initially prioritize distribution and data acquisition over revenue. One estimate cited puts annual spending on data to train some models at about $10 billion; companies could subsidize agents to collect user trajectories and fine-tune more efficient models, with scaling service costs as a second priority.

Later monetization could come from new targeting mechanisms across the distribution of Google, Meta, Snapchat and Pinterest. The analysis suggests agentic trajectories could be highly valuable: against roughly $120 in US annual revenue per Google user, a doubling or tripling of ARPU is presented as a possibility, not an established result.