I think most of us are probably realising by now that just as we thought eCommerce was done there is another eCommerce tsunami hitting just as it did around 1997 with the birth of the internet and you may have to start talking to your developers again! The problem is if you’re not an early mover then you’re going to be caught napping again.
Back in ‘97 we thought this the internet thing was moving too fast. This is moving much much faster because unlike with the internet where physical infrastructure took time to roll out, software moves much faster especially when fuelled by an incredible open source ecosystem which is in some cases likely being funded by nation states.
So what are the two new places consumers will discover products and services? Let me prompt you because you’ll need to understand where this is going and what the underlying protocols and interfaces will be:
- Shopping via a Language Model For certain types of product just as you will if not already start to use a language model to talk to just as you’d converse with a shop assistant in a physical store. Language models will understand semantic meaning but to go one step further will need hooks into a retailer’s catalogue to better return the right products and advice. The language models will need a standardised way to shop your catalogue and of most interest here would be emerging protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP) that are designed to broker between language models and 3rd parties which in this case would be an interface into your product and content catalogue.
- Manus & the human-like agents This is an agent doing desktop research on your behalf. The best example is the Chinese Manus project which is rolling out now – just watch the demos on their website and get yourself some credits to play with. It’s staggering.. Ask it to find you the lightest 5 road bikes you can purchase for a budget of under £5k then watch the agent operating its own virtual desktop computer. It’s not just going to do your research but it’s actually going to probably very soon checkout for you going one step further than a language model with deep search would.
See Manus in action in the video below:
