I read the TechCrunch piece on Ron Johnson twice, mostly because the headline promised a brawl and the actual argument turned out to be quieter than that. Johnson built Apple’s stores. He says he doesn’t buy Silicon Valley’s bet on AI shopping agents, and his reasoning lands on feeling: people like to browse, discovery is emotional, a query box is not a store.

He’s right that the agents are going to disappoint people. I think he has the wrong reason.

What breaks an AI shopping agent isn’t a missing soul. It’s that the thing spins up a clean browser in some datacenter, lands on a product page, and has absolutely no idea who you are.

The blank browser problem

Every checkout-capable agent shipping right now from OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity starts from the same place: a fresh session with nothing in it. No cart. No saved shipping addresses, no card on file, no loyalty tier, no order history, no size that you already know fits because you returned the other one in March.

So the agent has to reconstruct all of that from a public product page, which is the one surface on the internet specifically designed to show a logged-out visitor the least useful version of the truth. Public price is list price. Public stock is national stock, not the store four miles from you with one left. Public shipping estimate assumes you’re nobody and live nowhere.

I’ve watched an agent confidently report a jacket as in stock when the size I wear had been backordered for a week, information that was sitting right there in my account’s back-in-stock alert, in a tab I was already signed into, roughly eleven pixels from where the agent was reading. That’s not an emotional failure. That’s a data access failure dressed up as one.

And the workaround the industry landed on is credentials. Hand the agent your logins, or connect a merchant API, or adopt some new agentic checkout protocol that every retailer has to implement separately. Stripe and OpenAI have one. Google has another. Each requires the merchant to show up. Meanwhile your actual shopping context has been sitting in your browser this entire time, already authenticated, already personalized, already correct.

The damn cart is the context. Not a product catalog.

Johnson’s half

He’s right that agents will underwhelm. He thinks it’s because shopping is a feeling.

It’s because the agent is shopping as a guest.

What’s in your tab that isn’t on the page

Member pricing. The promo code already applied at the cart level. Your default address, which determines tax and whether two-day is actually two days. The three items you left in the cart last Tuesday. Your return history, which is why this retailer shows you free returns and shows your neighbor a $7 fee. Your points balance. The size chart the site pre-annotated with “you bought M last time.”

None of that renders for a logged-out crawler. All of it renders for you.

A browser agent that runs inside the Chrome you already use reads the session instead of guessing at it. Dassi works this way: it lives in the side panel, sees the page as you see it, including the logged-in state, so “what’s in my cart across these four stores and which one’s cheapest after my loyalty discount” is a reading task rather than a reconstruction task. We wrote about the general shape of this problem in why cloud browser agents can’t see your tabs, and the hotel-booking version of the same failure showed up when Google’s AI Mode started booking travel as a stranger.

The demo gap

Every agentic commerce demo I’ve seen picks a product with one SKU, one price, one shipping tier, from a retailer with a cooperative API. Which is fine. But the shopping I actually want help with is the annoying kind: comparing a cart at Target against one at Costco where my membership changes the math, or checking whether the thing I ordered three weeks ago shipped before I reorder it.

That work lives entirely behind logins. It’s not glamorous and it will never demo well on a stage.

If you want to try the logged-in version, dassi is a free Chrome extension and it’s in the Web Store. Bring your own model key or sign in with the ChatGPT subscription you’re already paying for.

Johnson will probably be proven right for a couple of years, and the takeaway everyone draws will be that shoppers wanted a human touch after all. I don’t think that’s what happened. The agents just never got introduced.