An AI agent does things its customer would not, on that customer’s behalf. Three businesses answered that problem three ways in October.

People are starting to send AI agents to do things for them online: Buy the groceries, book the flight, check the bank balance. The agent goes to the business’s website and acts in the customer’s place. Every business now has to decide what to do when one shows up, and in October three big ones answered three different ways.

I think Walmart got it right: It is about to give each agent a separate profile inside the customer’s account. An AI agent will do things the person maybe wouldn’t have, so the two are not the same. But it does those things on the person’s behalf, so they need to be linked. A separate profile lets the business see both: the agent and the customer who sent it.

Walmart says why it built Agent Profiles: “Today, when a customer uses an AI agent, it signs in using a customer’s account. This means that all purchases – whether made by the customer or the agent – appear together, without any differentiation.”

An agent might browse more pages than the customer would, maybe all of them. That’s the most basic difference. Beyond that, it could be literally anything.

So it’s not as simple as letting the agent sign in as the customer. Send a dog to shop for you at a local market, with a set amount of money.

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