A product listing used to have one obvious job: persuade the buyer. That buyer might be hurried, distracted, status-conscious, price-sensitive, or pretending not to care about shipping fees. Fine. Human messiness was the point. Good copywriting translated product attributes into human salience: scarcity, beauty, quality, emotion, trust. The machine’s role was secondary. Search engines ranked. Recommendation systems sorted. Humans decided. ...
Procurement looks boring until the software starts spending money. A human buyer can be slow, inconsistent, and occasionally allergic to spreadsheets. But at least we know what failure looks like: overpaying, accepting bad terms, walking away too late, or trusting the wrong supplier. When the buyer is an LLM agent, the failure mode becomes more polished. It can overpay in fluent English. It can miss a deal while sounding reasonable. It can keep bargaining after the answer is already visible. Progress, apparently, now comes with better punctuation. ...