The End of Shopping? Agentic AI and the Future of Consumer Financial Services Introduction

Alan Kaplinsky (0:07)

Welcome to the award-winning Consumer Finance Monitor podcast, where we explore important new developments in the world of consumer financial services and what they mean for your business, your customers, and the industry. This is a weekly show brought to you by the Consumer Financial Services Group at the Ballard Spahr Law Firm. And I'm your host, Alan Kaplinsky. I'm the founder, former practice group leader for 25 years, and now Senior Counsel of the Consumer Financial Services Group at Ballard Spahr. And I'm delighted to be moderating today's program. For those of you who are looking for more information, either about the topic that we're going to be discussing today, which I will introduce to you in a moment, or anything else in the world of Consumer Financial Services, don't forget to consult our blog, which also goes by the same name as our podcast show. That is, it's called Consumer Finance Monitor. We've been doing the blog since July 21, 2011, the very same day that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau became operational. And there is a ton of industry content there, and including a lot of content about the topic that we'll be discussing today. And if you like what you hear today, please leave us a review on whatever platform you may have used to access the podcast show today. And if you have any ideas for any other topics that we should consider covering, or speakers that we should consider as guests for our show, please let me know about it. So, today's episode examines a development that could fundamentally change consumer commerce.

And it's called technically agentic AI or agentic artificial intelligence. For decades now, technology has made shopping much easier for consumers. We move from brick and mortar stores to online shopping, from desktop computers to smartphones, and from manually comparing products to receiving personalized recommendations generated by sophisticated algorithms. But according to my guest today, we're about to enter an entirely different era.

Instead of consumers making purchasing decisions themselves, AI will increasingly make those decisions on your behalf. Can you imagine telling your AI assistant, whoever that may be, things like replace my running shoes when they're worn out, find me the lowest cost auto insurance policy, switch my checking account to another bank that offers a better deal than the bank that I'm using now?

And I've signed up for a lot of subscriptions in the last couple of years. Cancel any subscriptions that you see that I'm not really using. And book my family's vacation within my budget, which you're already familiar with.

The AI, not the consumer, conducts the search, compares the products, negotiates the prices, and completes the transaction.

Major technology companies are already developing versions of these AI shopping agents. As these systems become more capable, they may transform how consumers purchase virtually everything from groceries to obtaining mortgages to obtaining credit cards. The importance of the objective AI is underscored by the number of podcast shows we've already devoted to this topic this year.

On July 16th of this year, the guests on our show were Bridget McCormick, President and CEO of the American Arbitration Association, and David Hoffman, who is a Professor of Law at University of Pennsylvania Law School. They are the authors of a very thought-provoking short paper, I wouldn't call it a law review article, that's entitled, Agented Commerce Needs a Legal Infrastructure, and the courts are coming. It's published on the AAA website, and I would commend that to your reading, or you can listen to our podcast show. It's in our archives. That episode that we did, built on an earlier May 21, 2026 podcast with Professor Mark Geistfeld of the NYU Law School, who discussed the ALI's Principles of the Law project, entitled Civil Liability for Artificial Intelligence. Together, these two programs examine both the tort law and the contract law challenges that are posed by agentic AI systems. So our guest today argues that this represents far more than another technological innovation. In his recent article, which he co-authored with someone else that I'll mention in a moment, and the name of the article is The End of Shopping, and I'll tell you exactly how to get it in a moment, he contends that autonomous shopping agents raise fundamental questions about consumer autonomy, competition, privacy, behavioral economics, and the adequacy of our existing consumer protection laws.

Joining us today is the co-author of that article, Mark Bartholomew. Mark is the Vice Dean for Research and Faculty Development at the University of Buffalo School of Law. He writes and teaches in the areas of intellectual property and consumer protection law. He received his BA from Cornell University and his JD from Yale Law School. After clerking on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, he practiced law both as a litigator for a San Francisco law firm and in county government. His latest book called Intellectual Property and the Brain, How Neuroscience Will Reshape Legal Protection for Creations of the Mind. It was published by Cambridge University. Together with Professor Shmuel Becher, I hope I pronounced his name correctly, or Becher, he has written The End of Shopping, which I found to be a fascinating and a provocative article exploring what happens when shopping itself becomes fully automated. It's available on SSRN. Don't recall what the initials stand for, but if you go on ssrn.com, that will take you to the appropriate website. It will soon be published in volume 68 of the William & Mary Law Review. So Mark, a very warm welcome to our podcast show.