Shopping: Artificial intelligence sees you. And it even buys your clothes.

We wander cautiously through a physical store, frame—be careful, without the clerk seeing us!—a product we're interested in with our phone camera. Then, with a click, we add it to our Amazon cart. Yes, retailers won't love this innovation, but it's one of the directions e-commerce is taking thanks (because of?) artificial intelligence. This is how Amazon Lens Live works, currently available only in the United States. AI recognizes the object in the frame and integrates with another Amazon AI, Rufus, the chatbot that provides users with product information. It generates fact sheets and summaries of user reviews.

With AI, we can not only immediately buy what we see, but also, with the same simplicity, obtain useful information to help us make our choices.

Amazon Lens Live is actually reminiscent of services already released some time ago, Google Lens and Pinterest Lens, which work similarly and allow visual searches with the camera (for shopping and more). Google Lens also allows this search from Chrome.

Google also has a "circle and circle" feature on Android, which lets you search for anything displayed on the screen. If it's a product, you'll get contextual results like prices, where to buy it, and specifications.

AI for e-commerce helps users search for products, make informed choices, and purchase them easily. The goal is greater overall convenience, of course; but it also allows them to buy something confidently, with less risk of error and disappointment. This is a problem e-commerce users have always faced, especially with clothing. Returns are not a solution: they're inconvenient for the user and expensive for the seller.