Amazon Blocks Muse, Reshaping Retail Landscape

As a result of Amazon's action, Walmart and Shopify collaborated with Muse, achieving a 10% increase in year-end sales, opening up a new B2C market.

This active combination of payment systems helps Shopify's direct-to-consumer stores provide a more convenient purchasing experience for consumers.

AI agents accurately purchase only the items users need and, unlike human impulse buying tendencies, do not react to additional product purchases or ad exposures.

These consumption characteristics of AI agents deprive traditional retail companies of upselling opportunities and contribute to a decrease in advertising revenue, posing a significant threat to platforms like Amazon.

Amazon's logistics warehouses and delivery rates are optimized according to sales volume; thus, if sales decrease, average freight rates will rise, and inventory burden will increase, threatening the collapse of its existing economy of scale.

Naver is highly likely to implement a B2C AI agent service based on its vast user data.

Coupang faces a situation where it must decide whether to block external platforms and build its own agent or explore a collaborative model.

Kakao is also likely to enter the market competition, attempting to introduce AI agents and link with external platforms to strengthen its commerce business.

There is a possibility of a major upheaval, similar to the U.S. market, where the positions of existing strong and weak players are reversed, or the market structure itself is reorganized.

If AI agents connect directly to hotel websites to handle drudge work like bookings and data management, AI will take over the point of contact with final consumers, posing a significant threat to the existing travel platform industry.

AI is expected to become the primary entity replacing human tasks in most areas of daily life, including commerce, messaging, scheduling, and travel.

Areas that humans enjoy directly, such as entertainment, will still require human intervention, and AI is expected to evolve into a service that helps manage personal finances and reduce costs by integrating with MyData.

Last year, AI agent services did not succeed as expected due to structural accessibility issues on websites, bot blocking, and physical limitations such as internal network segmentation within companies.

For these reasons, agents often failed to complete tasks, hindering the super app strategy.

As AI agents become internalized and can record task histories through log files, 'collective intelligence' through collaboration among agents has become possible.

This aims for multiple agents to work like a team to complete practical tasks and is attempting to apply B2B success stories to the B2C market.

The failure of early AI devices like Rabbit R1 is due to the immaturity of agent technology, and they should focus on a supplementary role rather than directly replacing smartphones.

In a structure where all computations occur in a virtual machine (VM) within an individual's cloud, devices can become attractive tools in the form of 'Charms' that connect to virtual spaces without computational functions, based on that connection.

Such devices are expected to function by compensating for the limitations of immature agents through cloud-based computation.

While the cloud primarily served as data storage space in the past, like iCloud, it has now transformed into a computation-centric space with allocated GPUs, HBMs, and CPUs.

This change is expected to trigger a surge in demand for computing power within data centers, indicating that the role of the cloud will further expand.

Agents directly handle all computational tasks on the cloud, such as opening browsers, launching apps, and connecting databases, thereby delegating device computation to the cloud.

This concept is called 'Computer Use,' and a new era where computers manipulate apps themselves is expected to emerge.

AI agents like Muse can explore new revenue models, receiving commissions from selling companies based on agent activities such as purchasing goods, arranging insurance, or subscribing to financial products.

If users perceive significant benefits from AI services, they are likely to successfully transition to business models like advertising or transaction fees to secure profitability.

The advent of AI agents is expected to reshape the entire commerce market, extending beyond goods sales to include financial and insurance products.

This will lead to a 'super app' competition over who controls the 'starting page' of shopping, bringing about changes in the app ecosystem, and data centers will also transform from mere storage spaces into computation-centric computer markets.

This will usher in an era of lightweight devices with only essential functions like screens, keyboards, and batteries, and with AI handling logical computations, diverse devices unconstrained by hardware will emerge.