AI Agents Can Discover And Buy—They Can’t Verify

InnovationAI Agents Can Discover And Buy—They Can’t VerifyByMichael Quoc,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 01, 2026, 06:15am EDTMichael Quoc holds 9 US patents and is the founder and CEO of Product.ai—truth layer for commerce. gettyAmerican retailers absorbed an estimated $890 billion in returns in 2024, according to the National Retail Federation, roughly 16.9% of retail sales. A meaningful share likely traces back to product descriptions that did not match what buyers actually received. This issue can be highly concerning when the claims have implications beyond the fit of a shirt, but the data is often worse in those categories. A JAMA Network Open study of 57 sports supplements found just 11% had ingredient quantities within 10% of what the label claims.AI agents now inherit this data wholesale and turn it into confident recommendations, often in a single pass. The browsing pattern that gave a buyer multiple chances to spot a mismatch before checkout has compressed into a single query and a decision.​Try asking a shopping agent a simple product question. Does this jacket run small? Is this laptop good for video editing? Are these running shoes appropriate for flat feet? Whatever answer you get will sound confident.Under the hood, the agent is pulling text from merchant product descriptions, marketing pages and review snippets that were written to rank on Google, not to survive scrutiny from an AI making a purchase recommendation. The confidence has nothing to do with whether the claim is true.​​​When large language models answer medical questions drawn from this kind of data, hallucination rates have been measured between 64% and 68%.​​​​​​In the last 12 months, the industry shipped four protocols for agent commerce: Google and other companies published the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), OpenAI...