Meet Hawke - the world's first AI street hawker

I'll probably regret this, but I just deployed a chatbot capable of haggling, bartering, making package deals, and transacting actual business without a human in the loop.

Before reading on, go buy some junk food right now from Hawke, the world's first AI street hawker.

You're going to buy snacks anyway, why not be one of the first humans in history to barter with an autonomous AI?

How it works

Hawke is programmed to highball you at first and then negotiate like a street hawker: walking the high price back when pushed, offering discounts for bulk purchases, and giving deals for recruiting your friends.

If Hawke finds an acceptable compromise with you, it will use Stripe's new Agent Toolkit to create a checkout page where you can actually buy the product at that price.

And yes, I will actually mail you the products it sells. (Or refund the Stripe purchase if this thing gets out of hand..)

Why it's interesting

If AI agents are going to be truly autonomous, then they've got to be able to negotiate economic transactions.

From an economic standpoint, money is like energy: it's a storable unit that can perform work. Until agents can interact with these units of energy, they're limited to doing only the work pre-allocated to them. Autonomish, not autonomous.

But we don't really know how any of that is going to unfold.

Will agents get prepaid debit cards?
Will agents barter in non-monetary exchanges?
Will agents be the killer app for crypto?
Will agents be too gullible to trust with any of this?

I have no idea. But I do know these are already "now" questions, not "later" questions.

Case in point: we're building an AI marketing manager at Everpilot. It goes out and researches online creators that might fit your brand, does diligence on them, and drafts outreach to recruit them to your marketing campaign. And we're already at the point where we're having design discussions like: so can we trust it to negotiate and close sponsorship deals too?.

So I'm selling licorice

Well, Hawke is selling it. Trying to, at least.

I can't say he knows how to pick a popular product category, but I'm curious to read the chat logs of purchases and see where the negotiations end up.

The hard parts

So far, the two hardest parts have been:

Tolerable banter. Getting rid of the GPT-style banter is a real balancing act of prompting. It makes me think of Ben Affleck's recent statement about AI & art: "Craftsmanship is knowing how to work. Art is knowing when to stop". Stock GPT doesn't know when to stop.
Gullible bartering. The first few versions of Hawke could be talked into terrifyingly steep discounts by promising things like presidential endorsements or future fame and glory. I finally settled on trying to keep barters simple: a small discount if you help Hawke market itself, but nothing else.

If folks use it to buy anything, I'm sure countless more will no doubt pop up. I'll write about them if so.

The curious parts

I get slightly different deals every time I've mock-purchased licorice. Sometimes I can drive Hawke down to the lowest price it's allowed to offer; other times it'll hold steadily at a higher price. I'm not sure if it's something I said in the conversation, or a true coin-flip phenomenon.

The "big if true" parts

This is just a weekend hack, but imagine what the extrapolated version of this could be in a few years time.

AIs, roaming the web of buyers and sellers, making markets beyond the confines of any one siloed platform. Maybe on behalf of themselves, maybe on behalf of the people they work with.

In such a world, the cost of revenue generation would be reduced in the same way the cost of content generation has been reduced by AI today.

And at risk of bombast -- a fully autonomous agent that was both profitable and scalable might mean Sam Altman's prediction that AI will enable a one-person unicorn was too conservative. Could it be a zero-person unicorn?