Sorry, this price is AI only
Pawel Halicki
Soft chime announces a new delivery. He turns to his daughter, currently arguing with her homework bot on the other side of the sectional sofa.
- It’s your turn to unpack the groceries.
- Argh. Why can’t it wait? The delivery locker is refrigerated anyway.
- Remember those extra tokens you begged for your custom print? Chores first.
- Ok, ok. I’ll do it.
He turns back to his screen. For a minute.
- Dad, Dad!
His daughter waves from the kitchen, yoghurt cup in hand. With a sigh of defeat, he joins her as she works through the transit boxes.
- Dad, why do these yoghurts look… naked?
She turns the tub to face the light. No colours. No cow. Just blank film.
- These? That’s the procurement pack. Agent-only. No branding. Less waste.
- Why would anyone buy it?
- It’s not designed for people. It’s optimised for agents running errands. People buy stories. Agents buy proof and speed. Go on. Try to reorder it.
She scans the cup and taps [Buy again]. The countertop projector flashes:
[Sorry, this price is AI only · Agent plan required]
- See? That version is contract-priced. Humans can’t check out directly.
She frowns.
- Rude. That tiny square is the whole label?
- It’s not a label. Tap it.
She does. The square flickers white-to-gray-to-black, like it’s blinking.
- …It woke up.
- E-ink. Signed batch ID. Tap it, and it pulls up ingredients, lab results, and the last cleared price. It’s a product passport agents use with everything else they buy, making tons of micro decisions to shop in a way that fits their goals.
- And the dot?
- It’s a time-temp patch. Pink means the cold-chain clock tripped.
A glowing overlay paints arrows across the cabinets and countertops. Shelf numbers blink inside the fridge. She follows them like a game, speedrunning the arrows.
- So the cute cow is gone forever?
- The cow was a story. The code is the audit trail: batch, plant, cold-chain log.
- So this is why it has a “guarantee number”?
- It’s like a warranty.
- For yoghurt?
- For truth. If the product is not what it claimed to be, the agent auto-claims from the escrow deposit and flags the supplier score for other agents.
- The box told a better story. And now?
- Now the story has to be true enough for machines to verify.
- I liked the cow.
- You liked the feeling the cow sold you.
- Same thing.
- Not the same thing. The cow was a tax on your attention.
She spaces out the cans of cultured newfin tuna across all cabinets where shelf lights blink.
- It’s funny that all this stuff is mixed at random.
- Actually, it’s not. It’s categorised by storage temp and grouped by what we usually pair. Pasta with sauce. Toast with jam. Usually, you won’t eat all of each product at once.
- Unless no one’s home and there’s ice cream.
- Well, you’re young enough to still have time to recover from your bad decisions.
- Thanks. And all this chaos helps with what exactly?
- It packs faster and ships steadier, but mostly it’s algorithms against the food waste. Better use of space, faster cooking, and the kitchen nags you before your spinach liquefies in the back of the fridge.
- Ew. That’s gross.
Picking a colourful spray can, she grins, puzzled.
- Wait, and what is this thing? Pasta spray?
- Don’t ask. Tonight’s a surprise for my dinner date with your mom. We’re cooking lasagna supreme.
The front door clicks. Her mom leans in, already smiling.
- What are you cooking? Ugh, I saw the lights and thought you were cooking, but you’re still unpacking? How disappointing, I’m starving.
He hugs his partner and lands a kiss on her forehead.
- Good to know. You’ll have plenty of room for my latest masterpiece.
- You guys, ever found it weird we have a storage room, a living room, a bathroom, a bedroom, but we don’t have a room for dessert?
Her mum snorts a laugh, then nods at him with approval.
- Nice. We’re raising a contender for your dad jokes.
- Not tonight. I got her front row streamseat for a live show, so I get the kitchen to myself tonight.
- And what are we cooking?
Winking at his daughter, he makes a chef’s kiss to his wife.
- Hey, let me have one secret.
- One secret for two, it is. I’ll get changed.
Memories to build from this future:
Think about the last time you reached for something in your kitchen that you didn't choose. Someone else bought it. The brand was wrong, or unfamiliar, or just plain. It was fine, maybe even good. But standing there with it in your hand, something small was missing.
Now, notice what you were reaching for:
Try to recall the month your shopping agent started running deals across multiple stores at once, negotiating scenarios with their AIs that no human shopper could match.
How did your weekly routine shift once the agent started treating every store in your area as one connected inventory?
What did your pantry start looking like once the agent could negotiate bundles, timing, and substitutions across suppliers you'd never visited?
Which choice did you take back from the agent, and what made that one worth doing yourself?
Think back to a regular quarter after your organisation started routing purchases through agents to access price layers, product tiers, and bundles that human buyers couldn't reach.
How did budgeting change once the price your organisation paid depended on whether a human or an agent placed the order?
What shifted in vendor relationships once the agent's contract pricing made the human catalogue feel like the marked-up version?
Where did the gap between agent pricing and human pricing quietly reshape how your organisation operates day to day?
Go back to a regular quarter after agents became the primary buyers in your market, evaluating every product and service through verified data instead of promises.
What changed about how your organisation earns trust once the buyer assessing your offer is a machine, not a person?
How did marketing shift once the agent's supplier score carried more weight than any campaign?
Which part of what you sell turned out to matter most once the claim had to be true enough for machines to verify?
Before we finish here. If the people evaluating what you offer started weighing the proof more heavily than the story around it, what would you change about how you present your work? What small thing would you be curious to test first?
And does anything from this one keep showing up across other sessions?