Chat bots don't belong to an e-commerce site; chat bots belong on the outside, specifically to comparison-shop and pull in some external information to de-bullshitify offers, correct "mistakes" and "accidental omissions" in the listings, resolve the borderline-fraudlent crap companies play these days with store-specific and season/promotion-specific SKUs with different parameters all resolving to same model/make name (think Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals that are not actually deals, just inferior hardware with dedicated SKU).

Agree. AI is (currently) fantastic at "de-bullshitifying" the internet. "Give me a table that compares Products A & B by z, y, and z." Companies have gone out of their way to make comparison shopping near impossible. Specs are hidden, if they're shown at all. Just figuring out if a certain TV had an ARC-HDMI out required downloading the manual.

I dread the day when ads inevitably make their way into the main AI models. One of the things its currently good at will be destroyed.

But the chatbot will take as a source the comparision data provided by companies! It's very common practice for a company to do some SEO articles with comparing them to their competitor like "FooSoft vs BarSoft", with things like "FooSoft has instant support 24/7, Barsoft has tickets that take 24 hours.."

The use case for chat interfaces would be as follows:

Grandma wants to buy a good bike, but doesn't know about types of wheels or how many gears they need, or what type of frame is appropriate for their body type.

Reliable information on this does not exist on vendor sites, though. It exists on Reddit and in books and in med/physio papers and bunch of other places a SOTA model has read in training or can (for now) access via web search.

LLMs are already very good for shopping, but only as long as they sit on the outside.

Idk I earnestly tried using LLMs to find me the smallest by volume regular ATX PC case 3 months ago and it was a nightmare. That info is out there, but it could not avoid mentioning ITX, mini atx (sometimes because Reddit posters messed up) and just missed a bunch of cases. And letting in any mistakes meant I had to double check every volume calculation it did.

I found the Jonsbo D41 without the help of LLM despite trying. (There might be a few smaller but they are 3x the price)

LLMs don’t weigh and surveil the options well. They find some texts like from Reddit in this case that mention a bunch subset of cases and that text will heavily shape the answer. Which is not what you want a commerce agent to do, you don’t want text prediction. I doubt that gives the obscure but optimal option in most cases.

We are talking about a hypothetical sales chatbot which would be built alongside the business, so they absolutely have the capacity and information necessary to train the chatbot to advise their own clients.

> they absolutely have the capacity and information necessary to train the chatbot to advise their own clients.

That doesn't follow. In fact, having this capacity and information creates a moral dilemma, as giving customers objectively correct advice is, especially in highly competitive markets, bad for business. Ignorance is bliss for businesses, because this lets them bullshit people through marketing with less guilt, and if there's one thing any business knows, is that marketing has better ROI than product/service quality anyway.

My brother in christ, the function is just that of a salesman, you are pondering philosophical about whether a salesman's actions are ethical.

Company makes a chatbot that sells their product and advises customers on what to buy.

To be fair with you, you are not asking the wrong questions and you are on to something, it's just that it's basic if you are into sales. Read up on the subject, a source I would recommend, although obscure, is Claude Whitacre. I believe in "Sales Prospecting" he talks about this specific dilemma of giving good advice vs selling your product. He argues that a good salesman will give good advice over selling their own product, and that this is beneficial because it creates trust in the salesman and might result in more sales down the line even if the very specific interaction didn't result in a sale.