The march of OpenAI and other models has been fascinating to watch the last few years. Starting with text generation and moving to creation of virtually any media, the models have now moved up another level to performing tasks with the research preview of OpenAI's Operator.

This was essentially inevitable with the pace of innovation. For humans, the future can seem quite disturbing, however the dream has always been to free up humans from having to do menial tasks. Take the human out of the loop.

For now, these tasks are likely to be quite repetitive. Think about the creation of Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" in 2005, this is like that invention except no Turkers are needed. (!!)

For eCommerce, this has a number of interesting applications, both business and consumer-oriented.

* Help you monitor something over a long range of time and take actions independently.

* Reorder, restock and book goods and services.

* Automate procurement based on an understanding of company purchase cycles, needs, and opportunities.

I think the company use cases are more interesting than the consumer ones frankly. For large companies, it is entirely possibly that procurement departments might be automated on a permanent basis.

And you thought automated bot-scraping lawsuits submitted to online website owners were popular before, you ain't seen nothing yet. Yikes.

We have talked about automated AI negotiation between multiple parties, and I think at this point this is a solved problem. This will happen in short order.

For consumers, I could see how I might automate my Christmas shopping based on a spreadsheet of who needs a gift, and what some ideas might be.

The question is will I want to?

But this reminds me - especially for the business setting. Your data needs to be accurate for it to have any value: Is your inventory accurate? Are you sure ;-)