You Ask, I Answer: How to Prepare Your Website for AI Agent Purchasing?

In today's episode, Paul asks, how do we get ready for AI agents to buy from us? Now, remember, and I talked about this in a recent uh episode of the newsletter, an AI agent really you could just call it a self-driving app, right? Is it an app that runs itself? And AI agents can and will be acting as both buyers' agents and sellers' agents. Think of it kind of like real estate.

A vendor might have a seller's agent that is available to talk to a buyer's agent and say, hey, you know, here's the things we have on sale. Imagine, imagine you know, Siri or whoever on your phone has the ability to go on and shop on Amazon on your behalf, and you say, okay, you know, Siri, here's your here's your list of things to buy, here's your budget. Go and find me the best uh the best deals you can. And so that uh agent would go out onto Amazon and might talk to Amazon's AI agents, say, hey, I'm I'm here to negotiate. Um whether or not Amazon plays along is is a separate question.

That's kind of the future state of where people see uh commerce with AI agents, particularly e-commerce. How would you get ready for that? Well, here's the thing agents are nothing more than apps. And apps can talk to websites today with things like uh JSON or APIs or webhooks or any of these the technologies. But the easiest way, the fastest way to get ready for AI agents that you can do today that will have up to a 10% increase in your revenue today, is getting your website working with a screen reader, right?

Making your website a first class experience for screen readers, uh, for people who have visual disabilities. A screen reader is a piece of software that reads your website and then either reads it aloud or magnifies it or does something to enable people with visual disability to navigate sites better. If a screen reader today has no trouble getting to content, getting to your commerce funnel and making a purchase for someone who is visually impaired, then an AI agent tomorrow will have no trouble doing the same thing. If, on the other hand, your website is such a miserable experience for people with visual disabilities, an AI agent is not going to have a whole lot of extra luck, right? It's not going to be, it doesn't won't have magic powers to decode the tangled mess that is your website in a screen reader.

In the USA, we have uh ADA compliance, Americans with dis the Americans with Disabilities Act, that many companies should be following but aren't. And there are a ton of tools that can do uh screen reader and visual disability compliance. IBM has a whole suite of accessibility tools that are all free that you can test your website with. Many other companies do as well. You can also get a text web browser like Lynx that runs on the command line in your computer and you can fire it up and try and browse your website and just see how it goes, see how easy or difficult it is to purchase from you.

If you can't purchase easily from a screen reader or a text-based web browser today, an AI agent's going to have just as much trouble tomorrow. And it may buy the wrong things, it may cause all sorts of chaos. You can make a first class experience for AI by making a first class experience for the visually impaired. And by the way, in doing so, even if AI agents never progress, even if AI agents are a pipe dream that never gets realized, that 10% of the population that is using assistive technologies to browse your website will be more likely to buy from you because they can, because your website makes it easy. So even if AI was not a factor, you could add up to 10% more revenue by making your site easier to and more accessible.

So uh hopefully, Paul, that answers your question. Thanks for asking it, and I'll talk to you on the next one. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button. Subscribe to my channel if you haven't already, and if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.