Buying the equipment: why we chose the slightly dearer option
Our AI agent compared the whole equipment list, including discounts, gift cards and cashback options. We chose the convenience of buying almost everything together.
We ended up choosing a slightly more expensive purchasing option. The benefit was practical: we could buy almost everything together, without splitting the list across lots of suppliers.
In the previous story, we used AI to build a webpage for planning the shop layout. Cindy tried the equipment she liked in that tool, checked the dimensions and explored where it would go. The next question was where to buy it at a good price.
Our list included a commercial stove, a commercial oven, two large stainless steel prep benches, a commercial dishwasher and two large commercial fridges. With several items to buy, checking each price and working out the cost of the whole list meant quite a bit of research.
I had previously made a shopping skill for Australia: a reusable set of instructions for an AI agent to compare buying options. I asked the agent to use that skill to find suitable suppliers for our equipment list.
It compared the supplier prices it could find and considered other ways to reduce the total: buying several items together, offers that might be combined, discounted gift cards and cashback. That meant comparing different ways to buy the whole list as well as the price of each item.
The agent gave us several options. After comparing them, we chose its recommendation that let us buy almost everything together. The total was a little higher, but we would not have to spread the purchases across so many suppliers. That convenience mattered to us at the time.
We bought the commercial equipment on our list. The agent did much of the searching and comparing, and we chose from the options it put together. It saved us a lot of the research we would otherwise have had to do ourselves.
This made me think it is worth giving AI the whole shopping list and your preferences when asking it to compare prices. We cared about cost, and we also wanted a convenient way to get everything. Seeing those things together helped us choose an option that suited us.
