A friend this morning shared a list of vegetables, noting how hard it is to eat 30 different ones in the same week.
I immediately turned to my AI chatbot to ask to create a list of commonly eaten vegetables, and of course I got a very good one.
At that point I thought that it would be nice to add that list to my next grocery order on Ocado.
And this is where the magic ended.
My chatbot doesn’t talk to the Ocado app. And I actually use more than one bot, sometime I go with ChatGPT, sometime I go with Claude, they are both good and continuously improving and I like to pit them against each other.
ChatGPT has a plug-in architecture which potentially would allow to connect with other applications creating custom GPTs, but so far I haven’t seen any particularly good application. And what would be the idea there? That Ocado would have to build a custom GPT? And what about other chatbots? I don’t really want to be siloed again. I’m happy to pay for services, even Google, but leave me free to connect.
Meanwhile I’m sure that somebody at Ocado is already thinking on how to integrate an AI in their app (if you aren’t, call me), and while this will be a nice feature to have, it will be yet another AI agent unable to talk with my other agents.
Maybe the solution is similar to what Rabbit appears to be working on: teach AI to use UI. Avoid altogether the challenge of getting companies and engineers to agree on open standards and just teach AIs to use shitty incompatible interfaces of our apps.
AI interoperability might be one of the most interesting future problems that we will face.
I want the AIs I pay for to collaborate, not to compete.
It is along the same lines as a BBC engineer who once said to me “forget standards, just build converters as fast as you can“h
At the end the unifying theory of everything will be get AI to do stupid stuff copying and pasting between apps instead of ourselves. I’m sure that there’s an appropriate metaphor for this…