About why AI agent demos keep showing plane tickets and online shopping.
Has this happened?
Yes 52 (42%)Not sure 40 (32%)No 32 (26%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About why AI agent demos keep showing plane tickets and online shopping.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Many VCs also dislike these examples, I believe. I'm doubtful this is what they're being pitched.
As for public releases: I wonder if it's because these examples are easy to relate to. Many websites are just a long tail of industry or use-case specific stuff. What's valuable to me probably means nothing to you. This is unlikely to resonate with people-wit-large (and LLMs are marketed broadly) or requires the reader to think (and marketing that requires thinking is bad these days).
Second, it's arguably a good litmus test. If it still can't do the worn out examples of plane tickets and shopping, which would be a good assumption since we've been demo'd these use-cases for 2 years at this point, then ...