Residence Depot desires to roll out the welcome mat in your AI agent — as long as it is carrying a reputation tag and performing in your behalf.
Throughout a sit-down interview with Business Insider, Angie Brown, the corporate’s govt vice chairman and chief info officer, mentioned the retailer desires to help AI brokers that may search and purchase merchandise on a buyer’s behalf. However Residence Depot must be positive of two issues first.
“We need to know you are not a bot, and we really need to know if it is you,” she mentioned. “That is one thing that Muse is engaged on proper now, to self-identify.”
Her feedback are the most recent glimpse into how legacy retailers — and their tech employees — are desirous about the doable subsequent technology of on-line buying.
Not too long ago, a number of Silicon Valley corporations have launched consumer-focused AI brokers, equivalent to Meta’s Muse and Spear Avenue Expertise’s Instinct AI. They promise brokers able to scanning the web, evaluating merchandise, filling carts, and shopping for gadgets with little to no intervention from the one that despatched them.
Their rollout has been met with various ranges of resistance and buy-in from on-line retailers. Amazon barred Muse from buying on its market, saying the bots did not correctly establish themselves. A number of different retailers — together with Walmart, Finest Purchase, Sephora, and Shopify — have announced integrations or openness to AI brokers. In October, Meta introduced that it co-developed a private agent protocol with Sierra AI to standardize AI agent identification.
Brown mentioned Residence Depot is open to the concept of AI brokers, however the retailer would not need to lose its reference to loyal clients.
Frequent Residence Depot consumers, equivalent to contractors and remodelers, are a part of the corporate’s Professional Rewards platform, the place they’re eligible for reductions. The retailer would not “need to lose contact with the shopper,” she mentioned.
“That is the following evolution,” Brown added, confirming that Residence Depot is in lively conversations with Meta about how Muse ought to introduce itself to web sites. “There’s openness on each side, as a result of they need it to develop.”
Residence Depot is already utilizing AI to defend itself
Brown mentioned Residence Depot is deploying AI amid a latest wave of cybersecurity worries.
Final week, corporations all over the world raced to patch essential vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language utilized in an estimated 70% of internet sites. The failings have been found with assist from OpenAI and prompted US cybersecurity officers to induce affected organizations to replace their techniques or, in some instances, take them offline.
Brown, whose remit consists of Residence Depot’s cybersecurity, known as the hours after the warning a “little hectic,” however mentioned the corporate’s most important web site was not affected.
“We had a few working models — corporations we have purchased and issues like that which might be a bit bit smaller — that needed to plug a couple of vulnerabilities,” she mentioned, together with an inner job software system that was taken down “in the course of the day for about an hour to patch.”
In any other case, she mentioned, the corporate was largely spared from the sudden tech anxieties.
Residence Depot, Brown confirmed to Enterprise Insider, has entry to Anthropic’s Mythos AI mannequin, although the corporate wasn’t granted early entry through Venture Glasswing, “regardless of our greatest efforts, and calling a number of associates.” These slots have been largely reserved for banks and cybersecurity companies, not main retailers.
The Anthropic fashions “discovered a couple of issues” for Residence Depot to repair in its code — however the brokers additionally discovered a couple of “false positives,” Brown mentioned.
Residence Depot, she mentioned, has lengthy ranked cybersecurity vulnerabilities, however AI is main the corporate to rethink its desired time to deploy a repair.
“The pace to repair a vulnerability must be pushed right down to hours,” she mentioned.
Replace, November 2, 2026 — This story has been up to date to replicate that Residence Depot has not participated in Anthropic’s Venture Glasswing initiative.
