Can preferences travel without being exposed?
A shopper’s sizes and tastes could follow them between stores. How do we let that happen only with their consent, and without stores seeing each other?
Research · HawkShift
Notes from building an honest shopping agent.
What we measure while building Concierge: what worked, what didn’t, and the questions we haven’t answered yet.
- 1Real tests, real numbersEvery claim comes from a measurement we ran.
- 2Failures includedWhat broke is often the most useful part.
- 3Plain words firstReadable by a store owner, with the details for engineers.
The model judges. The infrastructure checks.
Why Concierge never lets a language model be the source of truth for a price, a stock level or a cart, and what that split made possible.
Read the paperAll research
Recent work.
26page setups tested on an iPhone to find what Safari puts behind the clock
Web platformWhat iOS 26 Safari puts behind the clock
Why most websites get a solid strip behind the iPhone status bar and Dynamic Island in iOS 26, tested one change at a time, and how we designed around it.
1shopper is enough for demand to show, never their words
Memory & privacyInsights without surveillance
How a store learns what shoppers want without ever seeing one shopper’s conversation.
93%of turns unanswered on a build our old suite scored as unchanged
EvaluationA green test suite is not a good answer
Why we stopped trusting unit scores for an agent, and started grading real shopper outcomes instead.
No newsis not a reason to message a shopper
AgentsA follow-up needs evidence
Teaching an agent that keeps watching after the shopper leaves to only speak when something really changed.
Inputsbeat instructions, again and again
GroundingWhy a better prompt rarely fixes an agent
When the data an agent sees contradicts its rules, rewriting the rules is wasted work. Fix what it sees.
−52%wait for the model’s first response, by connecting while the shopper types
SpeedWhere the first second goes
Taking apart a first answer, millisecond by millisecond, and what we could and couldn’t make faster.
Yoursshoppers see, correct and remove what Concierge remembers
Memory & privacyMemory that belongs to the shopper
Designing memory a shopper can read, correct and take back, and why consent has to be part of the design.
Open questions · what we’re working on
Shopping is changing. These are the hard parts.
What should a store say to someone else’s AI?
More shoppers will arrive through AI assistants. How does a store give those assistants the same checked truth it gives a person?
Can one agent shop the whole web honestly?
Helping a shopper across many stores means being clear about where every fact came from, and whose store it is.
When should an agent act on its own?
Watching a price is easy. Deciding when to message, or change a cart, is about permission, evidence and trust.
These are research directions, not products.
Follow along
New research, when it’s ready.
No schedule and no filler. Just an email when we publish something worth reading.