Home Depot wants your AI agent to show some ID first

• Have an AI agent? Need a hammer? Home Depot is thinking about how to make that palatable for the retailer.
• Angie Brown, the company's CIO, spoke to Business Insider about agents, the PHP cyber scramble, and AI fixes.
• She also talked about Home Depot's involvement in Project Glasswing, which grants access to Anthropic's Mythos Preview.

Home Depot wants to roll out the welcome mat for your AI agent — so long as it's wearing a name tag and acting on your behalf.

During a sit-down interview with Business Insider, Angie Brown, the company's executive vice president and chief information officer, said the retailer wants to support AI agents that can search and buy products on a customer's behalf. But Home Depot needs to be sure of two things first.

"We want to know you're not a bot, and we actually want to know if it's you," she said. "That's something that Muse is working on right now, to self-identify."

Her comments are the latest glimpse into how legacy retailers — and their tech staff — are thinking about the possible next generation of online shopping.

Recently, several Silicon Valley companies have launched consumer-focused AI agents, such as Meta's Muse and Spear Street Technology's Instinct AI. They promise agents capable of scanning the internet, comparing products, filling carts, and buying items with little to no intervention from the person who sent them.

Their rollout has been met with varying levels of resistance and buy-in from online retailers. Amazon barred Muse from shopping on its marketplace, saying the bots didn't properly identify themselves. Several other retailers — including Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora, and Shopify — have announced integrations or openness to AI agents. In October, Meta announced that it co-developed a personal agent protocol with Sierra AI to standardize AI agent identification.

Brown said Home Depot is open to the idea of AI agents, but the retailer doesn't want to lose its connection with loyal customers.

Frequent Home Depot shoppers, such as contractors and remodelers, are part of the company's Pro Rewards platform, where they're eligible for discounts. The retailer doesn't "want to lose contact with the customer," she said.

"That's the next evolution," Brown added, confirming that Home Depot is in active conversations with Meta about how Muse should introduce itself to websites. "There's openness on both sides, because they want it to grow."

Home Depot is already using AI to defend itself

Brown said Home Depot is deploying AI amid a recent wave of cybersecurity worries.

Last week, companies around the world raced to patch critical vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language used in an estimated 70% of websites. The flaws were discovered with help from OpenAI and prompted US cybersecurity officials to urge affected organizations to update their systems or, in some cases, take them offline.

Brown, whose remit includes Home Depot's cybersecurity, called the hours after the warning a "little hectic," but said the company's main website was not affected.

"We had a couple of operating units — companies we've bought and things like that that are a little bit smaller — that had to plug a few vulnerabilities," she said, including an internal job application system that was taken down "in the middle of the day for about an hour to patch."

Otherwise, she said, the company was largely spared from the sudden tech anxieties.

Home Depot, Brown confirmed to Business Insider, has joined Anthropic's Project Glasswing, an initiative that gives selected companies access to Claude Mythos Preview to help secure critical software. She said the company was not granted access in the project's first wave, "despite our best efforts, and calling a lot of friends." Those slots were largely reserved for banks and cybersecurity firms, not major retailers.

The Anthropic models "found a few things" for Home Depot to fix in its code — but the agents also found a few "false positives," Brown said.

Home Depot, she said, has long ranked cybersecurity vulnerabilities, but AI is leading the company to rethink its desired time to deploy a fix.

"The speed to fix a vulnerability has to be driven down to hours," she said.