Stop calling everything agentic when it's not

Every platform with a chat interface and a product feed is calling itself an AI agent now, and it's making it harder to talk about what the architecture looks like when the system is actually agentic. Online shopping, for example: The Amazon customers also bought model. Collaborative filtering and behavioral pattern matching returns a ranked list. It doesn't know how clothes would sit on your body or how you'd use the product. It's retrieval with a thin personalization layer. Recommendation engine. Not an agent. Then you get the conversational AI shopping assistants, which is basically a language model sitting in front of catalog search. ChatGPT shopping mode, Perplexity's shopping features, etc. Better than keyword search at understanding intent, like something for a beach wedding in June that isn't white is going to give results where a search bar fails. But you still get a list of products to evaluate in the abstract, like with Amazon Rufus. You're doing the imagining yourself. Smarter search box, sure, but again, NOT AN AGENT. I work in the fashion world and the only true shopping agent I've seen so far in my vertical is Glance. It reads multiple context signals at once (location, weather, trends, your history, your body geometry) and generates rather than retrieves. It's annoying to see people set the wrong expectations for what these systems can do. Is it an agent or a glorified search engine? Come on.