Home Depot is preparing to work with consumer AI agents that can search for and buy products on customers’ behalf — but only if those agents can reliably identify themselves and the people they represent, the company’s chief information officer told Business Insider.
In a sit-down interview with Business Insider, Angie Brown, Home Depot’s executive vice president and CIO, said the retailer wants to enable AI assistants that act for customers while protecting the company’s ties to loyal buyers. Brown said Home Depot will require agents to prove they are not automated scrapers and to demonstrate when an agent is acting for a real person. “We want to know you’re not a bot, and we actually want to know if it’s you,” she said.
Brown’s comments offer a window into how established retailers are approaching the next wave of online shopping tools. Several Silicon Valley firms have introduced consumer-facing AI agents — including Meta’s Muse and Spear Street Technology’s Instinct AI — that promise to browse the web, compare options, fill carts, and complete purchases with minimal human intervention. Retail responses have varied: Business Insider reported that Amazon blocked Muse from its marketplace for failing to identify itself properly, while other chains such as Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora, and Shopify have announced integrations or signaled openness to such agents. In October, Meta said it had co-developed a personal agent protocol with Sierra AI intended to standardize agent identification, Business Insider reported.
Home Depot has particular reasons to be cautious, Brown said. The company serves frequent shoppers such as contractors and remodelers through its Pro Rewards program, and she emphasized the retailer does not want to lose direct contact with those customers. “We don’t want to lose contact with the customer,” Brown said, adding 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 also described how Home Depot is deploying AI tools on the cybersecurity front. Business Insider reported that recent, widespread flaws in PHP — a programming language used by a large share of websites — were discovered with assistance from OpenAI, leading U.S. cybersecurity officials to urge organizations to patch or temporarily take vulnerable systems offline. Brown said Home Depot’s primary website was not affected, though some smaller operating units the company has acquired needed fixes. She described one internal jobs system that was taken offline for about an hour to apply a patch.
Brown confirmed to Business Insider that Home Depot has access to Anthropic’s Mythos AI model but clarified the company did not receive early access through Anthropic’s Project Glasswing initiative. She said the Anthropic models “found a few things” for Home Depot’s teams to fix but also produced some false positives. Those findings have led the company to reconsider how quickly it aims to remediate vulnerabilities; Brown said the goal is to reduce the time-to-fix to hours rather than days.
Business Insider obtained the interview and reported the company discussions referenced above. Update, November 2, 2026 — This story has been updated to reflect that Home Depot has not participated in Anthropic’s Project Glasswing initiative.
