Venture capitalist and Shark Tank co-host Kevin O'Leary has outlined a future where artificial intelligence (AI) automates everyday retail purchases, while blockchain technology handles instant payments. In a video posted to X on October 19, 2025, O'Leary described a scenario where users can voice-order items like coffee or groceries, and AI systems manage the entire process, from detecting location to selecting nearby stores.
O'Leary emphasized that blockchain is crucial for processing payments quickly and at scale, but he highlighted significant technical barriers. Platforms like Ethereum struggle with high retail transaction volumes, processing transactions one-by-one, which leads to slowdowns, delays, and high fees during peak demand. He analogized this to a "long highway on a way to a toll road for authentication," where transactions "get stuck at the toll" under heavy load.
To address these limitations, O'Leary pointed to Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based platforms such as Hedera and Nano, which allow multiple transactions to be verified simultaneously in a web-like structure, enabling faster processing without bottlenecks. However, these technologies are still in early adoption stages and have not yet been tested at full retail scale, unlike more established networks like Ethereum or Solana.
Meanwhile, agentic AI systems are already in use for tasks like tracking shopping lists and comparing prices across retailers, as illustrated by Kyle Okamoto, CTO at Aethir, who noted his wife uses an AI assistant for grocery management. The next step, according to O'Leary, is integrating blockchain to automate payments seamlessly, enabling a "faster, smarter, fully on-chain" revolution across sectors like grocery chains, fast food, and retail stores.
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