• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, 5 hours ago

I sat down with my newly updated glasses prescription after my annual exam and decided to get myself a new pair for my aging eyes. I used AI to help me search.  I know what I like, what I want, and I have an idea of what brands are out there.  Plus, I don’t like the price of buying glasses in the store, where the price seems awfully marked up.  I went to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to see how they each tackled the journey on my behalf.

ChatGPT went to work like a personal shopper.  It asked me my face shape and what I typically wear, pulled up real options with prices, and quickly had me looking at specific frames I could buy, with a checkout path right there if I wanted it.  It felt like being helped by someone standing behind the counter, but not locked into a single brand. 

Claude, on the other hand, treated the question more like a research project.  It wanted to talk through my prescription, walking me through lens coatings and what my astigmatism correction meant for frame shape.  It gave me a framework for evaluating options rather than the options themselves.  It felt like being helped by someone who used to work in an optometrist's office and just wanted me to understand what I was buying before I bought it. 

To be honest, both approaches were valuable in the journey.

I started wondering whether each platform has a truly different approach, or whether they're just a reflection of how I work with them.  Claude is where I go when I need to think something through, in strategy work or writing, where I want a partner that will push back on my logic before I commit to it. 

ChatGPT has become the one I reach for when I want something done around creative or commerce.  

Gemini sits closer to the creative angle for me, or general knowledge (the legacy of Google in my life), and I use it as a tiebreaker, depending on my mood.

I don't think I'm alone in sorting things this way.

This isn't really about which model is smarter.  I think that argument gets tired fast and mostly reflects the news cycle of whoever released a benchmark that week.  This is about what each platform has decided its relationship with the user should feel like, and they've made genuinely different bets. 

OpenAI has been racing to wire commerce directly into the product, with checkout built in, shopping integrations everywhere -- all of which shows in how ChatGPT handles a task like buying glasses. 

Anthropic has leaned into being the thinking partner, the one you trust with something sensitive or complicated -- and that shows up, too, in the way Claude wanted to make sure I understood my own prescription before it would even show me a pair of frames. 

Google is doing the interesting thing of trying to be excellent at both approaches, folding Gemini into Search, Workspace, and Shopping all at once, betting that ubiquity beats specialization. 

We spent the last two decades getting extremely good at understanding platform behavior -- why someone opens Instagram versus TikTok versus LinkedIn -- and building strategy around those different intents. 

We're about to do the exact same work for AI platforms, except the differentiation isn't content format or audience demographics; it's personality and trust. 

Or is it simply marketing, narrative, and storytelling?  Are people quietly deciding which assistant gets their deep thinking and which one gets their wallet based on the true experience, or are the companies themselves suggesting how to engage with their platforms? 

The recent ChatGPT ads are very conversational, more like Gemini in my eyes, versus Claude’s ads that seem more “deep thinker.”

I don't know yet whether these lanes will stay this defined or whether one platform eventually pulls off being everything to everyone.  My guess is they stay somewhat separate for longer than people expect, the same way we still use different apps for different things even after two decades of everyone promising the one app that does it all. 

What I do know is that I bought new glasses this week, and I bought them because one of these tools felt like a store and the other felt like a friend who happens to know a lot about lenses.  I ended up buying direct, but using the insight from both platforms.  I wonder which one really influenced me the most --and I’m sure that the company I bought from wants to know that, too.