YouTube launches Custom Feeds and expands Ask YouTube shopping tools, letting viewers save interest-specific homepage tabs and ask product questions—including voice queries on TVs, comparison tables and follow-ups—directly from video watch pages.
Apple retail creator Ron Johnson says AI shopping agents will enhance online buying but cannot replace stores, arguing consumers will still want to handle devices and compare displays before spending $1,000 to $2,000 on a laptop.
Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse AI assistant from making purchases on Amazon.com, saying the agent’s access violates its Conditions of Use and leaving users who saw the block beginning Sunday night to shop elsewhere.
Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse AI assistant from making purchases on Amazon.com, saying the autonomous shopping agent violates its Conditions of Use.
Meta’s Muse AI becomes the top free U.S. iPhone app ahead of ChatGPT, but Amazon blocks it over concerns it could capture customer credentials and scrape account data.
Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse AI shopping agent from Amazon.com, alleging it accessed customer account pages and order histories without permission or identifying itself, exposing sensitive data and transactions to an undisclosed third party.
Commerce AI agents built on a single-model architecture are boosting sales and slashing costs across retail, travel, and telecom by leveraging parallel tool calls, 90–99% prompt cache hit rates, and rigorous safety controls that stage all financial actions for human approval before execution.
Seoul-based AI startup Intellisia raises $2.5M in pre-Series A funding to power its platform that replaces real consumer surveys with virtual AI respondents, boasting over 90% accuracy compared to actual responses, with global expansion and a digital twin shopping simulation on the horizon.
Anthropic launches 'commerce-agents,' an open-source GitHub blueprint enabling developers to rapidly build AI-powered shopping and merchant tools using Claude, with support for retail, travel, telecom, and entertainment verticals across AWS, GCP, and Microsoft cloud platforms.
OpenAI's gpt-image-2 model now generates transparent PNG assets natively, eliminating the need for manual background removal and unlocking seamless integration across e-commerce, presentations, design templates, and print-on-demand merchandise.