AI Vendors Would Rather You Not Ask Questions, CX Teams Hit 90% Adoption With No Real Plan, TikTok's Feed Is Mostly AI Slop, and IBM Is Using Wimbledon as a Trojan Horse

In today’s brief: Everyone says they're doing AI. Fewer people can tell you what that actually means once you look closer.

Today's stories:

1. The questions you should be asking before you buy any AI tool

2. AI adoption in CX just hit 90%, but deployment tells a different story

3. Nearly 60% of what TikTok shows new users is AI slop

4. IBM is using Wimbledon and Formula One as a Trojan horse for enterprise AI

The Questions You Should Be Asking Before You Buy Any AI Tool

AI vendors are having a moment, which means so is the sales pitch that comes with it. Laura Schiele at Search Engine Land put together a list of questions worth asking before you sign anything, and honestly, they're just basic due diligence that somehow keeps getting skipped the second "AI" shows up in the pitch deck.

Start with the question nobody says out loud. What business problem does this actually solve, and what does ROI look like in real numbers, not vague productivity promises? From there, ask how your data gets used and stored, and push for actual customer proof instead of a logo slide. Implementation matters too, since a tool that eats six months of engineering time isn't the quick win the demo made it look like.

None of this is exotic advice. It's just the stuff that's easy to forget to ask when a sales rep says the magic word, and the whole room stops thinking like buyers.

Read more: https://searchengineland.com/ai-vendor-questions-481765

AI Adoption in CX Hit 90%, and Deployment Is a Different Story

AI adoption in customer service just crossed 90%, according to Five9's 2026 Business Leaders CX Report, which sounds like a done deal until you see how differently everyone's actually doing it. Respondents are nearly evenly split between end-to-end platforms, hybrid environments, and best-of-breed tools, meaning nobody's converged on a standard playbook yet. Infrastructure tells the same story, with 84% of organizations still migrating from on-premises systems to the cloud and most settling into hybrid setups instead of rushing to finish the move.

Data security is the top concern at 31%, and reliability, scalability, and customer consent each worry 27% of respondents, with only 4% saying they haven't hit a significant implementation snag. That caution shows up in where AI actually gets deployed, with internal, operational use cases like self-service automation and quality management leading the way while customer-facing applications like personalization sit closer to a quarter of respondents.

The ROI argument is already settled. Nine in 10 respondents report positive returns across every AI use case measured, so the conversation has shifted from whether AI is worth it to how carefully you deploy it. Organizations are proving the technology works quietly on the back end before they trust it in front of a customer, which is a pretty reasonable way to build confidence.

Read more: https://martech.org/ai-adoption-hits-90-as-cx-deployment-paths-diverge/

Nearly 60% of What TikTok Shows New Users Is AI Slop

Nearly 60% of the videos TikTok shows brand-new users are AI slop, according to a new Kapwing report covered in MarketingProfs. Kapwing built a fresh TikTok account and tracked the first 500 videos in the For You feed. 59% were AI-generated junk, roughly three times the rate Kapwing found running the same test on YouTube Shorts.

Kids' content gets it worst. Kapwing manually reviewed 10,742 TikTok videos across 20 categories and found the Kids category topped the list at 57.4% AI slop, with the hashtag #cartoonkids hitting a jaw-dropping 97%. Science and Education, Health, and History weren't far behind, all sitting around one-third AI slop.

Fashion, Music, and Fitness stayed almost entirely human-made, all under 2%. If you're a B2B marketer wondering why "authentic content" keeps showing up as a buzzword in every strategy deck, this is why.

Read more: https://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2026/55193/how-prevalent-is-ai-slop-on-tiktok-infographic

IBM Is Using Wimbledon as a Trojan Horse for Enterprise AI

IBM's chief communications and brand officer, Sarah Bruning Meron, has a phrase for how the company demos its AI and quantum technology these days. She calls it the most obvious Trojan horse strategy ever. Instead of leading with spec sheets, IBM leans on sponsorships like Wimbledon and Formula One to get people talking about the brand first and the technology second.

"When you go to a cocktail party, many of the technologies we're talking about aren't necessarily what people want to discuss," she told Marketing Week. "They want to talk about Wimbledon or Formula One. So we use those sports properties as a way to demo the technology."

Her bigger point is that B2B buyers are just people who happen to sit on a buying committee, not a different species that responds to different rules. She's also blunt about AI's role in content. "AI has made it very easy for brands to scale content," she said, "but it hasn't necessarily made it easy to scale the content people actually want."

Read more: https://www.marketingweek.com/ibm-b2b-trojan-marketing/

That's it for today.

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FAQs

How high is AI adoption in customer experience?

AI adoption in customer service has crossed 90%, according to Five9's 2026 Business Leaders CX Report. However, organizations remain divided on deployment architecture, with respondents nearly evenly split between end-to-end platforms, hybrid environments, and best-of-breed tools.

How much AI-generated content is on TikTok?

A Kapwing study found 59% of the first 500 videos shown to a new TikTok account were AI slop, about three times the rate Kapwing found on YouTube Shorts. Kids' content had the highest concentration at 57.4%, with the hashtag #cartoonkids reaching 97%.

What is IBM's Trojan horse marketing strategy?

IBM uses high-profile sponsorships like Wimbledon and Formula One to demonstrate its AI and quantum technology in contexts customers already care about, rather than leading with product specifications. IBM's brand chief Sarah Bruning Meron describes the approach as a way to build interest in the technology through experiences people already want to engage with.

The Brief: AI Trusts Earned Media, A $20 Tool Wants Your Agency's Job, Meta Wants In On the Cloud Business, and Challenger Brands Are Winning With Less

In today’s brief: Four stories this week that matter if you're thinking seriously about B2B marketing in the AI era.

Today's stories:

1.  AI visibility depends on who writes about your brand, not just where you rank

2. Can a $20 AI tool actually replace your marketing agency

3. Meta is reportedly building a cloud business to compete with AWS and Google Cloud

4. How challenger brands like Emerald Nuts win with fewer, bigger marketing bets

Rankings Get You Traffic, Earned Media Gets You Cited

Quick gut check for you. BrightEdge tracked a year of data and found that only about 17% of sources cited in AI Overviews also rank in Google's organic top 10 for that same query. Moz ran its own analysis of 40,000 AI Mode queries and came back with an even starker number, with 88% of citations pulled from pages that never cracked the top 10 at all. So yes, you can hold the number two spot on Google and still be invisible to anyone asking an AI for a recommendation.

So what actually gets you cited then? Earned media, and it's not particularly close. Muck Rack's Generative Pulse team dug through more than 25 million links cited across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini and found earned media accounts for 84% of all AI citations, while paid and ad content barely register at 0.3%. Journalism alone makes up 27% of cited sources, a share that's held steady since July 2025. Named, credentialed authors help too. 

This is one of the lanes I work in for brands and executives who want to land in that 84%. I offer is executive and personal branding services, which includes pitching expert commentary on a brand's behalf to trade publications and industry outlets so their name becomes one of the sources AI systems are actually citing. If nobody's quoting a named expert from your brand anywhere, you're simply not part of the conversation these systems are having about your category.

Read more: https://martech.org/ai-visibility-depends-on-who-writes-about-your-brand/

Can a $20 AI Tool Actually Replace Your Agency?

You've probably scrolled past the LinkedIn post already. Someone cancelled a $5,000-a-month agency, spent $20 on an AI tool instead, and now claims a robot handles their SEO while they sleep, complete with a screenshot of a suspiciously tidy score out of 100. Joanna Lambadjieva, who writes The AI Search Optimization Newsletter, decided to actually dig into whether that's true. Her answer lands somewhere in the middle of that argument, and it's worth hearing out.

According to Joanna, the tools are genuinely good at the boring, mechanical stuff. Site speed problems, pages accidentally hidden from Google, technical issues quietly costing you sales, an AI tool will catch all of that faster than any human and never get bored doing it. She also points out they're useful for tracking whether your brand shows up when someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation, which used to mean manually testing dozens of prompts a week and now just runs quietly in the background.

But maybe Joanna's main argument points to judgment. These tools tend to flag twenty problems as equally urgent because they can't tell what actually matters, and most only glance at a handful of pages before scoring your entire site, missing exactly where the real problems live if you're running hundreds of similar product pages. 

They're also nearly silent on backlinks and reputation, which happen to be some of the biggest factors in whether you rank at all. Her take, and I'd agree, is that the tools are a legitimately good deal for the mechanical work, but the judgment calls that actually grow a business are still a human job.

Read more: https://aisearchoptimization.beehiiv.com/p/can-a-20-ai-tool-replace-your-agency

Meta Wants In on the Cloud Business Too

Meta wants a slice of the cloud business as much as I want the Bills to win the Super Bowl (a lot). According to a Bloomberg report, the company is quietly building an infrastructure business that would sell AI computing power and model access to outside customers, which would put it in direct competition with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. 

One version of the plan looks like AWS Bedrock, letting developers tap into AI models hosted on Meta's own servers. The other looks more like neocloud players such as CoreWeave, just selling raw computing capacity outright.

Zuckerberg has actually been hinting at this for a while. On Meta's May earnings call, he said companies ask to buy Meta's spare compute almost every week, at a premium, and Meta just hasn't said yes yet because it's still using that capacity itself. If Meta ever decides it's overbuilt, monetizing the leftovers becomes an easy call. It fits the pattern we're seeing across Meta's AI bets lately, testing every possible way to make money off this buildout, including a rumored $199.99-a-month premium tier for its Hatch AI agent that would put it in the same weight class as Anthropic and OpenAI at the high end.

Read more: https://www.pymnts.com/technology/2026/meta-plans-cloud-business-to-take-on-big-tech-rivals/

Challenger Brands Are Winning by Doing Less, on Purpose

Dan Eisenberg, CMO at Chicago agency Blue Chip, has a philosophy for challenger brands competing with corporate giants and ten times the budget. He calls it "bigger, fewer, better," which basically means making disciplined, narrow choices about which audiences, markets, and retailers actually matter, then going all in there instead of spreading thin everywhere. 

Every dollar also has to pull double duty, building the brand and driving the sale at the same time, because challenger brands typically can't afford to run separate branding and performance strategies.

For example, Bob's Red Mill went all data-driven, using a tool that algorithmically scored which markets were actually worth the investment, then poured spend there instead of chasing broad national reach. The brand posted its first-ever million-dollar week at Walmart in Q4 2025, part of five straight years of household penetration growth against giants like Quaker Oats and King Arthur Baking.

Read more: https://www.marketingdive.com/news/how-challenger-brands-can-stand-out-with-fewer-marketing-swings/823549/

That's it for today.

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FAQs

Does ranking well in Google guarantee AI visibility?

No. BrightEdge found only about 17% of sources cited in AI Overviews also rank in Google's organic top 10, and Moz found 88% of AI Mode citations came from pages outside the top 10 entirely. Traditional SEO rankings and AI citations are increasingly separate systems.

What content do AI systems trust most when generating answers?

Earned media, by a wide margin. Muck Rack's Generative Pulse analysis of 25 million cited links found earned media accounts for 84% of all AI citations, compared to just 0.3% for paid and advertorial content. Journalism alone makes up 27% of cited sources.

Can AI tools replace an SEO or marketing agency?

Partially. AI tools are strong at technical audits and monitoring AI search visibility, but they struggle with prioritization, judging actual content quality, and assessing backlinks or reputation, which remain some of the biggest factors in search performance.

Is Meta building a cloud computing business?

Yes, according to a Bloomberg report. Meta is reportedly developing a cloud infrastructure business under its Meta Compute initiative that would sell AI computing power and model access to outside companies, competing directly with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

The Brief: Is Google Becoming a Marketplace? Consumers Don’t Want an Autopilot … Yet, Amazon Puts Ads In AI Conversations, and Your Grocery Pricing Strategy Was Built for Humans

In today’s brief: Google is trying to own the checkout layer, Amazon is putting ads inside AI shopping conversations, consumers are telling researchers they want a copilot, not an autopilot, and Bain is asking grocery retailers whether their pricing strategy was designed for humans, bots, or both.

Today's stories:

1. What Google's Universal Cart actually means for retailers, including my own take

2. Consumers want AI to help them shop, not shop for them

3. Amazon debuted agentic ads inside Alexa+ at Cannes

4. Bain warns grocery pricing strategies weren't built for AI agents

Google Wants to Become a Marketplace. That Should Get Every Retailer's Attention

Google unveiled Universal Cart at Google I/O 2026, an AI-powered shopping hub that lets consumers add products from Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail into a single cart that works across retailers. It can track price drops, surface deals, flag compatibility issues, and route checkout through Google Pay or a merchant's site. Retail TouchPoints rounded up expert reactions, and mine is in there too.

My take is that the short-term significance is being overstated, but the long-term play deserves attention. What Google is really trying to do is become a marketplace. If they can own the primary shopping experience, they gain leverage over sellers much the way Amazon does on its platform. The real question to watch is whether shoppers will eventually visit brand sites less and rely on Google more, or simply use Universal Cart as a smarter search layer. 

Other experts in the piece, including Neil Saunders and Paula Macaggi, flagged that while retailers keep the transaction, they lose visibility into the discovery moment, which is where the influence actually lives. I've written more about this dynamic in my piece on the future of agentic AI in retail.

Read more: https://www.retailtouchpoints.com/features/google-universal-cart-retail-experts-weigh-in/620149/

Consumers Want AI Riding Shotgun, Not Behind the Wheel

PYMNTS Intelligence's May 2026 Consumer AI Benchmark found that while AI adoption in commerce keeps growing, most consumers still want final say over their purchases. While product discovery, deal comparison, and personalized recommendations are areas where people are comfortable letting AI help, it gets murkier with payments, financial commitments, and anything that feels irreversible comes into play.

One interesting finding is that complete frictionlessness can start to feel unsettling when an AI agent is the one removing it. Consumers may actually want deliberate pause points built into agentic experiences, confirmation screens, approval checkpoints, or the ability to override. For retailers and brands building on top of agentic platforms, that’s a real design consideration. 

Read more: https://www.pymnts.com/news/artificial-intelligence/2026/consumers-want-ai-to-shop-with-them-not-for-them/

Amazon Just Put an Ad Inside Your AI Shopping Conversation

Amazon announced Alexa+ Agentic Ads at Cannes Lions, a new format that lets shoppers see an ad and complete a purchase without leaving it. The LLM engages in a natural conversation with the customer, answers questions, and handles the transaction end-to-end. Papa Johns and The Orchard, a Sony subsidiary, are in the beta. Amazon has not disclosed pricing.

Interestingly, agencies are calling organic AI visibility the baseline, and paid placement the tax you pay for not earning it organically. Mike Feldman, SVP of commerce at Flywheel, said paid agentic ads are only what you pay for messing up on the organic side. 

WPP forecasts AI search ads will become the fastest-growing channel in advertising, and OpenAI projects $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year. Whether this format scales depends on whether Amazon can produce a metric that replaces the click, which marketers say is the missing piece before serious dollars move in.

Read more: https://digiday.com/marketing/amazons-latest-ad-format-offers-a-glimpse-of-advertisings-agentic-future/

Your Grocery Pricing Strategy Was Designed for Humans. Bots Are Coming

Bain published a sharp piece this week on what agentic AI does to grocery economics. The argument is that grocery pricing has always worked by anchoring human shoppers on a handful of known-value items, like milk, bread, and bananas, and then recovering margin on everything else in the basket. AI agents do not work that way. They evaluate every SKU, cherry-pick the cheapest items across multiple retailers, and split orders accordingly. The mix that makes a grocery order profitable never gets built.

Bain's potential responses include basket-size incentives, store-only promotions that bots can't access, private-label assortments competitors can't match, and differentiated value in areas like fresh produce and prepared foods, where AI can't easily standardize comparison. 

Almost half of U.S. shoppers already use AI agents to compare grocery prices or find deals, per Bain's own research. The threat to basket building is not a future problem. It's a current one.

Read more: https://www.bain.com/insights/online-grocery-pricing-for-both-humans-and-bots/

That's it for today.

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FAQs

What is Google Universal Cart?

Google Universal Cart is an AI-powered shopping hub announced at Google I/O 2026 that lets consumers add products from Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail into a single cart that works across multiple retailers. It tracks price drops, surfaces deals, and routes checkout through Google Pay or a merchant's site.

Will Google Universal Cart hurt retailers?

Experts are divided on the short-term impact but broadly agree that the bigger concern is Google gaining influence over product discovery. Retailers keep the transaction but lose visibility into the moment of purchase decision, which increasingly happens inside AI-powered surfaces rather than on brand websites.

Do consumers want AI to shop for them?

Not entirely. PYMNTS Intelligence research from May 2026 found consumers are comfortable with AI for product discovery and deal comparison, but most want to retain final approval over purchases, especially for payments and higher-stakes decisions.

What are Amazon Alexa+ Agentic Ads?

Alexa+ Agentic Ads are a new Amazon ad format announced at Cannes Lions in June 2026. They allow shoppers to see an ad and complete a purchase inside a conversational AI experience without navigating to a separate page. Papa Johns and The Orchard are beta partners.

The Brief: Salesforce Acquires Fin for $3.6 Billion, Google Gives You an Opt-Out You Shouldn’t Use, and Marketers Still Can't Explain Why They're Doing Anything

In today's marketing brief: Three stories this week that have nothing to do with each other and yet somehow all point at the same problem. A lot of people in marketing and martech are making moves without thinking them all the way through, and one of those people spent $3.6 billion doing it.

Today's stories:

1. Salesforce acquires Fin, the AI customer agent formerly known as Intercom

2. Google released an AI opt-out feature, and your competitors hope you use it

3. More training will not fix marketing's critical thinking problem

Salesforce Paid $3.6 Billion for a Company That Changed Its Name Last Month

Salesforce announced it is acquiring Fin, the AI customer support company that rebranded from Intercom just weeks earlier, for approximately $3.6 billion. Fin's core product is an AI agent that handles complex customer queries end-to-end across live chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, phone, and Slack. The agent runs on Apex, Fin's proprietary AI model built specifically for customer support, which Salesforce says resolves about 76% of incoming support requests without a human ever touching them.

For Salesforce, this is the fifth acquisition announced in 2026 and the third in June alone, joining M3ter and Contentful. It fits directly into Agentforce, Salesforce's agentic AI platform, which hit $1.2 billion in ARR in Q1 FY27, up 20% year over year. The deal is expected to close in Q4 of Salesforce's fiscal 2027. If you are a B2B marketer or revenue operations leader who lives in the Salesforce ecosystem, Fin's capabilities landing inside Agentforce are worth paying attention to.

Read more: https://martech.org/salesforce-acquires-fin-formerly-known-as-intercom/

Google's AI Opt-Out Is a Trap Wearing a Publisher-Friendly Disguise

Google rolled out new controls letting publishers opt out of having their content surfaced in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and also introduced new AI reporting in Google Search Console. SEO consultant Nick LeRoy at Search Engine Land makes the right call here. The opt-out does not turn off AI search, does not change how users behave, and does not slow AI adoption. All it does is remove your brand from the pool of sources Google can pull from. Users keep searching. Google keeps answering. Your competitors just get the citation instead.

The reporting side of the announcement, which got less attention, is actually more useful. For years, the SEO community has asked for better visibility into AI-driven search performance, and this is the first step toward getting it. LeRoy makes a fair point that the SEO industry has always operated on imperfect data, and waiting for a perfect AI attribution model before acting is not a strategy. The real question for any marketing team is whether you can afford to go invisible in the places where buyers are increasingly going to find answers.

Read more: https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-opt-out-feature-competitors-480375

Your Team Does Not Need Another Course. It Needs to Learn How to Make Decisions.

Laura Chamberlain, a professor at Warwick Business School, wrote a piece in Marketing Week this week that is going to land differently depending on where you are in your career. Her argument is that marketing's imposter syndrome epidemic, which the Marketing Week Career and Salary Survey puts at 84.9% of marketers, comes down to a critical thinking problem rather than a training problem. Marketers know what to do and how to do it, but most of them cannot explain why, and that gap leaves them unable to defend decisions, influence stakeholders, or communicate strategic value to leadership.

Her prescription skips the certification course and goes straight to practicing decision-making. Articulate your reasoning even in low-stakes situations, get comfortable saying 'it depends' without apologizing for it, and find environments where you can think out loud without getting punished for uncertainty. 

The piece is aimed at individual marketers, but the organizational implication is equally pointed. If your culture rewards outputs and punishes the visible reasoning behind them, you are going to keep producing tactically competent people who can’t tell you why any of it matters. (personal note: I see this across many of today’s organizations. Some call it smart. Others call it laziness wrapped with a shiny ‘AI-knows everything’ label.)

Marketing expert and Professor at Lenoir-Rhyne University, John Andrews, may have a possible solution to this problem. He wrote about how to use AI as a thought partner instead of an answer engine. This back-and-forth methodology may be the way for marketers to fill their gaps in understanding.

Read more: https://www.marketingweek.com/marketings-critical-thinking-gap/

That's it for today.

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FAQs

Did Salesforce acquire Intercom?

Yes. Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Fin, the company formerly known as Intercom, for approximately $3.6 billion. Intercom rebranded to Fin in May 2026 before the deal was announced.

What is Salesforce Fin?

Fin is an AI customer agent platform that resolves complex customer support queries across channels, including live chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, phone, and Slack. It runs on a proprietary AI model called Apex and is being acquired by Salesforce to expand its Agentforce platform.

Should I opt out of Google AI Overviews?

Opting out removes your content from Google AI Overviews and AI Mode but does not remove AI from search. Users continue getting AI-generated answers, and your competitors fill the gap. Most SEO practitioners advise staying in and focusing on the visibility strategy instead.

What is Google's new AI reporting in Search Console?

Google introduced AI performance reporting in Google Search Console in June 2026, giving publishers early visibility into how their content performs in AI-powered search experiences. The reporting is in beta and not yet available to everyone.

The Brief: Shopify All-In on Agentic Commerce, Visa and OpenAI Team Up on Payments, and a Useful Reality Check for Everyone Evaluating This Space

In today's agentic commerce brief: Shopify is making it easier for merchants to plug into the emerging agentic infrastructure, Visa and OpenAI are building the payment rails underneath it, and MarTech is asking whether any of us have thought carefully enough about what we're actually committing to.

Today's stories:

1. Shopify's Spring platform update puts agentic commerce readiness in merchants' hands

2. Visa and OpenAI partner to bring secure payments to AI agent transactions

3. A framework for evaluating agentic commerce investments before you get burned

Shopify's Spring Update Makes Agentic Commerce a One-Click Decision for Merchants

Shopify dropped its Spring platform update with more than 150 changes, and the headline is agentic commerce readiness. The update adds support for the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), the agentic commerce standard Shopify co-developed with Google, making it easier for developers to build new shopping experiences on top of it. Merchants can now make their entire catalog available to AI shopping agents with a single click through a new Catalog API.

Shop Pay got a meaningful expansion too. It was previously available to non-Shopify merchants, but the integration path required going through Shopify's sales team and a complex setup. Now it works the way everything else on the platform does. Shop Pay processed $35 billion in gross merchandise volume in Q1, up 59% year-over-year, so Shopify has plenty of incentive to get it in more places.

The global selling improvements are practical. Shopify will automatically surface local payment methods for merchants selling internationally and, working with Global-e, can present buyers with a single all-in price covering currency conversion, taxes, and tariffs rather than a stack of fees at checkout. For merchants trying to grow internationally, that kind of friction reduction matters.

Read more: https://www.digitaltransactions.net/ai-takes-the-stage-in-shopifys-latest-pos-platform-update/

Visa and OpenAI Are Building the Payment Infrastructure Underneath Agentic Commerce

Visa and OpenAI announced a partnership at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco that will bring secure Visa payments into OpenAI's agentic commerce experiences. Visa is putting its global network, tokenization, and real-time fraud monitoring behind transactions initiated by AI agents, giving developers and merchants a cleaner way to accept payments when an agent does the buying.

Transactions will operate within consumer-defined spending limits, merchant category restrictions, and required approvals, so the agent can't just go off and buy whatever it wants. Tokenized Visa credentials and real-time authorization run underneath every transaction.

Visa's chief product officer said AI will transform commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile technology did, and that's the bet they're making with this partnership. Consumers are still hesitant to let agents spend on their behalf, and Visa's network credibility is how both companies are trying to close that gap.

Read more: https://financialit.net/news/payments/visa-partners-openai-enable-secure-payments-next-generation-agentic-commerce

Before You Sign That Agentic Commerce Contract, Read This

MarTech ran a useful piece this week on how to evaluate agentic commerce investments without getting burned, framing it through the lens of direct mail, a channel that survived decades of technological disruption. The argument is that durable marketing infrastructure has predictable qualities, and those qualities are worth checking for before you commit.

Agentic commerce pitches all start to blur together. One rewrites the funnel, another consolidates the stack, a third replaces something you bought 12 months ago. The acronyms are in place (UCP, MCP, A2A) and the demos look great, but protocols evolve, companies get acquired, and pricing changes can blow up a three-year roadmap. The data clauses in many of these contracts look a lot like the social media contracts brands signed in 2011, when that industry was still figuring itself out.

Two questions worth asking before you commit:

1. What does your brand actually keep when this relationship ends (product data, interaction history, negotiation policies that can move to another system)

2. What questions will this investment still answer in 2029?

If the best metric you can point to is a high score on a vendor's proprietary index, that's not a long-term asset. Gartner expects more than 40% of agentic AI projects to be canceled by end of 2027, citing escalating costs, unclear business value, and weak risk controls. Worth reading before your next vendor meeting.

Read more: https://martech.org/3-direct-mail-lessons-for-evaluating-agentic-commerce/

That's it for today.

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FAQs

How do I make my Shopify store available to AI shopping agents?

Shopify merchants can make their entire product catalog available to AI shopping agents with a single click through the new Catalog API, added in Shopify's Spring 2026 platform update. The update also added support for the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), the agentic commerce standard Shopify co-developed with Google, which is the underlying infrastructure AI agents use to discover and buy products.

What percentage of agentic AI projects are expected to fail?

Gartner expects more than 40% of agentic AI projects to be canceled by the end of 2027, citing escalating costs, unclear business value, and weak risk controls.

Is Visa partnering with OpenAI?

Yes, Visa and OpenAI announced a partnership at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco to bring secure Visa payments into OpenAI's agentic commerce experiences. Visa will provide its network, tokenization, and real-time fraud monitoring to support AI agent transactions, with consumer-defined spending limits and approval controls built in.

The Brief: Google Killed FAQ Rich Results, B2B Buyers Don't Trust You Anymore, and AI Pilots Are Not a Strategy

In today's brief: Three stories this week that B2B marketers should not ignore. Google quietly killed off a feature many teams built content strategies around. New research confirms what a lot of us have been feeling: B2B buyers have tuned out. And a Gartner analyst is calling out the AI pilot trap most marketing orgs have walked right into.

Today's stories:

1. Google deprecated FAQ rich results, and it already happened

2. 74% of B2B CMOs say buyers are more skeptical of traditional marketing

3. Marketing teams have too much AI activity and not enough AI value

Google Pulled FAQ Rich Results, and Most People Missed It

As of May 7, FAQ rich results are no longer appearing in Google Search. Google added a deprecation notice to its structured data documentation with almost no fanfare, no blog post, and no explanation. Search Console reporting goes away in June, and API support follows in August.

This one has been coming for a while. Google started restricting FAQ rich results back in 2023, limiting them to government and health sites. This deprecation appears to end eligibility for everyone. The FAQ schema markup itself can stay on your pages without causing issues, but it will not earn visible rich results in search. Worth noting: some in the SEO community had been recommending FAQ schema as a way to help AI systems parse content better. Google has not connected this deprecation to that trend, so that remains an open question.

Read more: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-drops-faq-rich-results-from-search/574429/

B2B Buyers Have Stopped Trusting the Playbook

LinkedIn's 2026 Global B2B Marketing Outlook surveyed 1,299 B2B marketers and CMOs across five countries, and the findings are pretty direct. Three-quarters of respondents say buyers are more skeptical of traditional marketing than they were in the past. Nine in 10 CMOs say buyers need to know and trust a brand before they will even engage with it.

The generational shift is part of it. According to the research, 71% of B2B buyers are now Gen Z or millennials, and they behave differently than the buyers most B2B marketing programs were built for. Two-thirds of UK marketers say buyers are turning to peer recommendations, trusted experts, and creators instead of brand-produced content when evaluating suppliers. That has 87% of B2B CMOs planning to increase spending on creator and influencer marketing in the next year. LinkedIn also announced a Creator Marketplace alongside the research to help brands find and work with those creators more easily.

Read more: https://www.marketingweek.com/b2b-cmo-traditional-marketing/

AI Pilots Are Not a Strategy

Gartner VP Analyst Nicole Greene published a piece in MarTech this week that gets at something a lot of marketing leaders already sense: the early phase of AI adoption produced a lot of pilots and productivity gains, but not a lot of measurable business value. Her argument is that the question has shifted from 'What AI tool should we try next?' to 'Where can AI create measurable value, and how do we capture it?'

Her framework organizes AI use cases into three buckets: defend (efficiency and cost reduction), extend (better conversion, lower acquisition costs, stronger personalization), and upend (new capabilities, new markets, competitive repositioning). The key point is that most teams have been focused on defend-level use cases and calling it AI transformation. Greene argues you need all three types, measured against outcomes that actually matter to the business, not just output-per-hour metrics. Speed and cost savings are a starting point, not a finish line.

Read more: https://martech.org/marketing-needs-ai-outcomes-not-more-ai-pilots/

That's it for today.

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FAQs

Did Google remove FAQ rich results?

Yes. Google deprecated FAQ rich results on May 7, 2026. They no longer appear in search results. Search Console reporting ends in June 2026 and API support ends in August 2026. FAQ schema markup can remain on pages without causing issues but will not generate visible results.

Should I remove FAQ schema from my website?

Not necessarily. Google has said unused structured data does not cause problems for search. You can leave FAQ schema in place, but it will not produce rich results in Google Search as of May 2026.

Are B2B buyers skeptical of marketing?

According to LinkedIn's 2026 Global B2B Marketing Outlook, 74% of B2B CMOs say buyers are more skeptical of traditional marketing than in the past. Nine in 10 CMOs say buyers need to already know and trust a brand before they will engage with it.

The Brief: Grocery AI at Kroger, Alexa Custom Merch, Ulta AI Results, Mastercard Agent Pay

In today's brief: Agentic commerce kept making moves this week. A grocery AI platform went live with two major chains, Amazon's shopping agent learned a new trick, Ulta Beauty showed what early AI results actually look like, and Mastercard's CEO asked the consumer protection question everyone else is avoiding.

Today's stories:

1. Cooklist brings its AI shopping assistant to Kroger and Wegmans

2. Alexa for Shopping now lets you design custom merch with a text prompt

3. Ulta Beauty's AI assistant is driving real ecommerce growth

4. Mastercard's CEO wants to know what happens when the AI agent gets it wrong

Grocery AI Just Got a Lot More Mainstream

Cooklist launched its AI Shopping Assistant with Kroger and Wegmans, putting agentic grocery shopping in front of 10 million digital shoppers across more than 700 stores. The platform takes natural language requests, checks live inventory, and builds personalized product bundles based on a shopper's purchase history, budget, dietary preferences, and nutritional goals. It can also import recipes from social media videos or blog posts and turn them into checkout-ready carts.

Cooklist plans to roll out to 10 more grocery banners and another 7 million shoppers in the coming weeks. When a shopper can describe what they want for dinner and get a cart built from actual in-stock items at their local store, that's agentic commerce doing exactly what it's supposed to do. For more on where this is all heading, I've written about the agentic AI opportunity in retail.

Read more: https://progressivegrocer.com/cooklist-brings-agentic-ai-based-shopping-kroger-wegmans

Alexa for Shopping Now Makes You a Merch Designer (Whether You Asked or Not)

Amazon added a new feature to Alexa for Shopping this week: type a prompt, get a custom design for a T-shirt, sweatshirt, or water bottle. Amazon then prints and ships it through Merch on Demand with Prime-eligible delivery, and designing is free — you only pay when you actually order something.

Alexa for Shopping launched in mid-May as a combined version of Rufus and Alexa+, Amazon's generative AI-upgraded voice assistant. Amazon demoed the feature with a sample prompt of "make a design of a golden retriever as a 90s corporate lawyer at a disco," which sounds about right for an AI-generated T-shirt. The feature is live for all U.S. customers, with more customizable product types on the way.

Hey Printful, you feeling good right about now? Asking for a friend.

Read more: https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2026/06/08/amazons-alexa-for-shopping-adds-customization-feature-for-merch/

Ulta's AI Assistant Is Not Just a Press Release Anymore

Ulta Beauty's Q1 results are the kind of numbers that make other retailers pay attention. Ecommerce comparable sales grew in the mid-teens while physical store comps came in at low single digits, and total net sales hit $3.16 billion, up 11.1% year over year. A big part of that digital lift is Ulta AI, an AI shopping assistant launched in April and built on Google's Gemini Enterprise.

Ulta also integrated with Google's AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, letting shoppers search, compare, and buy directly through Google's conversational interfaces. Add in an Uber Eats partnership for same-day delivery across 1,500-plus stores, Klarna's buy now, pay later option, and a TikTok Shop livestream that pulled more than 5 million impressions, and this is a company running a real omnichannel playbook. Full-year guidance calls for 6% to 7% net sales growth.

Looking for which retailers have upcoming earnings reports? Check out my Interactive Retail Earnings Calendar

Read more: https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2026/06/05/ulta-beauty-ai-assistant-ecommerce-sales-q1-fy26/

Mastercard's CEO Is Asking the Questions Nobody Else Is

Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach went on record this week with some pointed concerns about agentic commerce: What happens when an AI agent buys the wrong thing? Is the agent actually who it claims to be? Will it follow spending instructions? Those aren't hypothetical anymore. Robinhood launched an agentic credit card feature in May letting customers connect third-party AI agents to their accounts with preset spending caps, and Stripe expanded its Shared Payment Tokens to let AI agents initiate transactions using tokenized credentials from both Mastercard and Visa.

Mastercard's answer is Agent Pay, a framework that uses tokenization to replace card numbers with secure digital credentials and includes a "Know Your Agent" verification process so banks can approve or block individual AI agents. Accenture found 78% of financial institutions expect AI agent-related fraud to rise significantly, and the Consumer Bankers Association called agentic payment tools a potential massive disruptor of the existing consumer payments landscape. The infrastructure is moving fast. The guardrails are moving a little less fast. I've written more on where this is heading in my piece on the future of agentic AI in retail.

Read more: https://www.aol.com/articles/mastercard-ceo-shares-grave-concerns-141700000.html

That's it for today.

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FAQs

What is Cooklist and how does it work with Kroger?

Cooklist is a grocery AI platform that uses natural language to check inventory and build personalized shopping carts. It launched with Kroger and Wegmans in June 2026, reaching 10 million digital shoppers across more than 700 stores.

Is Ulta Beauty using AI for ecommerce?

Yes. Ulta launched its Ulta AI shopping assistant in April 2026, built on Google's Gemini Enterprise. The company posted mid-teen ecommerce comparable sales growth in Q1 and credits ongoing digital investments, including AI, as a key driver.

What is Mastercard Agent Pay?

Agent Pay is Mastercard's agentic commerce security framework that uses tokenization to secure AI-initiated transactions and includes a "Know Your Agent" verification process so banks can approve or block individual AI agents.

Can AI agents make purchases on your behalf?

Yes. Robinhood launched an agentic credit card feature in May 2026, and Stripe supports AI-initiated transactions through tokenized credentials. Both Mastercard and Visa are building infrastructure to support AI-agent purchasing with consumer protection guardrails.

Consumers Don't Trust AI to Shop for Them & Merchants Aren't Ready, and the Race to Own the Checkout Just Got More Interesting

In today's brief: a new report paints a pretty rough picture of where merchants stand on AI readiness. Google used its I/O developer conference to quietly advance its checkout ambitions. DHL and USPS made their 25-year partnership official in a very big way. And two marketing tech companies just merged to build something that looks a lot like the operating system for agentic retail.

Today's stories:

1. 73% of merchants aren't ready for the AI shopping era

2. Google Pay goes all-in on agentic checkout

3. DHL and USPS strike a $10 billion last-mile deal

4. Insider One acquires Bluecore to build the agentic marketing stack

AI Is Already Shopping. Merchants Are Not Ready for It.

A new report from Ballerine, a merchant risk and compliance platform, found that 73% of online sellers are not 'agent-ready,' meaning their digital infrastructure can't reliably support AI-driven shopping. Bain & Company projects agentic commerce could account for up to 25% of the U.S. online retail market by 2030, roughly $500 billion in annual spending, while consumer adoption is already accelerating. The merchant side hasn't kept pace.

AI agents need structured, machine-readable data to function, such as accurate inventory, clear policies, verified merchant identities, and real pricing. Most merchant websites were built for human shoppers who can read between the lines and fill in the gaps. When the data is incomplete or unreliable, agents either fail the task outright or, worse, send a shopper to a merchant they shouldn't have recommended in the first place.

Ballerine launched Agenticom.org to give the ecosystem a shared reference point for what needs to be built. Agentic commerce won't scale on the buyer side alone if the merchant side hasn't caught up, and right now it hasn't. For more on what that means for retail, see my piece on the future of agentic AI in retail if you want more context on where this is going.

Read more: https://www.gregzakowicz.com/blog/future-of-agentic-ai-in-retail

Google Pay Wants to Be the Checkout Layer for the Agentic Era

At Google I/O, Google announced a round of Google Pay updates aimed less at the traditional checkout experience and more at building the infrastructure for AI-driven commerce. The biggest one is that existing Google Pay merchant IDs are now compatible with Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), meaning merchants can participate in agentic commerce without rebuilding their payment stack, which removes a meaningful barrier to entry.

Google also launched a Google Pay and Wallet Developer MCP server, now in public preview, which lets AI agents plug into payment workflows to handle integration troubleshooting, trend analysis, and code generation. On the conversion side, they're bringing dynamic checkout callbacks to Android (already live on web), which allows the Google Pay button to move earlier in the purchase flow, like to product detail or cart pages, while still presenting accurate shipping costs and totals in real time.

There's also a cross-device authentication feature for desktop that takes aim at MFA prompts, one of the more reliable ways to lose a customer mid-checkout. Google routes that step to the user's phone instead, where a biometric or PIN handles it cleanly and quickly, which should improve conversion rates for merchants running checkout on the web.

Read more: https://developers.googleblog.com/the-latest-updates-to-google-pay/

DHL and USPS Just Made Their Long Partnership Very, Very Official

DHL eCommerce and the U.S. Postal Service signed a new exclusive multi-year contract for last-mile parcel delivery services worth over $10 billion, the largest agreement in a partnership that's been running for 25 years. Under the deal, DHL handles pickup, sortation through its 19 automated hubs, and linehaul across its air and ground network, while USPS takes the final mile, covering more than 170 million delivery points across 41,550 ZIP codes six days a week.

For both sides, the arrangement makes sense. DHL gets access to one of the most complete residential delivery networks in the country without having to build or maintain it, while USPS picks up long-term package volume at a time when its traditional mail business keeps shrinking. For shippers, that translates to better reach, especially outside major metro areas where private carriers either don't operate or aren't cost-effective.

For brands actually shipping through DHL, the most meaningful outcome is consistency. The long-term contract gives DHL the stability to invest deeper in its infrastructure, which should improve reliability over time. Whether that plays out in practice depends on how well DHL and USPS share data and coordinate handoffs, because the physical network only gets you so far. Tracking, exception management, and delivery visibility are what actually determine whether the experience improves for the end customer.

Read more: https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2026/05/29/dhl-usps-partner-last-mile-delivery/

Insider One Acquires Bluecore, and the Agentic Marketing Stack Starts Taking Shape

New York-based customer engagement platform Insider One has acquired Bluecore, a retail martech company that serves more than 400 U.S. enterprise brands, including Sephora, J.Crew, ALO Yoga, and Ralph Lauren. Terms weren't disclosed. Bluecore's main asset is its Transparent ID Network, which processes over 10 billion daily shopper events and powers machine learning models built specifically for retail commerce.

Insider One's play here is about data infrastructure. Its platform already handles cross-channel journey orchestration, personalization, and AI agents that manage customer engagement workflows autonomously across 12 digital channels. What Bluecore adds is an identity graph that converts anonymous site visitors into known customers and keeps that data accurate and actionable across touchpoints, filling in a gap the platform needed to run autonomous customer engagement at scale.

The agentic marketing platform category is still early, but it's already producing real M&A activity, which is a sign that vendors are racing to assemble the complete stack before brands lock in their architecture choices. If you're evaluating marketing technology right now, understanding how each platform fits into the broader infrastructure layer that agentic commerce runs on matters as much as what the platform does on its own.

Read more: https://uk.fashionnetwork.com/news/Agentic-commerce-marketing-platform-insider-one-acquires-bluecore,1835981.html

That's it for today.

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FAQs

Was Bluecore acquired?

Yes. Insider One, a customer engagement and AI marketing platform, acquired Bluecore in 2026. Bluecore serves more than 400 enterprise retail brands, including Sephora, J.Crew, and Ralph Lauren.

What percentage of merchants are ready for agentic commerce?

According to a 2026 Ballerine report, only 27% of online merchants have the structured data infrastructure that AI shopping agents need to work reliably. Most merchant websites were built for human shoppers, not agents, and that gap is becoming a real business problem as consumer adoption accelerates.

What is the DHL and USPS delivery partnership?

DHL and USPS signed a $10 billion exclusive agreement where DHL manages pickup, sortation, and linehaul while USPS handles the final mile to more than 170 million delivery points across the country. It's the largest deal in a partnership that's already been running for 25 years.

What is Google's Universal Commerce Protocol?

Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is the payment and commerce framework Google is building so that AI agents can complete purchases on behalf of shoppers using existing merchant infrastructure. Merchants with Google Pay IDs can now connect to UCP without rebuilding their payment stack.

Payment Systems Aren't Ready for AI Shoppers, Amazon Replaces Rufus, and Marketing Metrics Get an AI Overhaul

In today's brief: Payment infrastructure faces a reckoning as AI agents start buying things on behalf of consumers. Amazon is done experimenting with Rufus and putting Alexa front and center for shopping. B2B marketers are learning that website traffic isn't the metric that matters anymore. And Starbucks is cutting another 300 office jobs while its turnaround plan racks up costs.

Today's stories:

1. Chargebacks911 warns payment systems aren't ready for AI shopping agents

2. Amazon replaces Rufus with Alexa for Shopping in the main search bar

3. B2B marketing metrics shift from traffic to AI visibility

4. Starbucks cuts 300 more corporate jobs, takes $400 million charge

Payment Systems Aren't Built for AI Agents

Chargebacks911 is raising an alarm that nobody asked for, but everyone should hear: the entire dispute and chargeback infrastructure is not ready for AI agents making purchases.

When an AI agent buys something on your behalf, and it goes wrong, who disputes it? The consumer, the agent provider, the merchant, or some combination of all three? The current system assumes a human clicked "buy" and can explain what happened. That breaks down when software makes the decision.

The problem isn't theoretical. AI shopping agents are already live in limited form through tools like ChatGPT's shopping features and various browser extensions. As these scale, banks and payment processors are going to face disputes they have no framework to handle. The software made the purchase, and models don't have purchase intent in the legal sense.

The real issue is accountability. If an agent buys the wrong product, processes a duplicate order, or misinterprets instructions, the dispute process has to figure out where liability sits. Right now, it doesn't.

Read more: https://techround.co.uk/artificial-intelligence/risks-ai-agents-ecommerce-businesses-banks/

Amazon Sidelines Rufus and Goes All-In on Alexa

Amazon replaced Rufus with Alexa for Shopping in its main search bar, and the shift is telling. Rufus was the AI shopping assistant Amazon launched with fanfare less than a year ago. Now it's been moved to a side menu while Alexa takes the prime real estate.

Amazon is betting that voice and conversational interfaces are the path forward. Alexa has brand recognition, existing integrations, and years of user behavior data. Rufus was new and unfamiliar. Putting Alexa in the search bar makes the AI shopping experience feel like an extension of something people already use.

For consumers, the experience is more conversational. You can ask Alexa to find products, compare options, and complete purchases without typing queries or scanning through result pages. For Amazon, this is a way to keep shoppers inside its ecosystem longer and reduce friction at the point of purchase.

It also puts pressure on Google, which has been slower to integrate its AI shopping tools into the main search experience. Amazon's bet is that people will get used to asking Alexa instead of searching, and once that behavior sticks, it's hard to reverse.

Read more: https://www.retaildive.com/news/amazon-ai-alexa-for-shopping/820218/

B2B Marketers Are Measuring Different Things Now

Website traffic is losing its spot as the primary success metric for B2B marketing. A new report from 10Fold found that 52% of B2B tech marketing leaders now see AI-generated search as their top channel for reaching buyers.

Buyers are getting answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews without ever clicking through to a vendor site, meaning fewer visits but not necessarily fewer conversions. About 42% of respondents said both visibility and traffic increased, but others are seeing stronger lead quality even with lower site visits.

The priority now is whether AI systems recognize your content as credible enough to cite, summarize, or reference. That puts the focus on authority signals like media coverage, analyst mentions, expert bylines, proprietary research, and influencer validation. Producing more content doesn't help if it all sounds the same as everything else the AI is reading.

Marketing teams now have to figure out how to measure influence when buyers never land on their site but still show up in the pipeline better informed and further along in the buying process. The metrics haven't caught up to the behavior yet.

Read more: https://martech.org/the-ai-search-shift-changing-b2b-marketing-metrics/

Starbucks Cuts 300 More Jobs as Turnaround Costs Pile Up

Starbucks is laying off 300 corporate employees and closing four regional offices in the U.S., the third round of office cuts since 2025. The company is also taking a $400 million restructuring charge, split between real estate impairments and severance.

Sales have started to recover under CEO Brian Niccol's "Back to Starbucks" plan, which includes store renovations, hiring more baristas, and menu refreshes. But those investments are expensive. Store operating costs jumped 7% in the first half of the fiscal year, and profit margins remain below their historical levels.

The company is targeting $2 billion in cost savings over the next two years, and cutting office jobs is part of that. Starbucks employed about 9,000 people in U.S. corporate roles as of last September. The 300 cuts announced now will likely be followed by more internationally as the company reviews its overseas structure.

The regional office closures in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and Burbank come as Starbucks opens a second major office in Nashville, which will eventually house 2,000 employees. The Nashville move has caused tension in Seattle, where Starbucks has been headquartered for decades and where former CEO Howard Schultz recently criticized local officials for policies he says are hostile to business.

Read more: https://www.ft.com/content/2ae677ec-73be-4be1-8158-f56633cf0708

That's it for today.

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FAQs

Who is liable when an AI shopping agent makes a wrong purchase?

Current dispute and chargeback systems don't have a clear answer for AI agent purchases. Liability could fall on the consumer, the AI provider, the merchant, or some combination of all three, but payment processors have no established framework to handle these disputes since AI models don't have "purchase intent" in the legal sense.

What happened to Amazon Rufus?

Amazon replaced Rufus with Alexa for Shopping in its main search bar in May 2026, moving Rufus to a side menu. The change signals Amazon's bet that its established Alexa brand with years of user data is more effective than introducing a new AI chatbot.

Is website traffic still the most important metric for B2B marketing? 

No, website traffic is losing its position as the primary B2B marketing success metric. According to a 2026 report from 10Fold, 52% of B2B tech marketing leaders now consider AI-generated search their top channel, with the priority shifting to whether AI systems recognize content as credible enough to cite or reference.

How much is Starbucks' restructuring costing the company?

Starbucks is taking a $400 million restructuring charge in 2026, covering 300 corporate job cuts and four regional office closures. This is part of a $2 billion cost savings target over two years under CEO Brian Niccol's "Back to Starbucks" turnaround plan.

Rufus Product Optimization, Target Goes All-In on Stores, LinkedIn Leads the Field, and Does Agentic Commerce Has a Dispute Problem?

In today’s brief: Keyword-stuffing on Amazon is going the way of the Buffalo (p.s. go Bills), physical retail is having a moment, B2B marketers are finally getting the LinkedIn ROI data they've been asking for, and agentic commerce is running into its first real infrastructure headache.

Today's Stories:

1. Amazon Rufus may recommend your competitors

2. Target commits $5B to 130+ store remodels and 30 new locations

3. LinkedIn posts 121% ROAS, the only positive return among major B2B ad platforms

4. Agentic commerce has payment rails in progress, but no dispute layer to match

Amazon’s Rufus May Recommend Your Competitor If You’re Not Careful

Amazon optimization is evolving from keyword stuffing to conversational relevance. Sellers are being warned that Amazon’s Rufus AI shopping assistant may actively steer shoppers toward competing products if a listing doesn’t clearly answer customer questions. If a shopper asks something like “Will this work with an iPhone 16 Plus?” and the listing provides vague or incomplete information, Rufus may immediately suggest better-matching competitor products instead. Bad dog, Rufus!

This shifts Amazon SEO and product optimization for sellers. Rather than focusing mostly on keywords, brands now need “answer-complete” listings that directly address real shopper questions. Rufus prioritizes highly structured and trustworthy content, especially product descriptions, A+ content, and structured attributes such as dimensions, compatibility, materials, and fit. Reviews and customer Q&A act as secondary validation sources, while hidden metadata and image-only information have much less influence on AI-generated recommendations.

To adapt, sellers are encouraged to think like shoppers and audit their listings around likely customer questions and use cases, such as by replacing vague marketing language with specific claims, reinforcing key product details across multiple sections of a listing, and using AI tools to identify gaps in question coverage. 

Read more:https://www.interodigital.com/blog/rufus-will-recommend-your-competitor-if-your-amazon-listing-doesnt-answer-the-question/

Target Is Betting $5 Billion on Its Stores

Target just made its position on physical retail very clear. The company is putting $5 billion into its store network, with more than 130 remodels planned this year and 30 new stores on the way. This is a full commitment to the idea that physical stores are worth the investment, not a test-and-learn pilot.

Part of what makes the math work is scale. About 76% of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Target. That kind of reach turns the store network into something closer to a distribution system than a traditional retail footprint, and it's why the company treats remodels as infrastructure spending rather than interior design.

The early returns support the bet. Stores that have gone through a remodel are seeing low-to-mid single-digit sales lifts. That's not a headline number on its own, but apply it across hundreds of locations and the economics get interesting fast.

Read more: https://corporate.target.com/news-features/article/2026/05/target-store-remodels-new-stores-strategy

Is LinkedIn the Only B2B Ad Platform Actually Making Money

If you've been defending LinkedIn ad spend to skeptical executives, Dreamdata just handed you some useful ammunition. The company's 2026 B2B benchmarks report found LinkedIn is the only major paid social platform delivering a positive return on ad spend: 121% ROAS compared to 67% for Google and 51% for Meta.

LinkedIn now accounts for 41% of B2B paid social budgets, and that allocation looks well-supported by the numbers. The buying cycle data helps explain the dynamic: the average B2B buyer journey now runs 272 days, up from 211 a year ago, with sales pipeline visibility showing up around day 220. Staying visible to professional audiences across a nine-month cycle requires a platform that can target based on professional identity, and that's where LinkedIn has a genuine edge.

The 121% figure won't hold for every account, but the broader finding is consistent: LinkedIn works for B2B in ways that general-purpose platforms don't.

Read more: https://www.demandgenreport.com/industry-news/news-brief/linkedin-outperforms-all-b2b-ad-platforms-dreamdata/52164/

Agentic Commerce Is Getting Payment Rails, But No Dispute Layer

The vision for agentic commerce is simple: AI agents buy things on your behalf and the whole experience is seamless. Visa, Mastercard, and others are already building the payment infrastructure to make that work. What nobody has built yet is what happens when something goes wrong.

Donald Kossmann, CTO of Chargebacks911, laid out the problem in a recent piece: in a traditional purchase, there's a checkout event that creates a consent signal, and that signal is what makes chargebacks possible when a dispute arises. In agentic transactions, consent is granted before the purchase, often at the authorization stage rather than at checkout. Without that checkout moment, there's no clean mechanism to dispute a transaction.

McKinsey projects agentic commerce could represent $3 to $5 trillion in transaction value. That's a significant amount of volume to route through a system that can't yet handle a return. The payment rails are coming while the dispute layer may be very far behind.

Read more: https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2026/05/infrastructure-agentic-pay/

That's it for today.

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FAQs

How much is Target investing in physical retail stores?

Target Corporation is investing $5 billion into its physical retail footprint, including more than 130 store remodels and 30 new stores planned for 2026. The retailer says the strategy is designed to strengthen both in-store shopping and fulfillment capabilities as stores increasingly function like local distribution hubs.

What percentage of Americans live near a Target store?

About 76% of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Target Corporation store. That proximity gives the retailer a major logistics advantage for same-day pickup, delivery, and inventory distribution.

Which B2B advertising platform has the highest ROAS in 2026?

According to Dreamdata’s 2026 B2B benchmarks report, LinkedIn is the only major paid social platform delivering a positive return on ad spend (ROAS), averaging 121% compared to 67% for Google and 51% for Meta.

How long is the average B2B buyer journey in 2026?

The average B2B buyer journey now lasts 272 days, up from 211 days a year earlier. Research cited by Dreamdata shows most companies do not gain meaningful sales pipeline visibility until around day 220, reinforcing the importance of long-term brand visibility and nurturing campaigns on platforms like LinkedIn.

Amazon Rufus Hits 250M Users with Auto-Buy, Agentic Commerce Reshapes Brand Competition, and B2B Marketers Can’t Measure What They’re Spending

In today’s brief: Amazon turns Rufus into an autonomous shopping agent with 250 million users, agentic commerce threatens to upend decades of brand dominance in CPG, Loblaw proves AI grocery shopping works, and B2B marketers are getting budget increases without knowing what’s working.

Today’s stories:

1. Amazon expands Rufus AI with 12-month price tracking and auto-buy as usage surges to 250 million

2. Agentic commerce threatens legacy brands while opening doors for challengers

3. Loblaw’s ChatGPT grocery integration exceeds adoption expectations

4. B2B marketing budgets are growing, but ROI measurement remains the top challenge

Amazon Expands Rufus AI with 12-Month Price Tracking and Auto-Buy

Amazon’s Rufus AI assistant now shows 12 months of price history and can automatically buy products when they hit your target price. The expansion comes as Rufus reaches 250 million monthly active users, up 115% year over year, with engagement jumping 400%.

The auto-buy feature lets customers set a target price for any product, and Rufus handles the purchase when the price drops. It’s a shift from chatbot to autonomous shopping agent that could fundamentally change how people buy online. Amazon says customers using Rufus are 60% more likely to complete a purchase.

The price history transparency matters too. Showing 30, 90, and 365 days of pricing data makes it harder for retailers to play games with fake discounts or temporary price bumps before sales. Since its launch in 2024, over 50 million customers have checked price history, averaging three checks per month.

For sellers, pricing consistency now matters more than ever. Rufus surfaces price history directly to shoppers, so strategic discounting needs to be actually strategic. Timed price drops can trigger automatic purchases from customers who’ve set alerts. The shift toward agentic commerce is happening fast, and Amazon is betting on being the platform where it scales.

Read more

How Agentic Commerce Threatens Legacy Brands While Opening Doors for Challengers

If enough consumers let AI agents make buying decisions, legacy CPG brands are in trouble. That’s the takeaway from a new joint report by Kearney and NIQ analyzing $7.2 trillion in consumer spending across 90 countries.

The report finds that innovation, not volume, is becoming the main growth driver for food and beverage brands. Agentic commerce levels the playing field because AI agents don’t care about brand legacy or shelf dominance. They match product attributes to consumer preferences. A niche brand focused on innovation can compete directly with established players if its products better match what the AI is looking for.

For retailers, this could mean that in-store interactions need to become more experiential. Agentic shopping handles transactions. People come to stores to see, touch, taste, and get advice. The routine replenishment gets delegated to AI.

The data shows 74% of consumers already use AI to research products. Among AI shoppers, 31% will shop directly with a retailer if they have an emotional connection, while only 6% will direct their AI to recommend a specific brand even if it costs more. That gap shows how brand loyalty works in an AI-mediated world.

I’ve written more about the agentic AI opportunity in ecommerce and the future of agentic AI in retail if you want to dig deeper.

Read more

Loblaw’s ChatGPT Grocery Integration Exceeds Adoption Expectations

Loblaw says customer adoption of its ChatGPT grocery integration is running ahead of expectations. The Canadian grocer integrated OpenAI’s chatbot to help shoppers build shopping lists, find recipes, and plan meals, and it turns out people actually want to use AI for grocery shopping.

The success makes sense when you think about the friction in grocery shopping. Building a meal plan, checking what’s in season, figuring out substitutions, and finding recipes that use what you already have. These are real problems that AI can solve without requiring people to learn new interfaces or change their behavior much.

What Loblaw is doing right is meeting customers where they already are. ChatGPT integration means people can use familiar conversational AI to handle grocery tasks without downloading new apps and creating new accounts.

This is part of a broader trend where grocers are racing to figure out AI-powered shopping before Amazon and Walmart lock it down. The winners will be the ones who make AI shopping feel like a natural extension of how people already shop.

Read more

B2B Marketing Budgets Growing, But ROI Measurement Remains Top Barrier

Here’s a strange disconnect: 56% of B2B marketers expect budgets to grow in 2026, yet 25% say measuring ROI remains their biggest barrier. You’d think if budgets are growing, someone would be measuring what’s working.

The data comes from the EndeavorB2B Marketing Benchmark Report, which also found that 49% of organizations are increasing in-person event budgets while 37% plan to expand virtual events. Trade shows, roundtables, and small-group meetings are where deals move from interesting to serious.

B2B buyers are moving through discovery, comparison, and decision-making in non-linear ways, disrupting the traditional funnel. Marketers don’t control the path, so funnel-based attribution becomes less reliable. The fix is to create content buyers want, show up in peer networks and reviews, and make it easy for them to get information.

That's it for today.

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FAQs

How many users does Amazon Rufus have?

Amazon Rufus reached 250 million monthly active users as of May 2026, with usage growing 115% year over year. Engagement jumped 400%, and Amazon says customers using Rufus are 60% more likely to complete a purchase compared to those who don't use it.

What percentage of consumers use AI to research products?

74% of consumers already use AI to research products, according to a Kearney and NIQ report analyzing $7.2 trillion in consumer spending. Among AI shoppers, 31% will shop directly with a retailer if they have an emotional connection, while only 6% will direct their AI to recommend a specific brand even if it costs more.

Are B2B marketing budgets growing in 2026?

Yes. 56% of B2B marketers expect budgets to grow in 2026, according to the EndeavorB2B Marketing Benchmark Report. 49% of organizations are increasing in-person event budgets, and 37% plan to expand virtual events. However, 25% say measuring ROI remains their biggest barrier, creating a disconnect between spending and accountability.

Why is Loblaw's ChatGPT integration succeeding?

Loblaw's ChatGPT grocery integration is exceeding expectations because it meets customers where they already are. People can use familiar conversational AI to build shopping lists, find recipes, and plan meals without downloading new apps or creating new accounts. It solves real grocery friction points without requiring behavior change.

The Brief: Amazon's Logistics, Private Labels Get a Makeover, and AI Giants Want to Own Your Shopping Cart

In today's Azimuth brief: Amazon officially turned its logistics empire into a product any business can buy. Walmart and ALDI are rethinking what their store shelves look like from the inside out. And Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are all trying to solve the agentic commerce puzzle with completely different pieces.

Today's stories:

1. Amazon opens its entire logistics network to any U.S. business

2. Why major retailers are redesigning their private-label packaging

3. Where Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google each stand in the agentic commerce race

Amazon Opens Its Logistics to Everyone

Amazon launched Supply Chain Services this week, opening its logistics infrastructure to any U.S. business, not just sellers on its marketplace. The offering bundles freight forwarding, customs brokerage, warehousing, transportation, and last-mile delivery into a single package. P&G, 3M, American Eagle, and Lands' End are among the early adopters.

The network Amazon is putting to work: 200-plus fulfillment centers, 80,000 trailers, 24,000 intermodal containers, and 100 cargo aircraft. All of it was originally built to run Amazon's own retail operation. Now they're monetizing it.

FedEx dropped 9%, and UPS fell 10% on the news, and the concern is straightforward. Amazon can price aggressively because the fixed costs of this infrastructure are already covered by the core business. Competing with that as a traditional shipper is a tough spot.

For retailers and brands, the real question is a trust one. Handing your logistics over to a company that competes with you on the shelf is a trade-off every supply chain team is now going to have to think through. The cost savings might make sense. The strategic exposure is the part that takes a little longer to work out.

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Private Label Gets a Packaging Refresh

Walmart, ALDI, and Target have all done significant redesigns of their private-label packaging recently, and the rationale is the same across all of them: the products are good, but the packaging does not reflect that.

Walmart's overhaul of Great Value is the most ambitious of the group. The brand spans nearly 10,000 grocery and consumer products, and this is its first full design refresh in over 30 years. Walmart's own customer research found that shoppers liked the quality and the price, but "didn't particularly feel proud to display it in their home or with their families." That is a useful thing to know about your flagship store brand.

ALDI went through a similar refresh to unify the look of all its private-label products under a consistent visual identity. Target updated its Up&up line in 2024 with cleaner, bolder packaging. The pattern is not a coincidence. These retailers are treating their store brands less like budget fallbacks and more like actual brands they want shoppers to pick on purpose.

Private label has been gaining share for years, mostly driven by price. The interesting shift now is that the competition is moving up the value chain. When a store brand looks good sitting out on the counter, the old calculus of "name brand vs. store brand" starts to blur. National brands have been dealing with the price challenge for a while. The design challenge is a newer front.

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Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Are Running Very Different Plays in Agentic Commerce

Digital Commerce 360 put out a solid breakdown of where the three major AI labs stand in agentic commerce, and the most notable thing about it is how different their approaches are from each other.

Anthropic ran an internal experiment called "Project Deal," where 69 employees used AI agents to negotiate with each other in a test marketplace. The bots closed 186 deals totaling more than $4,000. Small dollar amounts, but it is the clearest proof of concept yet for agent-to-agent commerce working in practice. Anthropic also donated MCP, its Model Context Protocol, to the Linux Foundation, which is a significant move on the infrastructure layer. (If you want more background on where this is all heading, I've written about the agentic AI opportunity in retail here.

OpenAI moved away from its original in-ChatGPT checkout experience and pivoted to a ChatGPT app model, where retailers integrate directly into the platform. The Agentic Commerce Protocol it built with Stripe, is still active, and Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, Lowe's, Best Buy, and Home Depot are already plugged in. It is a different architecture than where they started, but the retailer list is serious.

Google is going deeper into enterprise retailer partnerships. Ulta Beauty and Macy's both have live AI shopping agents built on Google's technology. It has multiple active protocols in the market: UCP for product discovery (built with Shopify), AP2 for payments, and A2A for agent-to-agent coordination. Google bets that its existing retailer relationships and ad infrastructure give it an edge that the others cannot easily replicate.

None of these approaches has won yet. The fact that each company is building its own protocols means the underlying infrastructure of agentic commerce is going to be fragmented for a while. For anyone in ecommerce, understanding which protocols your tech stack supports is going to matter sooner than most people expect.

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That's it for today.

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The Brief: Sam’s Club’s One-Hour Delivery, MarTech Replacement Rates Slow, Affiliate Content Performance, and Ulta Beauty and Agentic Commerce

Today's Azimuth brief covers Sam's Club's aggressive move into ultra-fast delivery, the slowdown in MarTech platform churn, growing attribution challenges for affiliate marketers in the AI age, and Ulta Beauty's deployment of agentic commerce through Google Gemini.

Today's stories:

• Sam's Club launches one-hour express delivery nationwide

• MarTech replacement rates drop as companies shift focus to efficiency

• Brands struggle to measure affiliate content performance in the AI age

• Ulta Beauty deploys agentic commerce with Google Gemini

1. Sam's Club Launches One-Hour Express Delivery Nationwide

Sam's Club has rolled out one-hour Express delivery across all 600-plus stores, taking aim at Amazon's delivery dominance with a $10 service for Plus members. Since launching on April 2, the retailer has fulfilled nearly 65,000 orders with an average delivery time of 55 minutes. The 10 fastest deliveries clocked in under 12 minutes.

Members now choose between two tiers: the new one-hour service ($10 for Plus, $22 for Club members) or the existing three-hour option ($5 for Plus, $17 for Club). There's no purchase minimum, and items are priced the same as in-club with no markups.

What people are ordering reveals the shift from novelty to necessity. A significant share includes everyday essentials like bottled water, produce, rotisserie chicken, and paper goods. New parents in Amarillo got baby supplies in 11 minutes. Pet owners in Louisville received cat food at the same time.

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2. MarTech Replacement Rates Slow as Companies Shift Focus to Efficiency

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Source: MarTech.org

Marketing technology replacement rates are declining as companies shift from constant platform churn to extracting more value from existing stacks. Rather than ripping and replacing every few years, marketing leaders are doubling down on optimization, integration, and getting teams to actually use the tools they already have.

The change reflects broader economic pressure and MarTech maturation. Budgets are tighter, implementations are expensive, and switching costs are real. Teams are realizing that the problem often isn't the technology itself, but how it's deployed, integrated, and adopted across the organization.

This shift from churn to efficiency has implications for both vendors and practitioners. Vendors need to focus on retention, expansion, and proving ROI rather than purely acquisition. For marketers, it means getting serious about change management, training, and making sure the stack they have is fully leveraged before adding more to it.

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3. Brands Struggle to Measure Affiliate Content Performance in the AI Age

Brands like Adobe and Away are finding it increasingly difficult to measure how well their affiliate content performs as AI search engines and chatbots reshape discovery. Traditional tracking mechanisms break down when content gets summarized, rewritten, or pulled into AI-generated responses rather than driving direct clicks to publisher sites.

The challenge is attribution. When someone asks an AI assistant for product recommendations, and the AI synthesizes information from affiliate content without sending users to the original review or comparison article, how do you measure that influence? How do you credit the affiliate partner when the transaction happens three steps removed from their content?

This is a problem. Affiliate marketing has traditionally relied on clear click-and-conversion paths. AI intermediaries muddy those waters. Brands and affiliates will need new frameworks for tracking influence and crediting referrals in an environment where content gets consumed indirectly through AI summaries rather than direct site visits.

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4. Ulta Beauty Deploys Agentic Commerce with Google Gemini

Ulta Beauty is making its products shoppable directly within Google Search and the Gemini app, adopting the Universal Commerce Protocol to enable agentic commerce. The retailer is also launching Ulta AI, a shopping assistant built with Gemini Enterprise that leverages insights from Ulta's 46 million member base.

The UCP integration allows AI agents to interact with Ulta's ecommerce platform, meaning shoppers can discover, compare, and complete purchases without leaving the AI interface. This puts Ulta into the emerging agentic commerce flow where discovery, intent, and purchase are stitched together in a single interaction.

Beauty is a high-friction vertical where visual signals, brand trust, and personalization matter. Ulta's loyalty dataset and curated assortments give it a defensible advantage versus general marketplaces that win on logistics. The partnership positions Ulta to capture demand as shopping behavior shifts from browsing sites to asking assistants for recommendations.

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That's it for today.

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The Brief: Staples-Party City Partnership, Amazon's GLP-1 Program, Record Mother's Day Spending, and Parents' Digital Shopping Surge

Welcome to The Azimuth Brief for April 22, 2026. Here are the top retail and ecommerce stories that caught my attention.

Today's most interesting stories:

• Staples partners with Party City in 700+ stores nationwide

• Amazon launches GLP-1 weight loss program through One Medical

• Mother's Day spending expected to hit record $38 billion

• Parents drive 50% more digital shopping activity than average consumers

1. Staples and Party City Partner to Bring Party Supplies to 700+ Stores Nationwide

Staples and Party City announced a strategic partnership bringing Party City inside more than 700 Staples locations nationwide, just in time for graduation season. The collaboration makes Party City's selection of balloons, décor and party supplies available alongside Staples same-day print and marketing services, creating a single destination for personal and professional occasions.

The in-store experience features latex and foil balloons inflated with helium and ready to take home. Customers can choose from a range of colors, sizes, and designs. In the coming weeks, customers will also be able to schedule balloon pickups in advance through Staples.com and the Staples app.

Staples is celebrating the partnership with a buy 2, get 1 free offer on select foil balloons, valid through mid-June in store and online for in-store pickup. The deal applies to regularly priced foil balloons up to $6.99, with the discount applying to the lowest-priced item.

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2. Amazon Launches GLP-1 Weight Loss Program Through One Medical

Amazon One Medical launched a comprehensive GLP-1 management program integrating weight loss treatment with primary care. The program combines virtual and in-person appointments, medication management, and pharmacy fulfillment through Amazon Pharmacy, positioning weight management as a long-term chronic condition rather than a one-off prescription.

The program offers oral GLP-1 medications starting at $149 per month for cash-pay customers, while those with insurance can access medications starting at $25 per month. Injectable treatments like Wegovy and Zepbound start at $299 per month without insurance. Customers already using GLP-1 treatments can renew prescriptions on demand, with messaging consultations starting at $29 and video visits at $49.

Amazon Pharmacy makes the medications available with same-day delivery in nearly 3,000 cities today, expanding to 4,500 by year-end. The program integrates GLP-1 management into patients' broader primary care relationships, with clinicians monitoring how weight loss intersects with cardiovascular health, metabolic conditions, and overall health.

Read the full press release

3. Mother's Day Spending Expected to Hit Record $38 Billion

Consumer spending on Mother's Day is expected to reach a record $38 billion, according to the annual survey released by the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics. The amount surpasses last year's total spending of $34.1 billion and exceeds the previous record of $35.7 billion set in 2023.

Consistent with recent years, 84% of US adults plan to celebrate Mother's Day. On a per-person basis, consumers plan to spend a record average of $284.25 on gifts, up from $259.04 last year and the previous record of $274.02 in 2023. Of those celebrating, 54% plan to purchase for their mother or stepmother, followed by a wife (22%) or daughter (13%).

The leading shopping destinations for gifts include online (33%) and department stores (33%), followed by specialty stores (29%) and discount stores (26%). Flowers remain the most popular gift category, with 75% of shoppers planning to purchase. Other top categories include greeting cards (74%), special outings such as dinner or brunch (63%), gift cards (55%), and clothing or accessories (51%). Jewelry leads Mother's Day spending at $7.5 billion, followed by special outings ($6.4 billion) and electronics ($4.4 billion).

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4. Parents Engage in 50% More Digital Shopping Days Than Average Consumers

Parents engage in 50% more digital shopping activity days than the average consumer, according to "The 2025 Global Digital Shopping Index" study commissioned by Visa Acceptance Solutions and released by PYMNTS Intelligence. The report documents mobile shopping as a mainstream retail behavior worldwide, with 48% of consumers using a phone for their most recent purchase and 60% browsing merchant sites multiple times a week.

Shoppers with children under their care used a phone in 58.6% of their most recent purchases, compared with 40.7% for non-parents. Parents logged 63.5 digital shopping days per month versus a 50.9 average across the full sample. The pattern holds across markets, even in countries where digital adoption is less intense overall, parents remain highly engaged mobile shoppers.

On 59% of the days parents shop digitally, they make a purchase, showing that this group is not just browsing more often but converting at a higher rate. The research shows these consumers gravitate toward clear payment choices, rewards, coupons, product details, and easy-to-navigate stores. Notably, 92% of shoppers used or wanted to use their preferred payment method at the merchant where they made their last purchase, making payment choice the top digital feature globally.

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That's it for today.

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