The Two Futures of AI Retail

Hello Readers👀 

Curious about the biggest AI moves today? You’re in the right place. In today’s edition, we have:

🛒 AI Agents and the Battle for Commerce

📊 How to Automate Market Research with Perplexity

☀️ Google Unveils Space-Based AI Compute Project

🔨Tools and Shifts you cannot miss

🛒 AI Agents and the Battle for Commerce

AI is reshaping online shopping, but Shopify and Amazon are moving in opposite directions. Shopify is integrating AI deeply into its ecosystem, while Amazon is restricting external AI access to protect its platform. Their contrasting strategies show the split between open collaboration and controlled innovation in e-commerce.

The Shift:

1. Shopify’s AI Boom - Shopify reported 7x more AI-driven traffic and 11x higher AI-powered purchases since January. The company says AI is now central to its infrastructure, powering both internal tools and consumer experiences. Its partnerships with OpenAI, Perplexity, and Copilot aim to embed shopping into every AI interaction.

2. Building Agentic Commerce - Shopify is preparing for “agentic commerce,” where bots handle discovery, decision-making, and checkout, enabling shopping across multiple AI ecosystems, ensuring merchants stay visible no matter which platform wins. 

3. Amazon vs Perplexity - Perplexity revealed Amazon sent an “aggressive legal threat” to stop Comet agents from shopping on its site. Amazon argued the bots violated terms and hurt user experience. Perplexity responded by calling Amazon a “corporate bully” focused on ads over user rights.

4. Amazon Tightens AI Control  - Amazon cited “degraded shopping experiences” and blocked AI crawlers from OpenAI, Google, and Meta. It’s building its own tools like Rufus and Buy For Me to control in-platform AI commerce. 

Shopify’s open partnerships contrast with Amazon’s guarded ecosystem. One is fueling innovation through collaboration, the other through control. How these approaches evolve will define the future of AI-driven retail.

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📊 How to Automate Market Research with Perplexity

Research doesn’t need to drain hours or budgets. With a few precision prompts, Perplexity becomes your on-demand strategist, delivering audience insights, competitor scans, and market sizing in minutes.

Here’s how to use it:

1. Find Your Audience
   Prompt: “Act as a marketing analyst. Identify top 5 audience segments for [product], with needs, trends, and stats. Format: Segment | Insight | Source.”
   

2. Scan Competitors
   Prompt: “Find top 10 brands solving [problem]. Include founders, funding, edge, and website. Format: Company / Edge.”
   

3. Estimate Market Size
   Prompt: “You’re an analyst at McKinsey. Estimate TAM, SAM, SOM for [niche] using real data and citations.”
   

4. Spot Emerging Trends
   Prompt: “Summarize top marketing trends in [industry] over the past 3 months and predict next 3 shifts.”

It’s like having a full research team, in one chat.

→ Try it at: perplexity.ai

☀️ Google Unveils Space-Based AI Compute Project

Google is pushing AI to orbit with Project Suncatcher, a moonshot aiming to run large-scale AI workloads in space. By using solar-powered satellites equipped with Google TPUs, the project seeks to unlock virtually limitless, clean energy for computation. If successful, it could redefine how and where AI infrastructure operates.

The Shift:

1. Solar Efficiency in Orbit - Google’s plan leverages the Sun’s energy, with solar panels in orbit producing up to 8x more power than on Earth. These satellites would operate almost continuously, reducing dependency on batteries, eliminating grid constraints and maximizing energy output for AI processing. 

2. Space-Based TPU Testing - Google’s Trillium TPUs survived radiation levels equivalent to five years in orbit during tests. This milestone confirms the chips’ readiness for space environments. It removes one of the biggest barriers to running high-performance compute beyond Earth.

3. Next Steps in Deployment - Google will partner with Planet to launch two prototype satellites by 2027, testing inter-satellite communication and TPU performance. Early results show that formation flying and optical data links can reach data-center-grade speeds. The project’s modular design will enable scalable, interconnected constellations.

Project Suncatcher represents a bold step toward sustainable AI compute powered by the Sun. By moving AI infrastructure beyond Earth, Google could bypass grid limitations, energy costs, and local opposition. Space may soon become the next frontier for scaling intelligence.

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🔨AI Tools for the Shift

🎵 MusicGenAI – Instantly turn your ideas into fully produced songs using AI. Create, customize, and share original music effortlessly with this powerful online music maker.

🗣️ TranscribeToText.AI – Convert any audio, video, or meeting recording into highly accurate text in seconds with 99% precision.

📸 daisy | EasyPDP – Generate studio-quality product photos instantly using AI, perfect for eCommerce, social media, or brand visuals.

📝 Doco – Built directly into Microsoft Word, Doco is the smarter way to write, edit, and format beautiful, professional documents effortlessly.

🛡️ Charley | Charlemagne Labs – The world’s first SLM-powered agent for real-time threat detection that blocks sophisticated phishing attempts before they reach you.

🚀Quick Shifts

🎨 Microsoft launches MAI-Image-1, its first in-house AI image model, now in Bing Image Creator and Copilot. It delivers fast, photorealistic visuals of food, nature, and lighting, signaling Microsoft’s creative AI expansion.

🎬 OpenAI launches its Sora app on Android, expanding beyond iOS. Now available in seven countries, Sora lets users create, remix, and share AI-generated videos featuring reusable characters and personalized cameos.

🎧 Amazon is integrating Alexa Plus into its Music app, adding generative AI for deeper music discovery. Users can now ask complex questions, get lyric-based recommendations, and explore artist influences and song meanings.

🇮🇳 OpenAI launches IndQA, a new benchmark to test AI’s understanding of Indian culture and context. GPT-5-Thinking tops the leaderboard, showcasing superior performance in culturally grounded reasoning tasks.

💼 ClickUp launches its 4.0 platform with two new AI assistants, built after acquiring Qatalog. The update unifies chat, tasks, docs, and meetings, aiming to rival Slack, Notion, and Microsoft Teams.

🤳AI Nugget of the Day

That’s all for today’s edition. See you tomorrow as we track down and get you all that matters in the daily AI Shift!

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