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200 articles
Synthetic Consumer Insight Generation with Large Language Models
arXiv:2607.05761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern data-driven marketing relies on large amounts of consumer data, yet collecting such data can be costly, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. This research examines whether large language models (LLMs) can be used to generate synthetic consumer data for projective techniques, a set of methods designed to elicit consumer associations, emotions, wants, and needs. We test LLM-generated responses across multiple projective tasks, LLMs, prompting strategies, and temperature settings, and compare them with human responses from a primary research study on perceptions of city tourism destinations. Human and LLM responses were analyzed using linguistic measures, diversity and concentration metrics, topic models, and top-term analyses. The results show substantial overlap between human and LLM responses in broad topics and associations, but also important differences in style, linguistic structure, and the way diversity is generated. Recommendations are given on how to best utilize LLMs for generating synthetic consumer data, how model and prompt choices shape response quality, and on recognizing the limitations of LLM synthetic consumer data generation.
Small Business Tech News: Big Brands Rolling Out Robotics And Rolling Back AI
GM, Santander and other companies are expanding robotics and AI, but other companies are having doubts.
When Should Service Agents Reconsider? Difficulty-Routed Control in Customer-Service Operations
arXiv:2607.01426v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous customer-service agents are shifting from conversational interfaces toward operational execution roles: they retrieve firm records, apply service policies, and execute backend writes such as refunds, cancellations, exchanges, order modifications, and reservation changes. This shift creates a service-control problem: firms must keep routine service fast and low-friction while preventing operational errors on requests where customer instructions, policy constraints, firm records, and backend writes interact. We propose a difficulty-routed service-control architecture that asks when service agents should reconsider before acting. A lightweight router keeps routine sessions on a low-cost baseline path and routes operationally coupled sessions to an escalated workflow. The escalated path uses conflict-aware communication and write-triggered reconsideration to concentrate deliberation and safeguards before consequential backend writes, rather than applying additional control uniformly across all service sessions. We evaluate the architecture on human-verified retail and airline tasks from $\tau^{2}$-bench. In retail, the method improves reliability consistently on service requests with operational conflict. Routing evidence shows that stronger control is directed toward conflicted requests rather than broadly applied to routine ones. Dialogue and tool-use profiles suggest that gains do not come from indiscriminate interaction expansion or broader tool chains; instead, added turns and tool calls support evidence gathering, write separation, and pre-write reconsideration. Case-level evidence shows that the escalated workflow preserves fallback plans, binds retrieved records to the correct action, sequences writes, and decomposes multi-entity requests. Airline results extend the same service-control logic to reservation operations.
Those bots sending discounts to your email is dynamic pricing in action. Get revenge on those bots by abandoning your cart
Retailers are looking at your browsing history to change the price you see in your cart. Maybe you should be doing the same when looking to buy.
Understanding Guest Preferences and Optimizing Two-sided Marketplaces: Airbnb as an Example
arXiv:2607.00280v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Airbnb is a community based on connection and belonging -- many hosts on Airbnb are everyday people who share their worlds to provide guests with the feeling of connection and being at home; Airbnb strives to connect people and places. Among our efforts to connect guests and hosts, we provide tools to enable hosts to set competitive prices, which helps improve affordability for guests while helping hosts get more bookings. We also personalize the guest experience to show them the listings that match their needs. To help inform these efforts, we combine economic modeling and causal inference techniques to understand how guests book stays based on the prices hosts set, among other factors, and how that preference varies across different guests and listings. Such understanding helps us identify opportunities for Airbnb to support the marketplace and better connect guests and hosts. For example, understanding how much guests respond to different prices helps optimize the tools that we provide to hosts, in order to enable hosts to choose and set competitive prices that further balance demand and supply. As another example, understanding heterogeneity in guest preferences helps us personalize the guest experience and better match them with the listings that meet their needs, based on how much they respond to different prices and other factors.
Agentic Shopping Is Coming. These Stocks Will Ride Walmart's Google AI Bet. - 24/7 Wall St.
The Google Gemini agentic shopping ... and an AI front door. Walmart owns the anchor deal, Shopify powers the merchant layer, Symbotic automates the warehouses, Etsy is already inside the ChatGPT shopping surface, and FedEx moves what agents buy. Consumer sentiment is soft (the University of Michigan index printed 44.8 in May 2026, well into ...
5 Ways Food Founders Are Using AI To Thrive
In an archaic industry like food, here are the best tips founders offered on how they use AI to grow.
AI summaries of Tripadvisor hotel reviews downplay serious complaints, investigation finds
AI-generated overview found to gloss over allegations of sexual harassment and describes hotel being sued over hygiene as ‘spotless’ A hotel being sued for mass food poisonings was described as “spotless” and a resort where guests complained of sexual harassment by staff was praised for “friendly” service by an AI intended to summarise millions of Tripadvisor reviews. The overviews of customer feedback downplayed serious complaints, ranging from the stench of mould to a lack of mains water, according to an investigation by the consumer campaign organisation Which? Continue reading...
How foodservice giant Sodexo is embracing AI and robotics to reshape the kitchen
Alice Guéhennec oversees an annual investment budget of around 500 million euros to support AI, robotics, and other technology initiatives.
Restaurants can now accept orders placed directly from ChatGPT and Claude thanks to Square's new, low-fee, no setup integration
Square is launching a new ChatGPT app and Claude plugin, enabling consumers to discover restaurants and seamlessly place orders directly within these AI platforms — and allowing restaurants, in turn, to accept orders from users and their AI agents without any technical capabilities. Even more helpfully for businesses, Square is processing these AI-driven transactions without charging the traditional marketplace commission fees that have historically squeezed the food and beverage sector. However, Square is still charging its typical online ordering fees of 3.3% plus $0.30 or 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction for merchants subscribed to the Square Plus and Square Premium plans. The system pulls straight from the live Square catalog, dynamically mapping items, pricing, complex modifiers, and stock availability so autonomous agents never display out-of-stock inventory. For enterprise testing and deployment verification, operators can manually audit their digital footprint by using the "@" symbol to invoke the Order by Cash App plugin directly within ChatGPT or connecting it via the Claude extension directory. Depending on the specific AI tool configuration, customers can either finalize checkout completely inside the chat window via Order by Cash App, or they will be seamlessly redirected to the merchant’s standard online ordering landing page with their chosen items and modifiers already fully populated in the basket. A more affordable online order system for restaurants To understand the significance of Square’s move, you have to look at the math that restaurant owners face in 2026. Third-party delivery and ordering apps have fundamentally altered the economics of the restaurant industry. Currently, the major players—DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub—charge restaurants a hefty premium for visibility and fulfillment. These exorbitant rates exist primarily because delivery aggregators bundle the logistical costs of gig-worker delivery fleets, platform marketing, and search placement into a single revenue-sharing model. According to recent pricing structures, DoorDash charges restaurants a 15% commission on its “Basic” delivery tier, which climbs to 25% for “Plus” and 30% for its top-tier “Premier” visibility plan. Even pickup orders carry a 6% marketplace fee. Uber Eats similarly exacts standard delivery marketplace fees ranging from 20% on its “Lite” tier up to 30% for premium placement, with pickup orders costing up to 10% if in-store pricing isn't strictly validated. Grubhub echoes these rates, taking between 5% and 20% of the total order value depending on the marketing and delivery package chosen. On top of these marketplace commissions, platforms still tack on their own payment processing fees—typically around 2.5% to 3.05% plus a fixed cent amount per order. For an independent restaurant that might only clear a 3% to 9% net profit on a good day, handing over a 25% or 30% commission on a $40 digital order essentially means preparing food at a loss. Square’s new integration specifically targets this pain point. By tapping into Square's ChatGPT and Claude integrations, eligible sellers are opted in automatically with no additional setup, no new APIs to build, and, crucially, zero added marketplace fees. Instead of surrendering a 30% cut to a delivery aggregator, a restaurant discovered through an AI agent only pays Square’s standard online transaction processing fee (which typically sits around 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction on a standard plan, with no monthly marketplace commission attached). Unlike the delivery aggregators, Square’s fee model does not natively subsidize a driver network. Instead, if an AI-generated order requires delivery, Square utilizes a white-label dispatch network that charges a flat courier fee—often around $7 to $10 depending on distance—rather than taxing a percentage of the total basket size. Restaurants can choose to absorb this flat delivery cost or pass it directly to the customer, completely protecting their food margins. The result is an AI-powered discovery channel that functions like direct, first-party ordering. How the tech works Square’s new integration is currently live for U.S.-based Food & Beverage sellers who have an activated Square Online Ordering profile. The system operates entirely in the background. Sellers manage their discoverability and business information—menus, operating hours, stock levels, and pricing—directly through their existing Square Dashboard. When a consumer prompts ChatGPT or Claude with a query like, “Find me a specialty coffee shop nearby with a great pour-over and order me a bag of their house roast,” the AI parses the real-time data provided by Square. Customers can browse the results, make their selections, and finalize the purchase using Order by Cash App, all without leaving the chat interface. The transaction is then routed instantly into the seller’s existing operational flow, popping up on their Square Point of Sale (POS) and Kitchen Display System just like an in-store or direct-website order. To help operators track the return on this new channel, the origin of the order is clearly tagged as an AI integration within Square’s backend reporting. “Consumer behaviors and preferences are constantly evolving, and business owners can easily find themselves playing an impossible game of catch-up,” said Morgan Kuntze, Global Partnerships Lead at Block, Square’s parent company. “Our investment into agentic commerce aims to offload that responsibility by giving operators time back, helping connect them with customers in their communities, and keeping them at the industry's cutting edge. Modern commerce is moving at a sprint, and we're building Square to help sellers appear everywhere customers are going.” Focusing on tech to let restaurants focus on food During its pilot phase, Square collaborated with Partners Coffee, a Brooklyn-based specialty coffee brand, to refine how AI-driven discovery translates into the real world. For operators like Partners Coffee, the goal isn't necessarily to become a hyper-digitized storefront, but rather to use digital efficiency to protect the physical experience of the cafe. "We don't see coffee as transactional. To us, it's an opportunity to pause and reflect, a chance to unwind, and a catalyst for connection," noted Andrew Costaris, Digital VP at Partners Coffee, in a statement provided by Square to VentureBeat. "The last thing we want is for our technology solutions to work against this mission or complicate the customer experience. With agentic commerce and AI tools working in the background, we're confident knowing that our business is being digitally discovered and is consistently growing in efficiency, while our customers can continue to enjoy a lo-fi, specialty coffee-first environment." An AI-driven e-commerce ecosystem The integration with ChatGPT and Claude is only the first step in Square’s broader agentic commerce strategy. The stakes are high: industry data cited by the company indicates that more than 42% of consumers now use AI tools to assist with shopping tasks like product discovery and comparison. By 2030, analysts project that agentic shoppers could drive nearly $385 billion in U.S. ecommerce spending. Most small and mid-size businesses simply do not have the developer teams or budgets required to build custom integrations for every new chatbot, voice assistant, or AI hardware device that hits the market. Square wants to serve as that universal connective tissue. To that end, the company announced it is actively working with Amazon to bring sellers into Alexa+ voice commerce experiences. Furthermore, Square is participating in major regulatory and standards groups—including the AAIF Agentic Commerce Working Group and the W3C Web Payments Working Group—to shape how AI agents and commerce platforms interact at scale. Particularly notable is Square’s ongoing partnership with Google to co-develop the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) spec for local food ordering. This open standard is designed to allow agents and systems to seamlessly communicate across the entire commerce journey. On Google’s end, UCP enables discovery and checkout across AI Overviews in Search and the Gemini app. As the UCP protocol expands globally, Square plans to roll out these capabilities so that its sellers remain front and center. For the more than 4.5 million sellers currently using Square, the promise of agentic commerce is clear: a way to capture the next generation of internet traffic without sacrificing the profit margins required to keep their doors open. If Square can successfully route AI orders directly to local business's POS systems—sidestepping the 30% toll of the delivery aggregators—it could mark a massive shift in how the restaurant industry navigates the modern digital economy.
Beyond expert users: agents should help users construct preferences, not just elicit them
arXiv:2606.30863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agents typically assume an expert user -- one with well-formed preferences about what they want -- and default to clarifying questions whenever the task is underspecified. We argue this assumption is unrealistic. Users often lack the domain knowledge to have completely specified preferences; if asked about their preference on some feature, the user may be unable to answer without the agent helping the user to learn some domain knowledge needed to form a preference for that feature, e.g., via examples or explanations. To formalize these principles, we draw on the Search-Experience-Credence framework from Information Economics to introduce CoPref, a model of how users construct preferences based on agent dialog actions. We then study these ideas concretely in agentic recommender systems, proposing CoShop, an interactive benchmark. In CoShop, an agent converses with and makes recommendations for a CoPref user. The agent's performance depends on whether it can help the user gain the knowledge needed to specify the task well. Evaluating five frontier models, we find that no agent exceeds 56% accuracy on CoShop despite five turns of interaction. Failures stem not from agents' ability to find items, but from how little the interaction expands what users know about what they want.
An English Furniture Maker Faces AI Era of Bots Buying Sofas
With origins in the English countryside, The Cotswold Company is known for upscale furniture that evokes its bucolic backstory. Now it’s bracing for the era of artificial intelligence.
Marketers can see AI's influence on purchases. They just can't pay for it.
While most marketing leaders know AI-driven discovery is reshaping how consumers find brands, almost none of them have built the infrastructure for it. They know a partner is driving discovery. Their systems cannot pay for it. From a partner's perspective, those two positions look identical.
Search is getting an AI overhaul. This startup says it can help e-commerce brands keep up.
Lantern launched a loyalty tool for e-commerce brands. Now, it's doubling down on AI GEO and LLM result optimization. Read its pitch deck.
BBB survey finds consumers have negative sentiment for AI
Artificial intelligence is increasingly reshaping how businesses interact with customers, but a new Better Business Bureau (BBB) study finds most consumers aren’t happy about it. The BBB’s 2026 AI Customer Service Scam Study, released last week by BBB chapters nationwide — including the ...
How AI is Reshaping Product Information Management
New research reveals how top brands are using AI to drive trust, speed, and ROI.
How We Use Langchain to Power Lumi, Our E-Commerce Copilot
This article details how Lumi uses LangChain and multiple AI agents to support over 180,000 e-commerce merchants through an AI-powered copilot architecture.
AI Hospitality Alliance Announces Founding Partners to Accelerate Responsible AI Adoption Across Hospitality | AI Hospitality Alliance
Leading hospitality organizations and technology companies unite to help shape the future of AI standards, education, interoperability, and industry collaboration.
South Korea experiment finds algorithmic self-preferencing sways online purchase
A Korea Fair Trade Commission study found that algorithmic ranking manipulation significantly distorts consumer choice, with platform-favored products seeing higher sales.
Federal lawsuit says AI fueled a California gas price conspiracy at 1,700 stations
The case raises the question of ... because competitors were nudged to move in parallel instead of compete. Gas prices shape commuting expenses and the entire logistics chain, from delivery costs to the price of everyday goods. The timing is notable because regulators are increasingly examining how artificial intelligence can reshape markets out of public ...
Tech firms are blaming AI for mega device and console price rises
Xbox consoles, Nintendo's new Switch 2 and Valve's Steam Deck are just some of the gadgets seeing price hikes in recent months.
Council Post: The Hidden Funnel: Your Dashboard Says You’re Winning But AI May Say Otherwise
As AI increasingly influences consumer decisions, I've been observing a measurement gap and developing a conceptual model to illustrate my observations. The Pre-Funnel Influence Index (PFI) provides a framework for businesses to develop this new metric and can be expressed as a weighted composite index: PFI can serve as a conceptual key performance indicator (KPI) framework for evaluating ...
Know your agent: building the foundation of autonomous commerce | TechRadar
Identity verification and "Know Your Agent" protocols are essential for secure AI commerce
More Expensive iPhones on the Horizon?
Bloomberg Intelligence says Apple has to hike prices for its iPhones after raising prices for its Macs, iPads and home devices. Those hikes went into effect globally on Thursday. Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Technology Analyst Anurag Rana spoke with Bloomberg's Yvonne Man and Avril Hong on "Bloomberg: The China Show." (Source: Bloomberg)
Walmart’s ad deal smartly puts its customers in the shopping basket
Retailer looks to monetise its deep well of consumer data and insights
G7 data watchdogs consider minors’ privacy risks with age verification, smart devices
Privacy regulators from G7 nations signed a declaration addressing data protection for minors, focusing on connected home devices and age verification technologies.
LivCor deal with states approved by US judge in RealPage litigation
A North Carolina federal judge approved a $7 million settlement between LivCor and nine states regarding allegations of using RealPage's software to align rental prices.
Divergent Recommendations, Convergent Diagnoses: Cross-Provider Failure-Mode Convergence in AI Commercial Recommendation
arXiv:2606.26116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A brand whose customers use both ChatGPT and Claude for product recommendations faces a strategic choice: a single optimization playbook, or one per provider? Across 215 commercially-framed prompts in four measurement batches, the two providers disagree on which brands they recommend roughly two-thirds of the time (cross-provider recommendation Jaccard 0.35, below the 0.50-0.61 same-prompt rerun baseline). The picks diverge. But when neither provider recommends a brand, we classify the failure into one of three modes -- discoverability (the brand never reaches the model), compellingness (it reaches the model but isn't mentioned), or positioning (it's mentioned but not recommended) -- and on 7,763 such joint failures, both providers diagnose the same failure mode 95.1% of the time (clustered 95% CI [94.3%, 95.7%]). Agreement rises monotonically with falling brand prominence, from 81% [78.2%, 84.0%] on category leaders to 99.6% [99.3%, 99.9%] on long-tail regional brands. The two providers reach their picks by measurably different generative routes -- Anthropic recommends from priors 43-52% of the time, OpenAI 8-29% -- but they converge on the failure diagnosis where it matters most for the long tail. Work that addresses the diagnosed failure mode lifts visibility on both providers; positioning - and content-level work for category leaders is more provider-specific.
Apple Raises iPad and MacBook Prices Amid AI Memory Shortage
Apple raises iPad and MacBook prices as AI memory shortage disrupts tech supply chains; find out how this affects your next gadget purchase.
How Large Language Models Source Brand Reputation Across Languages and Markets
arXiv:2606.25787v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a large language model (LLM) answers a question about a company, it grounds the answer in retrieved web sources, and those sources decide what the model says. Most analysis of AI brand visibility looks at the answer text. This study looks one step earlier, at the citations. We merge three Rankfor.AI datasets covering 128 brands across 12 home
Walmart’s $1.4 billion Vibe.co deal is a direct shot at Amazon’s booming ad business
With a $1.4 billion deal for Vibe.co, Walmart is aiming to capture the ad dollars of smaller brands.
Repositioning retail for the AI era
Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping retail, but not in the ways consumers might immediately notice. The biggest transformation may not be flashy virtual try-ons or chatbot shopping assistants, but in how decisions are made behind the scenes: how products surface in search results, how inventory moves through supply chains, how engineers ship code faster, and…
Retail is entering the age of Agentic AI
This shift is closely tied to advances ... complex AI agents. These systems are increasingly being tested across e-commerce platforms, logistics networks, and marketing operations. While many applications are still in pilot stages, the direction is consistent across the industry: more tasks are being handed over to automated decision-making ...
Gas station owners have found a use case for AI, lawsuit says: colluding to fix prices
A new lawsuit claims AI pricing software helped Marathon, BP, and Circle K fix gas prices across 1,700 California stations.
Apple raises prices as AI-driven memory chip costs surge: Why MacBooks and iPads are getting more expensive | Hindustan Times
Apple raises prices on MacBooks, iPads and other devices as AI-driven memory chip shortages push costs higher. iPhone prices remain unchanged.
Salesforce's Agentforce Commerce Pushes Agentic AI From Hype to Retail Revenue Reality
ElevenLabs reveals that voice agent latency impacts enterprise AI adoption. With 56% of organizations prioritizing AI-driven customer experience, optimizing response times becomes a key business differentiator.... ... Epicor's Indago Warehouse Management System earns certified integration with ...
Generative AI expanding role in shopping, to enable AI-led purchases: Report
Generative AI is expected to play a growing role in consumer purchases, evolving from a tool for product discovery and research to one that can complete transactions on shoppers' behalf, according to a McKinsey report.
Apple Just Closed Its First Unionized U.S. Store
The company said it had shuttered a Maryland location because of “declining conditions” in a surrounding mall. The union accuses Apple of retaliation.
Teaching Sidekick to say no: automated data curation with LLM judge consensus
Shopify explains how it curated refusal data and used LLM judge consensus to train Sidekick to say no when appropriate, reducing hallucination and sycophancy risks.
AI-Generated Ads Should Be Exempt From EU Transparency Rules, Retail Association Says
Eurocommerce, the European retail association whose members include Amazon, H&M, Inditex, and Ikea, is asking EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen to exempt
EuroCommerce seeks ad exemption from EU AI disclosure rules
European retail association EuroCommerce has urged EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen to exclude some AI-generated advertisements from new EU disclosure rules. In a letter seen by Reuters, EuroCommerce director general Christel Delberghe said AI-generated advertisements that are not meant to deceive users should fall outside the regulation...
Retail Pulse Report: Why AI ROI is Hard to Find
Personal benefit does not (yet) translate into retail corporate benefit – except in consumer applications. But that still has a huge caveat.
Agentic AI: the next stage of automation or a new model of work? — Retail Technology Innovation Hub
For most of the past decade, business automation has been associated primarily with robotic process automation (RPA) and simple chatbots designed to handle repetitive customer inquiries. These technologies delivered measurable operational benefits. They accelerated processes, reduced costs, and impr
AI Infrastructure Is Raising Consumer Electronics Costs - AppleMagazine
AI infrastructure demand is pushing up memory, storage, and component costs, creating pricing pressure for iPhone, Mac, PCs, consoles, and other devices.
Building DoorDash Assistant: An engineering overview
DoorDash details the development of an AI assistant using personalization and memory to support consumer decisions like grocery selection. It serves as a production example of agentic AI in consumer platforms.
Brands using AI-generated influencers to promote products on social media
Companies are increasingly utilizing AI-generated influencers to market products, raising questions about transparency and authenticity.
Amazon Advances Prime Day by One Month Amid AI Shift
Amazon has moved its annual Prime Day sales event up by one month. The event is strategically important for Amazon as it aims to capture consumer spending, especially in a market where discretionary dollars are tightening and AI is increasingly influencing shopping behavior. Senior E-commerce and retail analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence Poonam Goyal explains the importance of Prime Day for Amazon to David Gura and Christina Ruffini on Bloomberg This Weekend. (Source: Bloomberg)
Generative Engine Optimization at Scale: Measuring Brand Visibility Across AI Search Engines
arXiv:2606.20065v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: People increasingly get answers straight from AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini rather than scrolling search results. Brands that once focused on search engine optimization (SEO) must now optimize for how these engines represent, cite, and recommend them -- a shift variously called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and AI Search Visibility. We treat AEO and AI Visibility as part of GEO, and study how to measure brand visibility across AI engines: what they value when they cite a brand, which sources they rely on, and what content large language models surface. The hard case is everyone outside the already-authoritative top brands -- SMEs, D2C brands, creators, and early-stage startups. We analyze 100K+ prompt responses across 100+ brands tracked on Ranqo between March and May 2026. First visibility runs form a clear three-tier brand-stature ladder: global household names (e.g., Stripe, Nike) appear in 73% of relevant AI answers on their first run; established mid-market and regional brands (e.g., Olipop, Klaviyo) in 44%; niche and small brands in just 11% -- about 30 percentage points per step. When engines cite sources, about 78% go to corporate websites; among non-corporate sources YouTube leads, ahead of Reddit, editorial media, and Wikipedia. The highest-leverage page is the ranked "best-of" listicle, the most-cited content format at about 21% of all citations. Sentiment is the unstable signal: whether a brand is framed positively or negatively flips about 6.7 times more often than whether it is mentioned at all. These findings provide a first large-scale baseline for measuring GEO: AI brand visibility can be measured, differs by platform, and varies strongly by brand maturity. We close by proposing seven v1.1 protocols to test whether specific recommendations can causally improve AI visibility.
AI is turning Nintendo and Sony products into accidental luxury goods
With component-makers busy supplying data centres, console prices are rising as demand outstrips production capacity
WorldLines: Benchmarking and Modeling Long-Horizon Stateful Embodied Agents
arXiv:2606.18847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To assist humans over extended periods in real homes, embodied agents must remember user routines, world states, and past interactions. Existing long-term memory benchmarks mainly evaluate language-centric retrieval and question answering, while embodied benchmarks often focus on short-horizon task execution without testing long-term memory use in dynamic environments. We introduce WorldLines, a project-driven benchmark for long-horizon embodied household assistance. It constructs temporally extended household traces with dialogues, actions, execution feedback, object and device state changes, and converts them into evidence-linked samples for Memory QA and Embodied Task Planning. We further propose ObsMem, an observer-grounded memory framework that maintains visibility-aware memories and action-native state trails for state-aware decisions. Experiments reveal persistent challenges in partial observability, overwritten world states, and translating long-term memory into embodied plans, while ObsMem offers a stronger reference architecture for this setting.
LLM Consumer Behavior Theory: Foundations of a Novel Research Field
arXiv:2606.18005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents that make consumption decisions on behalf of users. This shift raises fundamental questions for consumer theory, which has traditionally modeled humans as the primary decision-makers. In this paper, we introduce LLM Consumer Behavior Theory, a new field of study concerned with analyzing consumer behavior in agentic markets. Drawing on classical and behavioral economics alongside recent advances in Natural Language Processing, we formalize how human preferences are reflected and acted upon by LLM-based agents, and how agent-level decisions aggregate into market demand. We unify previously fragmented literature on LLM decision-making, human behavior simulation, and preference elicitation under a common economic lens, highlighting where assumptions, such as rationality and heterogeneity, may fail in agentic markets. Rather than providing empirical validation, this paper outlines the scope of LLM consumer behavior and identifies open research questions related to alignment, preference representation, and market dynamics.
Incumbent Advantage: Brand Bias and Cognitive Manipulation Dynamics in LLM Recommendation Systems
arXiv:2606.17443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are becoming a major way for consumers to find products, but we do not yet understand how brands compete in this new channel. We study brand dynamics in LLM recommendations using skincare products -- a category where consumers cannot easily judge quality before buying and must rely on brand reputation -- across three commercial LLMs (GPT-4o-mini, Claude Sonnet, Gemini 3 Flash), with a robustness check on search goods. In three experiments, we find: (1) a Conditional Monopoly where well-known brands get recommended 100% of the time (IAI = 10.0) when all products have the same specifications, but this dominance disappears with less than a +0.1-star rating advantage for a competitor; (2) authority-style marketing language, including fabricated clinical-evidence claims, breaks this monopoly at a Bias Surplus Value equal to +0.17 rating points, with each model responding differently; and (3) a social dilemma in multi-brand GEO competition: when all brands adopt the same optimization strategy, individual payoff falls from +0.802 to +0.007 in our payoff proxy, and non-participating brands receive zero recommendations in our tests. Our results suggest that generative engine optimization (GEO) should be studied not only as a security risk, but also as an emerging marketing practice that shapes market competition.
AI search adoption rises as consumer trust declines: Study
Survey data from 1,008 consumers and 150 marketers reveals how AI is reshaping search visibility, brand trust, GEO, and content strategy.
The $100M Pizza Hut Lesson: Why AI Needs Human Strategy
Discover how Pizza Hut’s $100M AI setback highlights the need for a human-led, outcomes-based AI strategy for sustainable business growth.
How Gen AI is Disrupting B2B Buying Decisions
Generative AI is shifting B2B purchasing toward AI-mediated environments, forcing organizations to adapt their strategies from traditional SEO to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
Not everyone is using AI for everything
An exploration of the current state of AI adoption and the reality of consumer usage patterns.
AI Agents Are Already Deciding Which Businesses Get the Sale
Most business owners still believe customers search online the same way they did a few years ago.A person types a keyword into Google, scrolls through websites, compares options, and then makes a decision.That process is rapidly changing.Today, AI-powered search assistants, recommendation engines, ...
UP-NRPA: User Portrait based Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation for Planning with Large Language Models in Goal-oriented Dialogue Systems
arXiv:2606.13683v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To address the challenge that current dialogue policy planning methods struggle to dynamically adapt to diverse user characteristics, this paper proposes a User Portrait based Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation (UP-NRPA) online framework with Large Language Models. In contrast to conventional approaches dependent on model training and require offline reinforcement learning policy models for user groups, UP-NRPA enables dynamic customization of dialogue strategies through an adaptive mechanism. This is achieved by leveraging real-time user feedback alongside personality, preferences, and objectives mapped from the current user portrait, thereby adapting to user characteristics without offline reinforcement learning. In collaborative and non-collaborative dialogue benchmarks, UP-NRPA demonstrated considerable benefits, achieving an impressive 100% success rate in multiple dialogue tasks. Particularly in negotiation tasks, the sale-to-list ratio (SL) increased by 56.41%. This demonstrates that UP-NRPA can adapt to diverse user needs without requiring a training mechanism, enabling the dialogue system to adapt to user characteristics.
Amsterdam’s Anterra Capital hits €86 million first close for Fund III as AI reshapes food and agriculture
Anterra Capital, an Amsterdam-based specialist venture firm investing in food and agriculture, has announced the first close of its Fund III at €86 million ($100 million), against a target of €172.1 million ($200 million). Anterra’s investor base spans institutional investors, food system operators and industry innovators across North America, Europe and APAC, including Rabobank, Novo […]
AI is making promises your brand never made. Hotels are paying the price
When algorithms and recommendation engines set guest expectations, the brand gets the blame when reality falls short.
The €300 Billion Retail Revolution: How AI Is Reshaping Europe’s Growth Story - The Global Economics
The scale of this opportunity is encouraging retailers, investors and technology providers to accelerate spending on digital transformation programmes that place AI at the centre of business strategy. Artificial intelligence is no longer a future ambition for European retailers; it is rapidly ...
Guide to measuring AI Agent ROI in marketing workflow
A four-layer approach to tracking cost savings, performance gains, and business impact from AI agents in marketing.
r/KitchenConfidential on Reddit: Red Lobster CEO Damola Adamolekun Plans To Make The Seafood Chain 'The Most AI-Forward Restaurant Company That Exists'
This is about agentic ai. Mostly cameras monitored by semi autonomous agents. Marginal gains by eliminating waste at every angle. It will be miserable to work under such conditions. In HS I was forced to work in a sweat shop. No AI back then, just some bitch named Tonya that watched every movement ...
The AI Price War Is Great News for Consumers | PYMNTS.com
Google cut its AI Plus plan and OpenAI is considering similar reductions. Meta launched its first paid AI tiers starting at $7.99 a month.
From Explicit Elements to Implicit Intent: A Predefined Library for Auditable Behavioral Inference
arXiv:2606.11207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present SemantiClean, a modular framework for extracting structured semantic signals from e-commerce session data and driving pluggable inference targets including purchase intent, customer segmentation, and product affinity through a shared element library. Unlike conventional end-to-end predictors that optimise solely for accuracy, SemantiClean prioritises auditability, structural governance, and sigma=0 reproducibility, explicitly trading marginal predictive gains for element-level transparency and defensible decision trails. Built upon the Online Shoppers Purchasing Intention (OSPI) dataset, the framework organises twenty-four behavioural elements into a four-layer architecture (Functional, Interaction, Systemic, Contextual) and enforces signal quality through three anti-inflation mechanisms: RedundancyGroup contribution caps, TieredPenaltyCalculator bias penalties, and AdaptiveConstraintMode cold-start protection.This report introduces the LLM-Integrated Semantic Inference Engine, a fully implemented two-phase LLM-driven inference architecture that leverages complete element metadata at inference time. All quantitative results reported herein are produced by this engine. Deterministic engine outputs remain fully reproducible (sigma=0); LLM-dependent results (E8, E10) are subject to controlled output variability under fixed provider/model/temperature settings. The gender inference target remains non-functional in the current implementation and is excluded from all quantitative results.
How dealers can navigate compliance and AI adoption
Affronti suggests that one of the biggest compliance risks is not intentional misconduct, but inconsistency across systems and departments. Pricing and deal
Your Next Customer Is a Machine - by Howard Yu
Your Next Customer Is a Machine - by Howard Yu # One Inch Ahead SubscribeSign in Playback speed × Share post Share post at current time Share from 0:00 0:00 / 41 37 5 ## Your Next Customer Is a Machine For 25 years, the internet economy ran on one assumption: Humans click. But in China, they have stopped. Jun 10, 2026 41 37 5 Share Sometime last fall, in a cafe near the Bund in Shanghai, a woman picked up her phone. She did not open an app, nor did she scroll, read the reviews, compare restaurants, or check the delivery time. Instead, she spoke the following nine words: “Order my usual lunch; deliver it 20 minutes later.” The phone paused for about three seconds. An agent named Xiaomei, built by Meituan, China’s largest food-delivery super app, read the word “usual.” It knew the restaurant where the woman always ordered her food and the delivery window that she norma
From Prompt to Purchase: How AI Brand Recommendations Move Consumers on the Open Web
arXiv:2606.10907v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a conversational assistant recommends a brand to a user with no recent observed engagement, that user's same-name Google search rises +4.3 percentage points (pp) [3.1, 5.5], visits to the brand's own site +2.4 pp [1.4, 3.5], and brand-specific retailer-page visits +1.0 pp [0.3, 1.7] over matched backward placebos. Recovering that estimate is the work. The mention creates a brand exposure no web log attributes to the assistant, and the naive all-mention funnel that seems to measure it is confounded: many mentions are incidental references to brands the user already uses ("your Netflix download"), whose downstream visits are that existing customer's own behavior and surface as a brand-specific pre-trend. We measure off-platform response on a panel that joins opt-in clickstream to the same users' ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini conversations, and isolate the effect with a pre-trend event study, a stance classifier, non-customer conditioning, and a within-response same-category control: incidental name-drops then move behavior far less (+1.8/+1.1/+0.3), and the named brand moves far more than unnamed same-category brands in the same response. The downstream path is mostly search-mediated and reaches both own sites and retailer pages, with a destination mix that tracks baseline brand-directed behavior rather than redirecting toward either. The design is observational and we do not observe transactions, so retail is purchase-adjacent. Standard referrer-based and last-click measurement miss this upstream exposure: assistants move observably-unengaged users into open-web brand navigation along a path attributed elsewhere.
10 Shifts Defining How AI Will Transform European Retail | ESM Magazine
AI has the potential to unlock €240–320 billion in economic value for the European retail sector over the next five years.
Astro, I'm Home! Investigating Factors that Influence the Acceptance of Home Robots Using Supervised Machine Learning
arXiv:2606.07551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The use of social robots in home environments is on the rise. This exploratory study applies regularization techniques (e.g., Lasso and Ridge regression) to investigate variables and identify new models of technology acceptance in the context of social robots. Within the original UTAUT2 framework, performance expectancy, social influence, and hedonic motivation emerged as the strongest and most consistent predictors of intention to use the technology. In addition, usability, trust, and competence were identified as promising variables in a model predicting intention to use.
AI isn’t replacing Hyatt’s salespeople—it’s freeing up a full day of work every week, according to the CEO
As companies move beyond AI pilots, Hyatt says the technology is delivering measurable business results.
The Geography of Algorithmic Judgment: LLM Intermediaries, Place Identity, and Racial Steering in Housing Search
arXiv:2606.06694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly assuming an intermediary role in housing search through the integration of listing platforms within conversational interfaces, mediating access to information, search, and recommendations within urban settings. We expand on prior work on racial steering in LLMs by conducting a behavioral audit of seven open-weight and closed-source LLMs across four U.S. cities, testing location recommendations across three iterative prompting conditions that progressively add lifestyle preference context and reflect fair housing paired-testing methodologies. We find that steering is an emergent behavior of the model's interpretive license rather than primarily a static property. Steering results from the interaction of a user's identity, preference articulation, and the spatial logic that a model has internalized about learned representations of place, preference, and opportunity in a given city, and how different types of users relate to it. While steering was present, it was not uniform in direction or magnitude across evaluated conditions. Preference-conditioned testing often increased or reconfigured the number of models that exhibited steering behaviors relative to baseline conditions, suggesting that LLMs may interpret what the same housing preference means differently depending on the racial identity of the user. Our findings also demonstrate that the city is not a neutral testing unit for LLM evaluation in place-based sectors, and results from one local market cannot be assumed to generalize to another. Local and domain expertise will be required in the housing sector to ensure that legal and institutional commitments to fair housing are not undermined while adopting AI tools that mediate spatial access.
Zepto's IPO filing reveals fast growth and big losses
Zepto's recent IPO filing highlights rapid expansion alongside significant financial losses, raising valuation questions.
‘Poisoned’ AI: the ChatGPT shopping scams that lead to fake websites
Buyers are ripped off after assuming online stores were genuine because they are recommended by an AI tool You want to buy a new bag and so you ask ChatGPT for help. You have always liked Russell & Bromley so you ask ChatGPT what is popular there at the moment. The artificial intelligence (AI) assistant gives you cross body, shoulder, casual and formal options with the prices listed beside them. You click through from the sources to what looks like the official Russell & Bromley site and buy your new bag, which is conveniently on sale. Continue reading...
Walmart tells workers that AI will improve their jobs, not steal them
Retailer’s embrace of artificial intelligence comes amid anxiety that the technology will create mass redundancies
Connecticut bans retailers from using personal data to set prices
Connecticut has signed legislation barring retailers and delivery services from using biometric or tracking data to charge individualized prices.
Indonesia updates e-commerce rules, adds AI and ride-hailing provisions
Indonesia's Trade Ministry has revised e-commerce regulations to include new rules governing the use of AI in product promotion and marketing, alongside other digital governance updates.
Marketers Rethink Measurement As AI Reshapes The Data Landscape
A shift is underway in marketing measurement, accelerated by the collapse of the deterministic model and the rise of AI-powered ad platforms.
Profitable French scale-up Innovorder raises €20 million to accelerate AI-first restaurant digitalisation
Innovorder, a Paris-based scale-up specialising in the digitalisation of the restaurant industry, has raised €20 million in a funding round to accelerate its “AI-first” transformation. The round was led by UL Invest, the family office of tech entrepreneur Laurent Useldinger. This deal combines a capital increase and the buyout of shares from historical investors. Evolem, […]
Synthetic Personalities: How Well Can LLMs Mimic Individual Respondents Using Socio-Economic Microdata?
arXiv:2606.04592v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based digital twins promise to scale and accelerate market research, but most published twins are either coarse persona bots conditioned on a few demographic questions or detailed individual-level twins built on purpose-collected surveys and interview transcripts. Neither setup speaks to the operationally most relevant case for marketing practice: building detailed individual twins from the pre-existing heterogeneous panel data that firms already accumulate through CRM systems, loyalty programs, and repeat surveys. We construct detailed individual-level twins from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and evaluate them across a $3 \times 5 \times 2 \times 2$ construction-method grid that covers three open-weights LLMs, five cumulative information depths ranked by normalized Shannon entropy, two embedding methods, and two reasoning modes, scoring over 2.1 million twin responses on 500 participants and 183 held-out questions. Twin quality rises with information depth but with diminishing returns past the 75 percent entropy quartile, which acts as a cost-efficient Pareto point relative to the best-performing 100 percent cells. Switching the embedding from a narrative persona summary to a raw dialog history of past responses raises hold-out accuracy in every model-by-reasoning cell at the 100 percent depth, while an explicit thinking mode raises rank-order correlation without moving accuracy. Best-cell accuracy reaches 78.8 percent and Fisher-$z$ correlation reaches $r = 0.590$ on the SOEP held-out evaluation set. The findings suggest that twin-based market research is no longer gated by data design, but by item volume, model selection, and a small set of construction-level decisions that this paper now maps.
Colorado governor vetoes surveillance pricing bills as other states enact bans
Colorado Governor Jared Polis has vetoed legislation that would have banned the use of AI-powered algorithms to set prices or wages based on a person's individual data.
FirstClub doubles valuation to $255M in nine months on quality-first grocery bet
Quick commerce startup FirstClub has doubled its valuation to $255 million in just nine months, driven by its focus on high-quality grocery delivery.
Generative AI and Sales Productivity: Field Experiments in Online Retail
arXiv:2510.12049v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We quantify the short-term impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) on sales performance through a series of large-scale randomized field experiments involving millions of users and products at a leading cross-border online retail platform. Over 2023-2024, the platform integrated GenAI into seven consumer-facing business workflows sp
Powering Agentic AI Sales Strategy with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
This AWS case study details a Field Advisor system that orchestrates over 20 specialized sales agents through a single interface.
Price Pass-Through of Austria's Single-Use Plastics Producer Charges: Evidence from Retail Offer Spells
arXiv:2510.15617v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Single use plastics (SUPs) impose substantial environmental costs. Following Directive (EU) 2019/904, Austria introduced producer charges and mandatory participation in collection and recycling systems. This paper exploits a monthly panel of retail offer spells drawn from a price comparison platform to estimate the extent to which compliance costs pass through to posted online prices in Austria. The treated sample comprises keyword matched SUP products including balloons, to go cups, wet wipes, plastic bags, food containers, tobacco filter items, beverage bottles, and plastic wraps observed alongside a control group of non SUP listings over 2020-2024. A two way fixed effects (TWFE) specification places the average post treatment price increase at approximately 4.1 percent. A sequential TWFE model separating the administrative reporting phase from March 2023 and the payment due phase from March 2024 reveals that the larger adjustment occurred during the earlier reporting stage, with a reporting only effect of approximately 8.1 percent and an incremental payment phase effect of 5.6 percent. For balloons, a category subject to pronounced regulatory fee exposure, event study estimates exceed 50 percent immediately following the initial payment date and remain elevated throughout most of the post treatment window. These findings indicate that Austrian online retailers adjusted prices in advance of fee payment deadlines, consistent with anticipatory pass through of expected compliance costs rather than a discrete response to realized payments. As the data contain price observations but not quantity data, the analysis speaks to price incidence and not to consumption or environmental outcomes.
AI-Driven Memory Shortage and Supply Chain Disruptions Push Laptop Prices Sharply Higher in 2026 - Bazaar Times
Memory shock and supply chain turmoil push laptop costs sharply higher in 2026
This model is not a real person: how AI is changing online shopping – video
From digital twins to models ‘sculpted’ by programmers, generative AI has been popping up all over the fashion industry. When an Australian e-commerce retailer started using AI-generated models to sell products, lifestyle editor Alyx Gorman had to see if the garments were more than mere pixels. The Iconic, which sells the dress worn in this video, said in a statement: ‘Where AI-generated imagery is used to advertise products for sale on our platform, our expectation is that it is clearly labelled and that the product itself is represented as accurately as possible for customers.’ Meanwhile, Atoir, the designer, said: ‘The Australian fashion industry is highly competitive, particularly for independent brands. We believe that when used responsibly, tools like this can help smaller businesses to operate with greater agility while still maintaining the creative standards and product integrity that matter to both the brand and the customer’ Calling all fashion models … now AI is coming for you Continue reading...
Pinterest cut AI costs 90% by gutting a frontier model's vision layer
At 620 million monthly users, calling a frontier model for every image recommendation isn't a strategy — it's a bill. Pinterest CTO Matt Madrigal solved it by gutting Qwen3-VL's vision layer and rebuilding it with proprietary embeddings, cutting costs 90% and boosting accuracy 30%. Madrigal’s team has been heavily investing in customizing open-source models “foundationally in-house.” “If you've g
Temu Hit With Fine in E.U. Over Sales of Unsafe Goods
The Chinese e-commerce platform faces a penalty of more than $230 million for selling baby toys and other products the European Commission said could harm consumers.
EU fines China’s Temu €200mn for failing to prevent sale of illegal goods
Online retailer becomes second company to be punished under bloc’s Digital Services Act after Elon Musk’s X
Starbucks quietly retired its AI agent just months after deployment after it miscounted coffee shop inventories and slowed down baristas
“It started off not particularly accurate and got less accurate over time,” one Starbucks employee told Fortune.
East meets West: How AI and social commerce are reshaping the future of retail
NielsenIQ's Commerce Revolution report reveals how agentic AI is replacing traditional product discovery, with Morgan Stanley projecting AI-assisted shoppers could drive up to $385 billion in US e-commerce by 2030. Brands that fail to adapt risk becoming invisible.
Costco CEO Ron Vachris says tech is ‘elevating’ workers,’ not replacing them—as IBM and Delta bosses make the same bet on humans
As companies like Meta and Amazon use AI to justify headcount reductions, Costco is doubling down on $1.50 hot dogs and humans at the cash register.
Gartner Survey Finds Consumers Want AI Shopping Help, But Not AI Purchase Decisions
As brands race to invest in agentic commerce, consumer willingness to let AI make purchase decisions topped out at 11% across lower-stakes categories, such a...
Google’s Fitbit Air Gives Whoop Some Serious Competition
The Fitbit Air, a new $100 screenless wearable from Alphabet Inc.’s Google, represents a major evolution in what consumers can expect from fitness trackers as tech companies race into an era of personalized health and artificial intelligence-powered wellness insights.
AI compliance startup Certo raises $4m seed round led by Daphni to scale regulatory platform for beauty and CPG brands
The Paris-San Francisco startup, founded by Bastien Deliège-Coste and Jean Duquenne, is already working with major global consumer goods groups. Entrepreneurs First, Motier Ventures and Transpose Platform also joined the round French-US startup Certo, an AI-powered regulatory compliance platform for consumer goods companies, has raised a 4 million US dollars seed round led by French […]
Nearly 500 New York Small Businesses Back Moratorium Push on AI Data Centers - Business2Community
Nearly 500 small business owners across New York have signed a letter to Governor Kathy Hochul and the state…
AI Expands From Multibillion-Dollar Enterprises to Main Street
Artificial-intelligence agents scraped a bakery’s spreadsheets to help manage its growth.
AI in the Trades: Key Statistics on Automation Adoption Among Home Service Operators
Explore how AI in the trades is transforming home care with improved scheduling and streamlined operations for service providers.
Exclusive: Starbucks scraps AI inventory tool across North America | Reuters
Starbucks rapidly rolled the tool out to North American stores in September, the company announced at the time. The AI -powered app aimed to replace hand counts of some products with automated ones that were expected to be faster and more accurate.
Zara Owner Inditex’s CEO Bets on Diversification, AI for Growth
Zara owner Inditex SA is banking on diversification across brands and countries as well as artificial intelligence to spur growth at the world’s largest listed retailer, Chief Executive Officer Óscar García Maceiras said.
UK gets a fresh new unicorn as beauty and wellness platform Fresha lands €68.9 million from KKR
Fresha, a London-based AI-powered marketplace and business management platform for the beauty and wellness industry, has announced a €68.9 million ($80 million) primary growth investment from funds managed by KKR, a global investment firm. This deal values Fresha at over €861.9 million ($1 billion) and brings Fresha’s total capital raised to €245.5 million ($285 million). […]
AI didn’t kill brand consistency — it made it mission-critical
Presented by Design.com Generative AI has made design radically more accessible. A founder can now create a logo, launch a website, build social campaigns, generate presentations, and produce marketing collateral in a single afternoon — work that once required agencies, freelancers, or internal creative teams. But as design generation becomes easier, maintaining a recognizable identity becomes harder. The problem is no longer whether businesses can create content. It’s whether all of that content still feels like it comes from the same company. That shift matters most for emerging businesses. Established enterprises already have brand governance systems, design teams, and years of customer recognition reinforcing their identity. Small businesses and solo founders often have none of those advantages. Their brand is built almost entirely through digital touchpoints — websites, presentations, social posts, ads, emails, and customer interactions that may be created across multiple tools and platforms. In the AI era, inconsistency scales just as fast as creativity. AI has turned branding into a systems problem The biggest risk with AI-generated design is not necessarily poor-quality output. In many cases, individual assets look polished on their own. The problem is fragmentation. A logo generated in one tool may not align with the visual language of a website created elsewhere. Marketing graphics evolve independently from presentation templates. Messaging shifts between channels. Colors, typography, layouts, and tone gradually drift as more assets are produced. Over time, the business stops presenting a coherent identity. Consumers increasingly encounter brands through dozens of micro-interactions rather than a single destination. A customer may discover a company through social media, visit its website, receive an email campaign, then view a proposal or presentation later. If those experiences feel disconnected, credibility erodes quickly — particularly for younger companies still trying to establish trust and legitimacy in crowded digital markets. That changes the role of design itself. Instead of treating design as a series of one-off deliverables, businesses increasingly need connected brand systems that carry identity consistently across every asset they create. Why static style guides are no longer enough Traditional brand style guides were built for slower creative cycles. Teams manually referenced approved logos, fonts, colors, and tone guidelines while producing a relatively limited number of assets. AI changes both the speed and scale of content generation. When businesses are producing dozens — or hundreds — of design variations across channels, consistency cannot rely entirely on humans manually enforcing brand rules after the fact. Brand governance increasingly needs to become embedded directly into the creation process itself, allowing brand rules and visual systems to persist across every generated asset. That is where platforms like Design.com are trying to evolve beyond standalone design generation tools. Rather than treating a logo, website, presentation, and marketing assets as separate projects, the platform carries core branding decisions — visual identity, typography, color systems, and stylistic direction — across multiple asset types from a shared starting point. A founder who creates a logo, for example, can extend those same brand elements into websites, social graphics, business collateral, and promotional materials without rebuilding the visual system each time from scratch. The shift may sound subtle, but it reflects a larger transition happening across AI-powered creative workflows: from isolated asset generation to integrated brand orchestration. Coherence is becoming a competitive advantage As AI commoditizes content creation, the ability to generate more assets becomes less meaningful on its own. What increasingly matters is recognition. The brands that stand out may not be the ones producing the highest volume of content, but the ones creating a clear and consistent identity across every interaction. That consistency influences more than aesthetics. It shapes whether customers perceive a business as established, trustworthy, and credible enough to engage with. For solo entrepreneurs and small businesses especially, that changes the value proposition of design tools entirely. The goal is no longer simply to create professional-looking assets faster. It is to ensure that every new asset reinforces the same brand rather than diluting it. AI is making content creation nearly infinite. That makes coherence — not just creativity — one of the most important signals a brand can project. Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.
Allbirds’ 600% stock surge says a lot about how ‘AI washing’ became the new ‘greenwashing’
In the early 2000s, corporate sustainability faced a similar credibility crisis — every company measured sustainability differently.
Cox Media, two others settle US FTC claims over AI marketing service
Cox Media Group and two marketing firms agreed to pay $930,000 to settle FTC allegations regarding deceptive claims about using AI to listen to smart device conversations for ad targeting.
ThredUp’s CEO has a warning for five-day companies: You’re going to lose the talent war
A four-day workweek leaves employees more content and well-rested, and that directly translated to increased and sustained revenues.
AI shift forces skills rethink at India tech hubs, Kimberly-Clark executive says
AI is reshaping hiring and job roles at India's booming offshore centres, with companies placing less emphasis on coding and more on domain and product skills, a senior Kimberly-Clark executive said. The U.S.-based consumer goods maker is increasingly seeking workers who can apply ...
Retailers Facing An 'AI Paradox' In Turning Pilot To Profit, Says McKinsey | ESM Magazine
Many grocers face an "AI paradox" in terms of turning experimentation into clear profit-and-loss benefits, McKinsey's Simon Wintels said.
Boundedly Rational Meta-Learning in Sequential Consumer Choice
arXiv:2605.16532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many consumer decisions are repeated choices under uncertainty. Standard models capture these decisions using Bayesian learning and dynamic programming: consumers update beliefs from feedback and use those beliefs to guide future choices. In many markets, however, learning does not restart when consumers enter a new context: prior experience with a brand, product, or provider can shape beliefs in later, related decisions. We study this cross-context knowledge transfer, or meta-learning, in sequential choice. We design a hierarchical laboratory task in which participants repeatedly choose among airlines across routes and observe noisy binary outcomes. Reduced-form evidence shows that participants improve not only within routes, but also across routes: they choose better airlines earlier in later routes and reduce pseudo-regret. To identify the mechanism behind this transfer, we compare human choices to a no-transfer benchmark and a fully integrated Bayesian meta-learning benchmark. In particular, we introduce a class of boundedly rational meta dynamic programming policies, BRMDP(D), that approximate full integration using a limited number of hyper-posterior draws, denoted by D. Trial-by-trial likelihood comparisons show that low-D boundedly rational meta-learning, especially BRMDP(1), fits participant behavior better than both no transfer and fully integrated Bayesian transfer. Consumers, therefore, transfer brand-level regularities across contexts, but through coarse representations of prior uncertainty. The findings imply that models of consumer learning should allow for approximate cross-context transfer, and that managerial counterfactuals based on either no-transfer or fully integrated learning can be misleading.
Google is building a ‘universal’ AI shopping cart that tracks prices, offers suggestions, and finds discounts | The Verge
At Google I/O, the company announced its latest iteration of AI-powered shopping: a “universal” cart that works across retailers and platforms, powered by Gemini.
Frustrated franchisee sues Pizza Hut over crappy kitchen AI
The Hut stands accused of breaching its franchise agreement by forcing 'algorithmic behaviors that slowed production and delivery' on restaurants, leading to $100M in losses one group wants back
Meet the California cheese mogul who turned to AI agents to save his iconic $50 million business
When the pandemic pushed a 113-year-old California institution to the brink of collapse, Larry Peter called his cousin.
Mixed Integer Goal Programming for Personalized Meal Optimization with User-Defined Serving Granularity
arXiv:2605.13849v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Determining what to eat to satisfy nutritional requirements is one of the oldest optimization problems in operations research, yet existing formulations have two persistent limitations: continuous variables produce impractical fractional servings (1.7 eggs, 0.37 bananas), and hard nutrient constraints cause infeasibility when targets conflict. A systematic review of 56 diet optimization papers found that none combine integer programming with goal programming to address both issues. We propose Mixed Integer Goal Programming (MIGP) for personalized meal optimization. The formulation uses integer variables for practical serving counts and goal programming deviations for soft nutrient targets, with inverse-target normalization to balance multi-nutrient optimization. Per-food serving granularity allows natural units (one egg, one tablespoon of oil) without post-hoc rounding. We characterize the integrality gap in the goal programming context and identify a deviation absorption property: GP deviation variables buffer the cost of requiring integer servings, making the gap structurally smaller than in hard-constraint MIP. For meals with 15+ foods, the integer solution matches the continuous optimum in every benchmark instance. A computational evaluation across 810 instances (30 USDA foods, 9 configurations, 3 methods) shows MIGP finds strictly better solutions than GP with post-hoc rounding in 66% of cases (never worse) while maintaining 100% feasibility; hard-constraint IP achieves only 48%. Solve times stay under 100 ms for typical meal sizes using the open-source HiGHS solver. The implementation is available as an open-source Python module integrated into an interactive meal planning application.
South Korean court seeks to probe intent behind Coupang's algorithm design
A judge in a criminal case against Coupang has emphasized the need to examine the business intent and decision-making processes behind the company's algorithm modifications.
Africa E-Commerce Giant Jumia to Cut Workforce Due to AI
Jumia Technologies AG is planning to cut an initial 10% of its workforce of about 2,000 people as the African e-commerce giant implements artificial intelligence across its departments, Chief Executive Officer Francis Dufay said.
Amazon’s AI Success Sends Stock Racing Toward $3 Trillion Club
Investors are growing increasingly optimistic about Amazon.com Inc.’s position in artificial intelligence, lighting a fire under the stock and sending the company’s market capitalization soaring toward the rarefied $3 trillion level.
AI to infest eight in ten premium phones within two years
And Counterpoint sees fad spreading from pricey handsets to smart rings and earbuds too... whether you asked for it or not
Walmart restructuring AI and technology teams; 1,000 roles to be affected
The move is part of a broader modernisation strategy being driven under CEO John Furner as competition in global retail intensifies
AI Backlash Grows Across US, UK, and Canada: More Customers Reject Bots for Human Support in 2026
/PRNewswire/ -- AnswerConnect, a leader in business services and software, has released new research revealing a growing consumer backlash against AI in...
AI Backlash Grows Across US, UK, and Canada: More Customers Reject Bots for Human Support in 2026 | The AI Journal
New research in the US, UK, and Canada shows attitudes toward AI in customer service are worsening, with more customers rejecting bots, losing trust, and
Is Big Brother watching you shop? – podcast
From supermarkets to corner shops, live facial recognition could be coming to retailers near you. Jessica Murray on the AI systems increasingly used by the police and stores Live facial recognition is being hailed as a powerful new frontier in the fight against crime, not only by police but by private companies too. Retailers from supermarkets to corner shops hope it will help them fight back against shoplifting. But the Guardian’s social affairs correspondent, Jessica Murray, points out that it will also expand surveillance into more and more public spaces. And the technology doesn’t always get it right. Continue reading...
Exclusive: Martha Stewart’s new AI startup wants to manage your home before things break | Fortune
That idea is now Hint, an AI home management startup cofounded by Stewart, home-services veteran Yih-Han Ma, and chief technology officer Rush. The company raised $10 million in seed funding led by Slow Ventures, Fortune learned exclusively. Montauk Capital (who incubated the company), Tusk ...
Why personalised pricing could be a good deal for shoppers
Selling the same thing to different people at a different price sounds unfair, but it needn’t be bad news for consumers
Playing Games with My Heart: An Evaluation of AI Companion Apps
arXiv:2605.08093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The use of chatbots for various forms of companionship is growing rapidly, raising a myriad of questions about simulated relationships, emotional dependence, and psychological harm. While major platforms such as ChatGPT, Grok, and Character.AI are the subject of a growing body of research and legal inquiries, apps explicitly built for simulating intimate interpersonal relationships remain under-explored. In this work, we evaluate the five most popular AI companion mobile applications in the EU and UK markets for factors that encourage parasocial interaction and may manipulate users. We do this by manually annotating the user experience each offers. Specifically, we systematically record and quantify design dark patterns, anthropomorphism, stereotypes, erotica, and technical performance issues. We find that all apps contain substantial dark patterns aimed at increasing monetisation and user engagement. Erotica and gamification features such as levelling are also prevalent, and although other features vary considerably between applications, all apps have highly anthropomorphic design. These findings shed light on the mechanics used to leverage users' simulated relationships. On that basis, we put forward concrete recommendations for regulators to strengthen consumer protection in this rapidly emerging market. Content warning: This article contains objectifying images of women, erotic images, textual references to incest, and other potentially sensitive, offensive, and distressing text.
Spanish watchdog seeks new AI product safety regulations for SMEs, digital platforms
Spain's CNMC has proposed a draft decree to update product safety rules for AI and digital platforms to improve consumer protection and market fairness.
Walmart Lays Off or Relocates About 1,000 Corporate Workers
The retailer is cutting positions as it combines more of its global-tech and product teams.
Marketers strain to juggle media budgets, AI and high expectations from CEOs
A new survey reveals sustained pressure on budgets as CMOs struggle to deliver on marketing goals and AI objectives.
Alibaba Revolutionizes Taobao Shopping with AI-Powered Conversational Commerce Platform
Alibaba is embedding its Qwen AI platform into Taobao to transform shopping through conversational interfaces, marking its largest AI initiative.
Exploring the "Banality" of Deception in Generative AI
arXiv:2605.07012v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current approaches to addressing deceptive design largely focus on visible interface manipulations, commonly referred to as "dark patterns". With the rise of generative AI, deception is becoming more difficult to spot and easier to live with, as it is quietly embedded in default settings, automated suggestions, and conversational interactions rather than discrete interface elements. These subtle, normalised forms of influence, which Simone Natale frames as "banal deception", shape everyday digital use and blur the line between AI-enabled assistance and manipulation. This position paper explores banality as a lens through which to reason through deception in generative AI experiences, especially with chatbots. We explore what Natale describes as users' own involvement in their deception, and argue that this perspective could lead to future work for introducing friction to safeguard users from deception in generative AI interactions, such as empowering users through raising awareness, providing them with intervention tools, and regulatory or enforcement improvements. We present these concepts as points for discussion for the deceptive design scholarly community.
Cracking The Code of Campaign Success with Google's AlphaEvolve Agent
An experiment using Google's AlphaEvolve-style agentic methods to improve campaign prediction and optimization, showing potential accuracy gains.
This Gen Zer dropped out of college to become an influencer—now he’s a millionaire from selling products like Medicube and Neutrogena on TikTok Shop
Logan Walter, a 21-year-old content creator selling products on TikTok Shop, reels in a seven-figure monthly income making videos in his childhood bedroom.
Amperity Unveils Real-Time AI Capabilities
Amperity has launched real-time AI capabilities and new assistants at Amplify 2026, aimed at enhancing personalized customer engagement through integrated decision-making systems.
Popular dating app Bumble is killing off the 'swipe' in favor of AI matchmaking
Bumble is phasing out its iconic swipe mechanic, replacing it with an AI-driven matchmaking system.
The New Rules of Customer Experience in the Age of Agents
This article discusses how AI agents and answer engine optimization are transforming customer experience, discovery, and brand engagement.
EU's simplified AI rulebook creates 'dangerous loopholes,' consumer group warns
The consumer group BEUC warned that the EU's newly adopted AI Omnibus creates dangerous loopholes and rolls back key consumer protections.
Coalition calls for ban on surveillance pricing, electronic shelf labels in New York
A coalition is calling for a ban on surveillance pricing and electronic shelf labels in New York.
Deco: Extending Personal Physical Objects into Pervasive AI Companion through a Dual-Embodiment Framework
arXiv:2605.03882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Individuals frequently form deep attachments to physical objects (e.g., plush toys) that usually cannot sense or respond to their emotions. While AI companions offer responsiveness and personalization, they exist independently of these physical objects and lack an ongoing connection to them. To bridge this gap, we conducted a formative study (N=9) to explore how digital agents could inherit and extend the emotional bond, deriving four design principles (Faithful Identity, Calibrated Agency, Ambient Presence, and Reciprocal Memory). We then present the Dual-Embodiment Companion Framework, instantiated as Deco, a mobile system integrating multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) and Augmented Reality to create synchronized digital embodiments of users' physical companions. A within-subjects study (N=25) showed Deco significantly outperformed a personalized LLM-empowered digital companion baseline on perceived companionship, emotional bond, and design-principle scales (all p<0.01). A seven-day field deployment (N=17) showed sustained engagement, subjective well-being improvement (p=.040), and three key relational patterns: digital activities retroactively vitalized physical objects, bond deepening was driven by emotional engagement depth rather than interaction frequency, and users sustained bonds while actively navigating digital companions' AI nature. This work highlights a promising alternative for designing digital companions: moving from creating new relationships to dual embodiment, where digital agents seamlessly extend the emotional history of physical objects.
Coupang Warns of 2026 Slowdown After Data Breach Hits Spending
Coupang Inc. warned revenue growth will slow this year after a bigger-than-expected March-quarter loss, reflecting the extent to which a historic cyber-intrusion is depressing spending across South Korea’s biggest online retail platform.
Beyond Distributive Justice: Hermeneutical Fairness in Ad Delivery
arXiv:2605.03419v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fairness in online advertising is often formalized as a distributive justice problem, aiming to ensure that impressions, opportunities, or outcomes are allocated comparably across protected groups. Yet online advertising can still produce harms arising from ads' content and from how recipients interpret and uptake them. To capture this dimension, we draw on Miranda Fricker's notion of hermeneutical injustice. We model ad delivery as a mechanism that distributes interpretative resources and can fail in two ways: relevant concepts can be withheld through systematic under-exposure, leading to hermeneutical deprivation; and recipients may experience hermeneutical distortions when saturated with low-uptake or skewed framings. Grounded in exploratory correlational patterns from the AIDS Advertising Evaluation surveys (1986-1987), we introduce a group-level hermeneutical fairness constraint and a hermeneutically aware utility cost. We integrate them into a benchmark, utility-driven ad allocation framework that already enforces distributive justice, yielding a distributively fair, hermeneutically aware framework that prevents deprivation and distortion from concentrating within protected groups. Through controlled simulations, we explore trade-offs between economic utility, classical distributive fairness constraints, and hermeneutical cost. The results show that purely utility-based allocation drives under-delivery to the disadvantaged group. When the hermeneutical stakes of withholding ads are high, distributive constraints reduce hermeneutical cost at modest utility loss. Conversely, weighting hermeneutical cost without distributive constraints can yield policies concentrated on the disadvantaged group. These findings motivate expanding fairness analyses of online advertising beyond distributive notions to include epistemic conditions of interpretation and uptake.
Consumer Choice Over Shopping Baskets
arXiv:2511.11846v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: I introduce a novel approach to structural modelling and estimation of continuous demand systems, utilising consideration sets to analyse differentiated products markets with very large choice sets and purchases over multiple goods, multiple units, and across product categories. I apply it to study intra-store competition in the Portuguese supermarket industry between 2020 and 2023, during which the country faced the COVID pandemic. Anonymised transaction-level point-of-sale data is sufficient to estimate price elasticities across almost 30 000 goods and more than 500 product categories. Results suggest mark-ups remained stable throughout the sample period, with a short-lived, slight increase post-pandemic observed only in the highest-mark-up-percentile goods. The implied mark-ups match observed price volatility, profit margin surveys, as well as reports on shifting consumer tastes during the sample period.
The CEO of Saks Global Says the Company Is Ready for a Comeback
Geoffroy van Raemdonck has a plan to return the luxury retailer to profitability and start growing again.
Ebay weighs GameStop’s unsolicited $56bn offer for online marketplace
Video game retailer offers $125 a share for resale web group with plans to bring in ‘entrepreneurial mindset’
‘It’s crucial’: how AI is reshaping the fragrance industry
From hyper-personalisation to cutting costs, artificial intelligence is getting a hold on your perfume cabinet
Dairy Queen pauses Middle East growth plans
Dairy Queen has put expansion plans in the Middle East on hold due to war in Iran and supply-chain disruptions.
Old Phones Could Save the Industry
That old phone in the kitchen drawer could save an industry. Users have less cash to burn and less patience for AI in new models... now where to get the used stock
Restaurants lean on AI to cut waste and reduce costs
Hospitality sector has been slower than others at adopting the technology
How to Move from AI Experimentation to AI Transformation
This article provides a framework for scaling AI beyond fragmented pilots, using a Lowe's case study to illustrate the path toward enterprise-wide AI transformation.
Agentic AI, fraud and the fight for customer loyalty | Retail Dive
As AI-powered commerce grows into a multi-trillion-dollar space, speed, personalization, and automation are becoming standard expectations. However, this shift fundamentally changes how security must be approached. When bots act on behalf of users, businesses are no longer verifying just a person. They must also verify the legitimacy and authority of the agent acting for them. This introduces a new layer of complexity that many current systems ...
Guilty until proven innocent: shoppers falsely identified by facial recognition system struggle to clear their names
People shamed and ordered to leave shops after being misidentified then ‘given no help’ to investigate verdicts
Why eBay, in Its Latest Incarnation, Is a Takeover Target for GameStop
A focus on collectibles could make the online marketplace a match for the videogame retailer.
Thermos Recalls 8.2 Million Jars and Bottles After Customers Are Injured
The company received reports that the stoppers on some of its products had “forcefully ejected,” striking customers and causing permanent vision loss in a few cases, safety regulators said.
Estee Lauder Raises Fiscal-Year Outlook as Turnaround Continues to Bear Fruit
Estee Lauder Companies boosted its full-year profit outlook and said it will cut more jobs in its restructuring than it initially expected.
A Mark Cuban–backed vegan cheese company trained AI to scrutinize cardboard boxes. It’s saved $400,000
Austin-based Rebel Cheese says an AI agent helped uncover shipping-box overcharges after a holiday rush and has saved the company $400,000 in one year.
The best pressure washers in the UK for cleaning garden furniture and patios – tested
Our expert puts the best power washers through their paces on the toughest – and muckiest – outdoor chores, from grimy paving slabs to dirty decking • The best lawnmowers to keep your grass in check The trouble with the great outdoors is that it gets a bit untidy. Your garden tools might do a good job of keeping your plot in check, but keeping your patio, decking and outdoor furniture spick and span can take hours, especially if you rely on a bucket of soapy water and a scrubbing brush. That’s where a pressure washer comes in.
Retailers are rushing to build AI apps. It's unclear if shoppers will use them
Retailers and brands are launching shopping apps within ChatGPT and Claude at a rapid pace. It's unclear if shoppers are equally as excited.
That old phone in the kitchen drawer could save an industry
Users have less cash to burn and less patience for AI in new models... now where to get the used stock Secondhand phones sales are booming - relatively speaking - and the industry has rising inflation, AI bloat, and consumers' growing apathy toward overpriced new handsets to thank for it.…
Guiding without Generating: Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Enabled Topic Nudges in Online Reviews
arXiv:2511.09877v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Digital platforms increasingly face a common challenge in the age of artificial intelligence (AI): how to elicit richer and more useful user-generated content (UGC) without fully automating content production. We study this question in the context of online reviews by examining Yelp's introduction of an AI-enabled topic nudging tool in 2023, whi
4 in 10 enterprises see 40%+ productivity gains from AI in customer support: Report - Storyboard18
Kapture CX survey shows 40% enterprises reporting over 40% productivity gains from AI in customer support, with growing automation, uneven adoption, and cost benefits tied to deeper workflow integration.
Popsa AI-Driven Content Creation
This article presents a case study of Popsa using generative AI models like Amazon Nova and Claude Haiku to generate personalized photo book titles through a RAG-based approach. Our analysts highlighted that while it demonstrates AI-driven content creation improving user engagement, the use case is relatively narrow and limited in broader strategic significance.
When Agents Shop for You: Role Coherence in AI-Mediated Markets
arXiv:2604.26220v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Consumers are increasingly delegating purchase decisions to AI agents, providing natural-language descriptions of their preferences and identity. We argue that these representations constitute an information channel, role coherence, through which sellers can infer willingness to pay without explicit disclosure by the buyer agent, leading to preference leakage. In an experiment where a language-model buyer agent shops on behalf of a verbal consumer profile, we show that seller-side inference from dialogue alone recovers willingness to pay nearly one-for-one. Comparing this setting to a numeric-budget condition with confidentiality instructions cleanly isolates role coherence as distinct from instruction-following failure. Because this leakage arises from delegation itself, it cannot be mitigated at the prompt level. Instead, we propose architectural interventions that trade off personalization against preference privacy.
Hierarchical Multi-Persona Induction from User Behavioral Logs: Learning Evidence-Grounded and Truthful Personas
arXiv:2604.26120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavioral logs provide rich signals for user modeling, but are noisy and interleaved across diverse intents. Recent work uses LLMs to generate interpretable natural-language personas from user logs, yet evaluation often emphasizes downstream utility, providing limited assurance of persona quality itself. We propose a hierarchical framework that aggregates user actions into intent memories and induces multiple evidence-grounded personas by clustering and labeling these memories. We formulate persona induction as an optimization problem over persona quality-captured by cluster cohesion, persona-evidence alignment, and persona truthfulness-and train the persona model using a groupwise extension of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Experiments on a large-scale service log and two public datasets show that our method induces more coherent, evidence-grounded, and trustworthy personas, while also improving future interaction prediction.
As AI Alters the Customer Journey, Retailers Focus on Experience, Content and Curation
Discover how AI is transforming retail, shifting focus to customer experience, curated content, and sustainability for long-term growth.
Gifting marketplace Flowwow rebrands to Udora, separating from Russian business and raising €8.5 million for European growth
Udora, a global gifting marketplace formerly known as Flowwow, has closed a €9.2 million private investment round and relaunched under their new brand to investe in a deeper local presence across Europe, expanding its product catalogue, and advancing AI-powered personalisation. According to a representative of the company, the rebranding is part of a long-planned separation […]
Online marketplace Etsy beats revenue estimates on steady demand
Online marketplace Etsy beat Wall Street expectations for first-quarter revenue on Wednesday, helped by growth in gross merchandise sales as more active buyers joined the platform and shoppers spent more on each purchase.
Snapchat moves ads into chats with AI agents designed to feel like conversation
Snapchat is integrating advertisements into its AI-powered chat features to monetize user interactions.
Maryland law spotlights momentum — and limits — of US state surveillance pricing bans
Maryland has become the first state to restrict “surveillance pricing,” as lawmakers across the US seek to curb the use of personal data to tailor prices.
Beyond chatbots: How agentic AI can boost productivity and decision-making in food
Agentic AI is already being used in food. The more autonomous, flexible form of AI is being used by Nestlé to help employee productivity, streamlining sales tasks and supporting finance teams to make better decisions. Danone is also using agentic AI, helping it analyse production data, simulate ...
GoTo Posts First-Ever Net Income After Cost Cuts Bear Fruit
GoTo Group reported its first-ever net income, a major milestone in the Indonesian ride-hailing and food delivery company’s turnaround effort as it seeks to gain fresh momentum in its long-standing rivalry with Grab Holdings Ltd.
Amazon launches an AI-powered audio Q&A experience on product pages
Amazon is introducing a new feature that uses AI to answer customer questions about products via audio.
Epicure: Multidimensional Flavor Structure in Food Ingredient Embeddings
arXiv:2604.22776v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A chef's intuition about flavor, texture, and cultural identity represents tacit knowledge that is difficult to articulate yet central to culinary practice. We show that this knowledge is already encoded in FlavorGraph's 300-dimensional ingredient embeddings, trained on recipe cooccurrence and food chemistry, and that it can be systematically recovered. An LLM-augmented curation pipeline consolidates 6,653 raw FlavorGraph ingredients into 1,032 canonical entries, substantially strengthening the recoverable structure. We identify at least fifteen independently classifiable dimensions spanning taste, texture, geography, food processing, and culture.
Lowe’s Enhances Customer Experience With Gen AI and Digital Twins
Lowe's is leveraging generative AI, digital twins, and edge computing to optimize store operations and inventory management, though specific ROI metrics remain undisclosed.
Your Next Pair of Good American Jeans Won’t Be Designed by AI
Emma Grede, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Good American jeans, said her businesses are being changed by artificial intelligence, though there are some areas that are off limits.
AI Transforms Mother's Day Shopping
As Mother's Day approaches, shoppers increasingly rely on AI tools for gift discovery, with many willing to explore new brands. Marketers are advised to focus on personalized messaging and timely AI-driven insights to convert and engage customers, as Optimove garners recognition for its strategic capabilities in this domain.
AI is transforming innovation in Unilever Beauty & Wellbeing | Unilever
Discover how Unilever's Beauty & Wellbeing scientists are using AI to decode consumer trends and mine decades of research data.
AI's Role in Modern Pricing Strategies: Unlocking ai-driven pricing solutions
Pricing is one of the most powerful levers in retail. But with thousands of SKUs and ever-changing market conditions, setting the right price can feel like trying to hit a moving target in the dark. That’s where AI steps in. Today, I want to share how AI's role in modern pricing strategies ...
Why AI search broke the marketing playbook
AI is changing how audiences are reached, forcing marketing teams to adapt to automated workflows and a zero-click search environment.
In Wine Country, Sales Are Down and Fraud Is Rampant
The industry’s murky supply chain has long attracted scammers and con artists. In the words of one expert, “Wine and fraud go hand in hand.”
Wedding Dresses Now Come With a Legal Waiver for Brides on GLP-1s
Selling wedding gowns has always been a high-stakes business. New weight-loss drugs make fitting brides for the big day even more fraught.
Companies Are Rushing to Deploy AI Agents. The Smart Ones Are Doing Something Crucial First
Companies Are Rushing to Deploy AI Agents. The Smart Ones Are Doing Something Crucial First # Companies Are Rushing to Deploy AI Agents. The Smart Ones Are Doing Something Crucial First AI agents are set to transform the workplace, but companies need to take a key step to ensure success. BY KOLAWOLE ADEBAYO, COLUMNIST Apr 25, 2026 SHARE LinkedInFacebookXBlueskyLink ADD ON GOOGLE Illustration: Getty Images Listen to this Article More info 0:00 / 0:00 Michael Treacy, the head chef of Domino’s Australia, is not who you’d typically expect to be an early enterprise AI adopter. But earlier this year, the pizza chain deployed Snowflake’s AI platform across its 3,503 stores, and Treacy became one of its most active users—querying product performance data across international markets without touching a dashboard or waiting on an analyst. There was no technical training nor SQL queries—
Canadian Retail Sales Improve Ahead of Expected Squeeze
Canadians’ retail spending rebounded during the first quarter, highlighting consumer resilience that is likely to be tested by a jump in fuel costs.
Claude is connecting directly to your personal apps like Spotify, Uber Eats, and TurboTax
Anthropic is introducing personal app connectors for Claude, allowing the AI to interact directly with services like Spotify and Uber Eats.
Diagnosing Urban Street Vitality via a Visual-Semantic and Spatiotemporal Framework for Street-Level Economics
arXiv:2604.19798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Micro-scale street-level economic assessment is fundamental for precision spatial resource allocation. While Street View Imagery (SVI) advances urban sensing, existing approaches remain semantically superficial and overlook brand hierarchy heterogeneity and structural recession. To address this, we propose a visual-semantic and field-based spatiotemporal framework, operationalized via the Street Economic Vitality Index (SEVI). Our approach integrates physical and semantic streetscape parsing through instance segmentation of signboards, glass interfaces, and storefront closures. A dual-stage VLM-LLM pipeline standardizes signage into global hierarchies to quantify a spatially smoothed brand premium index. To overcome static SVI limitations, we introduce a temporal lag design using Location-Based Services (LBS) data to capture realized demand. Combined with a category-weighted Gaussian spillover model, we construct a three-dimensional diagnostic system covering Commercial Activity, Spatial Utilization, and Physical Environment. Experiments based on time-lagged geographically weighted regression across eight tidal periods in Nanjing reveal quasi-causal spatiotemporal heterogeneity. Street vibrancy arises from interactions between hierarchical brand clustering and mall-induced externalities. High-quality interfaces show peak attraction during midday and evening, while structural recession produces a lagged nighttime repulsion effect. The framework offers evidence-based support for precision spatial governance.
Gen AI penetrates over half of US internet households | Retail Customer Experience
Generative AI has reached more than half of U.S. internet households, 58%, but there's still a lag when it comes to monetization and trust.
Amazon's Anti-Counterfeit Crusade
Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit has removed 15 million counterfeit items and closed over 100 scam websites in 2025 using AI to enhance brand protection.
‘Get back to work’: Amazon faces fresh scrutiny over workplace safety record
Workers and labor advocates say the company’s injury rates and how it treats injured staff remain a problem Amazon, one of the world’s largest employers, has for years faced scrutiny over its safety record. When Billy Foister, a 48-year-old worker, died after a heart attack inside one of the tech giant’s warehouses in September 2019, managers were accused of telling staff to “get back to work”. When another worker died this month at a distribution center in Troutdale, Oregon, an Amazon spokesperson claimed they had collapsed from an “existing medical issue”.
The best hair straighteners in the UK for foolproof styling, tried and tested by our expert
Whether you want cordless designs or a budget buy, we’ve tested the top hair straighteners for every hair type • The best hair dryers, tested Straighteners are here to stay – but thankfully, heat styling has come a long way since GHD’s first ceramic straighteners ushered in an era of poker-straight hair in 2001. Today’s models feature adjustable heat settings and protective technology for hairstyling with minimal damage. The looks you can achieve with a straightener have become more versatile as well: one twist of a modern, curved-edge straightener can create styles from ultra-smooth strands to structured ringlets and soft, beachy waves.
A Deep Learning Approach to Heterogeneous Consumer Aesthetics in Fast Fashion
arXiv:2405.10498v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Aesthetics drives product differentiation in industries such as fashion, interior decor, luxury goods, real estate and hospitality. However, visual differentiation is hard to encode in formal economic analysis. This paper analyses millions of purchase records from H\&M in the Netherlands, including product images, text descriptions, prices, and consumer demographics. I fine-tune Fashion CLIP embeddings with a three-tower approach that builds separate channels for product visuals and text, consumer history, and price, which makes downstream analysis tractable and scalable. The embeddings feed a latent-class deep demand system that captures price and taste sensitivities through deep nets, recovers rich substitution patterns, reveals meaningful heterogeneity, and performs much better than competing alternatives. Then, a supply-side inversion recovers sensible markups and costs and supports conduct tests and counterfactuals on sustainability practices. I also estimate machine learning hedonic pricing models that perform much better than competing alternatives. This model allows us to construct quality-adjusted price indices, make it possible to price completely new designs, and with an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition reveal the underlying sources of price changes. Finally, a Poisson event study around the COVID-19 lockdown shows that the range of demand responses across embedding-based product and user clusters exceeds anything recoverable from simple text-based attributes or demographic labels alone. The methodology is portable to any market where products are differentiated along sensory dimensions that are hard to encode but meaningfully important for consumer choices.
Lisbon-based DOJO AI secures €5.1 million to expand its AI marketing platform in the U.S.
DOJO AI, a Portuguese intelligent marketing system that brings integrated AI to marketing teams, today announced a €5.1 million ($6 million) Seed round at a €25 million ($30 million) valuation. The round was led by Armilar, with participation from Heartfelt VC. The funding will support continued product development and accelerated expansion in the United States. […]
EssilorLuxottica AI Glasses-Led Sales Gains Disappoint
EssilorLuxottica SA reported a rise in first-quarter sales that disappointed investors, as a weaker dollar limited the gains from its AI-glasses partnership with Meta Platforms Inc.
How the AI Race Will Impact the Global Luxury Market | Vogue
AI is evolving at different speeds across regions, creating fragmented systems that are reshaping consumer expectations — and forcing luxury brands to think carefully about how they use the tech in each market.
Ex-Dunzo Chief Kabeer Biswas Raises ₹102 Cr for AI Concierge Startup 'M' | Whalesbook
Kabeer Biswas, former co-founder of Dunzo, is back in the startup world with 'M', securing significant seed funding to automate household management. This capital injection shows strong investor confidence in his vision and the growing appeal of AI consumer platforms, a sector drawing substantial venture capital attention in 2026. 'M' aims to simplify daily consumer services by automating decisions and coordination, addressing a clear market ...
Yelp Unveils AI Assistant for Reservations and Service Scheduling
Yelp is introducing an AI-powered Assistant in its app to streamline tasks like booking reservations and ordering takeout in one conversation. This move enhances user experience by integrating with major platforms like DoorDash and Grubhub, and includes features like personalized home pages and AI-driven photo tools, marking a significant step …
Puig Shares Gain as Suitor Estee Lauder Said to Be Shaping Funding Package
Spanish financial daily Expansion reported Estee Lauder is seeking financing for a planned business combination, adding fresh impetus to a deal that would create a rival to France’s L’Oreal.
EssilorLuxottica faces test to grow smart glass sales without hurting margins
EssilorLuxottica faces test to grow smart glass sales without hurting margins
What China's AI Agents Reveal About the Future of Commerce
This article explores the shift toward agentic commerce, where AI handles discovery and execution, using China's integrated ecosystems as a primary example.
Allbirds’ Move to AI Has Echoes of the Dot-Com Frenzy
The faltering shoe company says it will become an AI computing provider
Inside San Francisco's AI-run store
Andon Market is an Anthropic-backed retail experiment testing whether an AI model can effectively run a business, from inventory to customer engagement.
AI-Run Store in San Francisco
A new retail experiment in San Francisco's Marina District is testing whether an AI model can run a business. The store, called Andon Market, is part store and part social experiment, with an AI agent named Luna handling everything from hiring and inventory to pricing and customer engagement.
AI Consumer Devices Steal the Show at China's CICPE Expo, with Rokid's Glasses Leading the Charge
At the China International Consumer Products Expo, AI-enabled consumer devices, notably Rokid's AI glasses, are a major highlight, showcasing advancements in integrating AI into daily life.
on ai matchmaker apps: a continued destruction story
AND - we arrive at the same lie. In Justin’s words about what Overtone might be => “…cutting-edge AI capabilities with deep respect for the messy, human journey of connection…to create something people actually want.”