‍AI-Powered Shopping with Perplexity: Perplexity adds a shopping feature to its AI-driven platform, allowing users to research and buy within the app. The first-of-its-kind feature creates a new channel for merchants through first-party partnerships with retailers like Best Buy; and in new payments partnerships with ecosystems like Shopify.

Our Take: Expect a long-form member brief and coverage of this release in an upcoming Future Commerce After Dark podcast episode. Here are our three big takeaways: this is bigger than we realize, it creates new, opaque challenges for merchants, and we saw this coming. 

In our summer research, we found that customers spend more time in influential channels for shopping research than is measurable or attributable by merchants. Our New Modes report discovered that ChatGPT was influential for shopping research, with 25% of our surveyed audience using in their product and purchase journey—that’s more than Siri and Alexa combined.

Heretofore, the nature of AI recommendations has been non-deterministic, but Perplexity’s new shopping focus and related merchant program may change that. Just as we saw with content partnerships in the early web, vetted, first-party partnerships will create a prioritization effect for merchants to have exposure in recommendations. This presents a double-edged sword of a problem: how do you attribute sales in your dashboarding and analytics to an opaque, agentic-done-for-you, customer-absent checkout? Third-party cookies could never track this behavior, which may present an argument for CAPI/server-side attribution.

Finally, AI search platforms like Perplexity aren’t merely an evolution of search, they’re a new platform unto themselves. Customers can aggregate product research, combine it with their own context, and import relevant external context (think Amazon reviews, Christmas wishlist, or perhaps a dossier on your spouse that includes their Meyers/Briggs, Goodreads, and enneagram). 

This is bigger than we think, both in terms of the opportunity for a retailer and in our loss of control for a customer’s experience of a brand.

‍From Barcodes to Battlefields. A new report from the Data Catalyst Institute has analyzed AI’s transformative impact on sectors like commerce, banking, healthcare—and even defense. As AI reshapes workflows and consumer interactions, the report addresses challenges, including ethical dilemmas and regulatory hurdles, accompanying its rapid adoption.

‍“Young Gun Takes On Aging Champ.” Call it elder abuse, but a new startup isn’t pulling any punches on its aging rival. Twenty years after the cloud SaaS revolution began, aptly named startup Twenty has begun developing an open-source alternative to Salesforce. The project has hundreds of contributors and over 22,000 stars on Github, the leading open-source software contribution platform.

This is the latest in a long queue of challengers for Salesforce, which lost its AI chief amid a push towards agentic AI and whose legacy CRM suite was displaced for homegrown software at payments giant Klarna. Klarna recently filed for a US IPO. People of a certain age will remember the FLOSS movement of the early 2000s and products like SugarCRM that were difficult to develop and extend and more challenging to manage. Now, in the age of AI, software development and maintenance costs have changed, and new competitors and alternatives have arrived.

‍Bring Me a Shrubbery Parsnip. How did you celebrate National Parsnip Day? It could have been with a free G&T from Marketplace Vauxhall in collaboration with James Gin. For everyone’s most forgettable root vegetable holiday, MV launched a campaign allowing customers to trade root vegetables, like parsnips, for a free Asian Parsnip Gin & Tonic.

‍How Much Wood Can a Satellite Chuck? (Not much… yet.) The world’s first wooden satellite offers a sustainable answer to the growing problem of orbital junk, which often returns to Earth and burns up in the atmosphere. The magnolia wood-based satellite is lighter than its metal cousins and can withstand harsh conditions. After years of testing on the ISS, the material was among the most durable and sustainable found.