Welcome to this week's AI edition of The Commerce Brief 🤖
✦ THIS WEEK’S AI INDUSTRY UPDATES
01. Zalando has invested in warehouse robotics startup Sereact as a strategic investor, bringing its ongoing Series B round to $116m and total funding to over $145m. Sereact's Cortex AI system automates order picking and returns processing across single-arm cells, dual-arm stations and humanoid robots, with over 200 systems live across Europe and more than one billion production picks processed. (source)
02. WhatsApp is becoming retail's favourite sales associate, according to a new report finding that brands are increasingly using the messaging platform for AI-powered conversational commerce, personalised recommendations and customer engagement at scale. (source)
03. About You has launched SCAYLE Studios, an AI-powered photo and video production tool now available to UK brands and retailers. The system reduces production times from weeks to minutes at approximately 90% lower cost, with A/B testing showing a 9.2% GMV uplift compared to traditional studio photography. Over 80,000 outfits have been generated in the past 30 days, with clients including s.Oliver Group, Betty Barclay Group and FC Bayern München. (source)
04. AI voice agents are becoming more popular across retail, with brands deploying conversational voice technology for customer service, in-store assistance and order management. The trend reflects growing consumer comfort with voice-based AI interactions in shopping contexts. (source)
05. LPP, the Polish fashion group behind Reserved, Cropp and Mohito, is ramping up its use of AI in marketing through a partnership with Polish startup Pirxe. The collaboration aims to accelerate AI-driven content creation and campaign execution across LPP's portfolio of brands. (source)
06. ESW has launched ESW Agentic Commerce, a new solution initially integrated with Microsoft Copilot that enables brands to make their product catalogues discoverable on AI platforms and complete secure checkout within AI-powered shopping experiences. The tool works alongside retailers' existing e-commerce infrastructure, with plans to extend to additional AI agents in the coming months. (source)
07. The EU has forced Google to open its Android and search data to rival AI platforms, a ruling with significant implications for retail media and AI-powered product discovery. The decision could reshape how consumers discover products through AI tools and reduce Google's dominance over the shopping search landscape. (source)
08. OpenAI's rogue AI incident has raised trust questions for the future of agentic commerce. The episode highlights the risks of autonomous AI agents making purchasing decisions on behalf of consumers, and the governance challenges retailers and platforms will need to address as agentic commerce scales. (source)
✦ PARTNER SPOTLIGHT
Run Omnisend from inside ChatGPT & Claude
AI assistants just got a serious upgrade. Omnisend has launched an MCP integration that lets ChatGPT and Claude talk directly to your Omnisend account. No more copy-pasting between tabs or exporting CSVs to see what's working.
Quick context if Omnisend's new to you: it's an email and SMS marketing platform built for ecommerce, used by 150,000+ brands. Campaigns, automated flows (welcome, cart and browse abandonment, post-purchase), segmentation and reporting all sit in one place, working together to help you sell more.
With the integration live, you can ask Claude or ChatGPT to pull your campaign reports, build segments, run a deliverability audit or plan your next send, all without opening Omnisend.
💡 MCP, if you're wondering, stands for Model Context Protocol, the bit that lets AI actually talk to your tools.
Here's why it's worth a look. Automations are just 2% of email volume but drive 37% of email sales. The data that actually grows revenue has always been buried in dashboards nobody has time to open. Now you can just ask a question and get the answer in seconds.
Readers get 30% off Omnisend paid plans for the first 3 months with code SUE30 — link here.
There's also a quick walkthrough below that shows it in action if you want to see how it actually works:
