Welcome to this week's AI edition of The Commerce Brief 🤖
✦ THIS WEEK’S AI INDUSTRY UPDATES
01. Meta has launched its latest AI glasses in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, tapping Kylie Jenner to design the Meta Starfire Glasses, Kylie Edition. The collaboration is aimed at making the wearable AI product appealing to a younger audience demanding stylish tech solutions. (source)
02. Anthropic has accused Alibaba-linked operators of carrying out "industrial scale" extraction of capabilities from its Claude AI model. In a letter to US senators, the AI firm alleged that operators tied to the Chinese e-commerce and technology group carried out almost 29m exchanges with Claude using thousands of fraudulent accounts, designed to extract the model's most valuable capabilities including its reasoning and complex task handling. (source)
03. Allbirds has completed its AI pivot, officially rebranding as Smartbird after the $39m sale of its footwear assets to American Exchange Group (AXNY) and WSG Brands. The parent company is now a technology company listed on Nasdaq with no remaining footwear operations, signalling one of the most dramatic corporate transformations in recent retail history. (source)
04. Pinterest has announced a suite of new AI-powered tools, headlined by Ask Pinterest, an experimental app rolling out in the US for conversational, visual-first and agentic shopping experiences. Powered by Pinterest's proprietary Taste Graph, the app is designed for complex, multi-step decisions such as planning a dinner party on a budget or furnishing a room over time, retaining context across sessions. (source)
05. Disney Store has launched an AI Personal Shopping Assistant, piloting with select shoppers in its iOS app before a wider rollout. The assistant responds to natural, conversational language and mirrors Disney's brand voice and character knowledge, offering recommendations by character, age, occasion or budget with one-click shopping, sale alerts and real-time order tracking. (source)
06. The Home Depot is replacing its customer service phone menus with an AI-powered voice agent that can understand why a customer is calling in under 10 seconds. The agent can build a digital shopping cart, initiate service requests and resolve common inquiries from start to finish, with deployment expected across US stores this year. (source)
07. Rackhams has been invited to join the ChatGPT advertising beta programme, becoming one of the first UK online marketplaces to integrate its product feed with the platform. The integration enables products from across its catalogue to appear within AI-driven shopping journeys, with the ability to create targeted campaigns based on user intent and conversational search behaviour. (source)
08. Gap Inc. is leveraging its partnership with Google Cloud to build a unified, AI-ready data foundation that brings together customer and product intelligence across its portfolio of brands. The initiative aims to turn Gap Inc.'s shared marketing organisation into a scalable, real-time growth engine using data, AI and agentic capabilities for faster personalisation, improved retention and better decision-making. (source)
09. Stitch Fix has expanded its Vision AI platform with a new "See it on me" feature, allowing customers to generate personalised images of themselves wearing recommended outfits. The enhancement builds on the online styling platform's broader investment in AI-powered visualisation tools. (source)
10. Albertsons has integrated branded product placement into its AI-powered conversational search tool through its retail media division. Powered by commerce intelligence platform Criteo, the capability enables brands to influence shoppers as they plan meals, search for products and build baskets within the AI search experience. (source)
That's a wrap for this week! If you found this useful or if you have any feedback, hit reply and let me know, or share it with someone in the industry who'd enjoy the read.
Thanks - Sue
