Payments. AI. Commerce. Decoded. 236 articles and counting.
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The fear is that AI agents turn every product into a commodity and erase brands. The history of distribution says agents move discovery, not loyalty. The merchant who should worry is the one who only ever competed on being found.
Three beauty giants picked three different AI surfaces in the same week. Sephora went ChatGPT. Fenty went WhatsApp. Ulta went Google. The split is the most important signal in consumer commerce this quarter.
Publicis is paying $2.2 billion for LiveRamp at a 29.8 percent premium, and the press release puts agentic commerce in the headline. This is the first ten-figure M&A move in agentic commerce, and it is not a network, a model, or a checkout. It is an identity graph. The deal lands two weeks after OpenAI handed checkout back to merchants and tells us where the value is actually accruing.
Marathon is not the disease. It is the latest symptom of an industry addicted to a model that does not work.