Latest AI News
Amazon expands a program that lets customers shop from other retailers’ sites
Amazon is expanding access to a program calledShop Directthat lets U.S. customers discover and buy products not sold in its own online store. The retail giant on Wednesday said it will now support third-party product feeds, which merchants use to provide information about their inventory, pricing, and catalog to other partners. With this information, Amazon can direct shoppers to a merchant’s website via its search results or its AI shopping assistant, Rufus, and even let customers use AI to make a purchase. The company hasadded supportfor third-party product feeds from Feedonomics, Salsify, and CEDCommerce, which provide Amazon access to merchants’ inventory and product information in real time. More feed providers will be supported in time, and an Amazon merchant portal with a merchant-direct feed is said to be coming soon. InFebruary 2025, Amazon began beta testing a new shopping feature that would link to a retailer’s website when its own search results didn’t include the product the customer was seeking. Customers would see the product information on Amazon, but could click through to the retailer’s site to learn more, check pricing, and view delivery options. Customers would be notified that they were leaving Amazon’s website so they wouldn’t be confused into thinking they were buying from the company itself. The program was being offered to a range of brands and wasn’t limited to partners using Buy with Prime — a way to offer checkout using a customer’s saved payment information on Amazon. While the move to be included on Amazon could certainly boost a brand’s exposure and potential sales, it could also give Amazon insights into which brands, products and price points are most appealing to customers. The company could use this information to improve its own business by providing data on competing products, tracking trends, identifying potential Buy with Prime partners and more. It could also help Amazon solidify itself as the starting point for product search. The company says it now supportsBuy for Me, which has Amazon use an AI agent to complete purchases, on third-party merchant sites as well. TheAI bothandles the entire purchase process on the customer’s behalf, and the customer simply has to confirm their order details on the checkout page, including their delivery address, taxes, shipping fees, and payment method. Amazon’s AI then completes the checkout from the merchant’s website using the required information. Customers can track these orders in the same “Your Orders” tab where they track their Amazon purchases, or in a special “Buy for Me Orders” tab. Shop Direct is live for U.S. customers on Amazon.com, in the Amazon mobile app, and in Amazon’s Rufus AI assistant.
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Meta didn’t buy Moltbook for bots — it bought into the agentic web
When news broke Tuesday morning thatMeta bought Moltbook, the social network for AI agents, it may have left some people scratching their heads. What on earth would Meta — an ad-supported company — want with a social network where the users are bots? Bots, after all, are not the target audience of brand marketers and advertisers. Meta isn’t saying much. Its only official comment was a brief statement that the Moltbook team was joiningMeta Superintelligence Labs, which would open up “new ways for AI agents to work with people and businesses.” Reading between the lines, this was an acqui-hire. A network built for bots isn’t exactly a natural home for brand advertising — even if Moltbook was never entirelynon-human. What Meta really wanted was the talent behind it — people who are having fun brainstorming and experimenting with AI agent ecosystems. And that, counterintuitively, could be a boon for its advertising business. As Meta CEO Mark Zuckerbergsaid last year, he believes in a future where “every business will soon have a business AI, just like they have an email address, social media account, and website.” On an agentic web, one where AI systems act independently on users’ behalf, AI agents could interact with each other, doing things like buying ads, making bookings, and responding to customers. AI is alsobeing usedto generate ad creative and tailor its output based on who’s viewing it. AI systems could also manage product pricing or generate personalized offers. On the consumer side, agents could be used tofindthe best prices and deals, manage bookings, andshopfor products. Insomelimitedcases,agentscan already check out and pay on consumers’ behalf. (Agentic commerceis still in its early days, and these systems don’t always work as well as advertised. But the market has been moving fast, and improvements seem likely soon enough.) As Facebook once built the “friend graph” — a network defined by social connections between people, where every individual is a node — an agentic web could benefit from an “agent graph,” a system that maps out how various agents are connected and what actions they can take on each other’s behalf. For an agentic web where businesses’ agents and consumers’ agents can work together, though, the agents first need to be able to find each other, connect, and coordinate their activities. As Facebook once built the “friend graph” — a network defined by social connections between people, where every individual is a node — an agentic web could benefit from an “agent graph,” a system that maps out how various agents are connected and what actions they can take on each other’s behalf. This could span areas like travel, online shopping, media and research, productivity tools, and more. This, too, could be where advertising slots in. Today, humans view and click on ads when they see something of interest, but on an agentic web where agents are shopping on users’ behalf, ads might look quite different. Instead of influencing a human to buy a product, a business’s agent may need to negotiate directly with a consumer’s agent to make the sale. Maybe the consumer wants to buy that shirt or that lipstick, but only in a certain color and at a certain price. Maybe the systems become so complex that these considerations go beyond product and price — perhaps the consumer prefers to support small businesses, or shops only with eco-friendly companies. Maybe the consumer only buys items when they’re on sale or purchases generic versions if the ingredients are the same. And so on. In that case, it’s not just a matter of connecting the AI agents but also ranking products by whichever one best fits that individual customer’s needs. If Meta could capitalize on that market — AI at the orchestration layer, meaning the system decides which agents talk to each other and in what order — it could potentially expand its ads business into entirely new territory. This all depends on whether or not consumers actually embrace the agentic web, or ever trust AI enough to let it act on their behalf. But the very existence ofOpenClaw, the personal AI assistant that populated Moltbook with content, suggests that at least some people are already leaning into autonomous AI agents. Of course, there’s another possible reason Meta bought Moltbook. The companylost the acqui-hireof OpenClaw’s creator, Peter Steinberger, to rival OpenAI, so it went after Moltbook, the platform Steinberger’s tool helped build, instead. Petty? Maybe. But it kept Meta’sSuperintelligence Labsin the news.
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Wipro Signs Multi-Year Deal with US-Based TruStage to Modernise Retirement Services
Designit, Wipro’s experience innovation company, will help redesign TruStage’s technology stack and customer delivery model.
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Cyient, Prospecta to Build Unified Data Platform for Asset-Intensive Industries
The alliance aims to create a trusted master data foundation to power AI, analytics, and digital twins.
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Microsoft Warns Pentagon Move Against Anthropic Could Disrupt Military Systems
Without court intervention, Microsoft said tech providers working with the Pentagon would be forced to immediately reconfigure products and contractual arrangements that currently depend on Anthropic’s technology.
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How Ford's India GCCs are Aiding Its E-Commerce Buildout With Agentic AI
The work supported by the Chennai and Bengaluru teams has helped Ford receive the highest rankings for mass-market automaker websites.
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Canva Introduces Magic Layers to Make AI-Generated Images Fully Editable
The feature addresses a common limitation of generative AI design tools, where outputs are typically delivered as static image files that cannot be easily edited.
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Behind the Tech That Powers Rapido’s 6 Mn Rides a Day
Rapido CTO Srivatsa Katta talks about the platform’s highly distributed backend system, mapping India’s roads, and why bike taxis have a different model.
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Google Upgrades Gemini Side Panel in Workspace Apps With New Features
Google added new capabilities to the Gemini assistant in Workspace apps on Tuesday. The Mountain View-based tech giant said that Gemini in Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive is now more personalised, capable, and collaborative. The biggest upgrade is that the artificial intelligence (AI) tool can now create a final draft from scratch with a single prompt, something it could not do earlier. While this is not on the same level as Claude Cowork or the recently launched Copilot Cowork, it does bring some level of automation to Google's productivity ecosystem.
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AlphaGo Turns 10: How DeepMind’s Breakthrough Set the Stage for AGI
While generative artificial intelligence (AI) gained mainstream attention after the launch of GPT-3 in 2020, the underlying technology, machine learning, is decades old. From typing prediction in keyboard apps to recommendation algorithms in social media platforms, all rely on the same technology and have contributed to what AI has become today. One definitive precursor of modern-day AI is said to be AlphaGo, a system created by Google DeepMind in 2016. In fact, it showcased a single moment which convinced researchers and domain experts that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is possible.
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Google Cloud, Brahma AI Team Up to Scale ‘Digital Humans’ for Global Enterprises
These digital humans replicate the likeness of real individuals, enabling firms to communicate across languages and geographies while maintaining the authenticity of face-to-face interactions.
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PayU, CoRover.ai to Enable AI Voice Payments in 100+ Indian Languages
PayU and CoRover.ai will work across e-commerce, travel, OTT services, and banking and financial services sectors.
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