Happy New Year (to everyone except Larry David.)
A couple of quick updates before today’s main news.
The Aisle is only seven weeks in but the start of 2026 felt like a good moment for a quick acknowledgment of our early wins, even if just as a sanity check for a first-time founder grinding through the startup abyss. So I did that publicly on the only platform where such #humbled, #grateful, #content seemed appropriate: LinkedIn of course…with a cameo by my wife that I’m pretty sure she’s still unaware of.
But I thought I’d share the TL;DR here for those who can somehow avoid the gravity-defying thought leadership vortex:
*The Aisle’s early paid subscriber base—which has already grown beyond my own projections—includes employees and leaders from the world’s biggest tech companies, AI labs, retailers, and VC firms. (No doubt I also appreciate the startup founders and employees among you too.)
*I’ve already agreed to a half-dozen speaking gigs since launch, with others in the works. I love sharing stories and expertise live, while hopefully helping to educate smart, curious people along the way. Interested? Let’s talk.
*The Aisle has also attracted strong sponsorship and partnership interest from blue-chip corporations that want to align with this new community in ways I believe will be smart and useful. Again, let’s chat if you have ideas. You can reply to this email or send a message to [email protected]
None of this means we’ve made it, but it’s been an inspiring start thanks to you all. #supergrateful I am.
I’m also gearing up for some private talks, onstage moderating, and industry dinners around the National Retail Federation’s “Big Show” in New York City next week. If you’ll be around, please hit me up—I’d love to reconnect with old friends and meet new subscribers for the first time.
Lastly, you can catch me onstage this Sunday, January 11, at 11:20 am at the Javits Center moderating a discussion with Home Depot CIO Angie Brown, Wayfair CTO Fiona Tan, and PayPal’s VP of agentic commerce Mike Edmonds on “The rise of agentic commerce: What AI means for the future of shopping.” I’m confident after meeting these three that it will contain much more real talk than marketing fluff. But feel free to heckle me if I’m wrong.
Now on to the good stuff…
The Center Aisle
I wasn’t planning to write about Amazon this week until yesterday. And yet, here we are—because of a blowup tied to the company’s AI ambitions that could become a reference point for what is and isn’t fair game in the race to build automated shopping assistants and agents.
At the core of it is a simple but still unsettled question: who gets to grant consent when AI bots make purchases on our behalf—the consumer, the platform, or the merchant?
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