Amazon doesn't need Muse

Happy Wednesday.

The good news is this newsletter is landing in your inbox on a Wednesday like it’s supposed to. The bad news is that the send was actually supposed to be delayed this week due to travel.

At this moment, I was supposed to be out in Huntington Beach, Calif., conducting interviews and meetings both on and offstage. It was slated to mark my first appearance at and partnership with the RetailClub AI Festival.

But sometimes the world has other plans for us.

My wife suffered a pinched nerve recently and it just hasn’t healed as quickly as we assumed. For someone whose pain tolerance is laughably higher than mine, when she finally agreed that I should cancel my trip, I knew it was the one and only option.

I’m still hoping to bring you some intel from the event, thanks to an army of industry friends and sources who are attending. (That means if you’re there, I’d love to hear a couple of your takeaways, including from the beachside cocktail parties. Attribution to you by name is optional.)

But for now, The Aisle’s first-ever media tent will sadly sit empty along the Pacific. And the only Jason Del Rey that will attend is this AI version of me that serial entrepreneur and “agentic commerce maximalist” Scot Wingo dreamt up. (Note: The real me doesn’t do Hawaiian shirts.)

But enough of the what-ifs.

Now on to the good stuff…

I keep thinking I’m going to stop writing about Meta’s AI personal agent Muse and well, I keep being wrong.

Over the weekend, Seattle-based tech publication GeekWire broke the news that Amazon had blocked Muse from accessing its shopping site—and thus blocked human users of Muse who were trying to shop on Amazon via Meta’s new AI assistant.

This, of course, should not be shocking to any of my dear subscribers. As I summarized on LinkedIn earlier this week…

Beyond my two cents, a lot has already been said about this move in newsletters, on podcasts, and across social media. Some have pointed out the obvious: Amazon generates more than $70 billion annually, with a B, in advertising revenue, and it could lose out on some of that money if Muse ends up doing a lot of the shopping on its site instead of the human customers behind Muse, whose eyes and fingers actually view and click on ads.

And of course, that ad business is some of the most profitable revenue Amazon generates because of its fat margins. Without it, your increasingly speedy “free” Prime delivery might not be possible.

On the other side, Muse-bois are screaming into their microphones on the social network formerly known as Twitter that Amazon is at serious risk of missing out on the future. Enter Shopify, which is taking the opposite approach: plugging into Muse so the AI can scan products across Shopify-powered stores and even make a purchase when a Muse user has a relevant shopping query.

But I think some institutional knowledge about what Amazon is and isn’t amazing at adds some value here.

As do some realities of consumer behavior and online shopping that I don’t believe are being talked about enough.

Let me explain.