ChatGPT’s Shopping Research mode. Courtesy of OpenAI
Happy Tuesday. I trust that many of you are just coming up from the craziness of the Cyber 5 retail bonanza—either in your work or personal lives. I hope you also got a chance to spend quality time with friends or family.
Before this week’s piece, a quick heads up: I’ll be co-hosting Fortune’s stellar Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Dec. 8 and 9, and I’m conducting one-on-one mainstage interviews and panel discussions with some of the most influential thinkers on AI and commerce (plus autonomous driving). If you’ll be in San Francisco and want to attend, shoot me a note and I’ll see what I can do. If you can’t make it but still have questions for any of these tech and retail leaders, pass them along and I’ll do my best to incorporate some into my onstage conversations.
Panos Panay, Amazon’s head of Alexa; satellite internet service Project Leo; and devices (Echo, Fire TV, etc.)
Dmitry Shevelenko, chief business officer of Perplexity
Sven Gerjets, Gap’s chief technology officer
Julie Bornstein, retail veteran and Daydream founder and CEO
Jesse Levinson, cofounder and chief technology officer of Zoox
Now on to this week’s piece, which is a reflection on some of the glossy AI stats from Black Friday and Cyber Weekend and what we should and shouldn’t read into them.
Plus, a new Aisle feature highlighting one good use of AI…a fun tale starring a former Amazon executive, WWII military service records, and a once-in-a-lifetime vacation only made possible by an LLM. I really enjoyed it.
The Center Aisle
When I spoke to Stripe cofounder John Collison for my launch piece, I asked him if this holiday season was going to be AI’s big shining moment in e-commerce. He didn’t think so, instead predicting that the 2026 holiday season would be the one when your college buddy or aunt and uncle would be talking about using AI to power their holiday shopping. That seemed pretty reasonable to me.
But then the holiday shopping statistics began pouring in this long weekend, and I admit my first reaction was that both Collison and I might have been too cautious.
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