Good morning.
Before we get into today’s main feature, a quick victory lap if you’ll allow me.
I’ve seen some surprised reactions this week about Google and Shopify’s announcement that the tech council for the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), the set of rules they are co-developing to scale AI-powered shopping, has added a representative from Amazon.
For those of you who’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know that Amazon has stood out as the biggest shopping site to block external AI shopping agents like the very ones UCP is being created to support. So a level of surprise here is understandable (though Amazon CEO Andy Jassy did tell analysts on yesterday’s earnings call that his company continues to have discussions with the makers of all the big AI apps about possible ways to work together).
Yet paid subscribers of The Aisle could have seen Amazon’s involvement with UCP coming. That’s because back in early March, when I reported deeply on the UCP launch and rollout, I noted some Amazon involvement:
“GitHub activity shows at least one Amazon engineer reviewing proposals in the UCP repository, including suggested changes related to payment methods and product lookup, even if Amazon itself hasn’t been a partner.”
The same goes for some recent surprised reactions I saw when it became clear that ChatGPT sunset the dedicated “Shopping Research” AI model that it unveiled only in November. In fact, OpenAI’s commerce product leader had hinted at such a change in my interview with him a month earlier.
If you’re building, leading, or investing at the intersection of AI and commerce, this is the kind of signal paid subscribers tend to see first. Not a paid subscriber yet? You can join here. The monthly plan includes a free trial, but the annual option remains the best value.
Now on to the good stuff….
The Center Aisle
An Eko employee maneuvers Lego pieces for a product shoot. Photo courtesy of Eko.
For visitors to Bentonville, Arkansas, the top attractions often include Walmart’s new corporate campus, the stunning Crystal Bridges art museum and, at least for me, the standout brisket at Wright’s Barbecue. But one of the coolest attractions for techie retail nerds now sits about six miles southwest of the new Walmart HQ.
There, in an otherwise mundane industrial park, stands more than 100,000 square feet of AI-powered warehouse space that serial entrepreneur Ben Kaufman, along with the rest of the executive team at a company called Eko, is betting can dramatically improve online shopping in this new AI era of commerce.
Kaufman guided me on a tour of the facility this week to understand how it works and why it could be so disruptive to the way online shopping and selling has been done for the past 30 years. Here’s what I found.
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