Mike Maresca

Ai will eat transactional commerce. Shopping will change. Websites will eventually feel like print catalogues. Neat, nice, not that necessary. You will need a product feed that pumps into every LLM. You will need marketing to make sure LLMs see you as high signal. But personal shopping for all, on demand, with perfect memory about style and taste is coming.

New Mckinsey report - AI agents are quietly taking over the retail shopping cart and could mediate $3 Tn to $5 tn of global consumer commerce by 2030. Instead of just suggesting a product, an AI agent can now scan multiple stores, check inventory, and build a ready-to-buy shopping cart. This shift is happening across 6 different levels of automation. At the lowest level, the AI just compares prices and features so a human can make the final choice. At the highest level, your personal AI agent negotiates directly with a store's AI agent to get the best price and shipping terms. This progression means brands will increasingly compete to win over algorithms rather than just human shoppers. For this to work, retail stores must make their product catalogs and return policies easily readable by software via application programming interfaces. If a brand only focuses on looking good to humans but hides its inventory data, the AI agents will simply ignore it. Stores that expose their pricing and stock data through clear software connections will dominate this new landscape, while those relying purely on flashy marketing will lose out as machines make the actual purchasing choices. Automation ranges from simple product comparisons to full machine-to-machine negotiation. Retailers must make their inventory and policies machine-readable to survive.

Here's my conversation with Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, the most valuable & one of the most influential companies in the history of human civilization. It is the engine powering the AI revolution. This was a fascinating & inspiring conversation, in parts super-technical on engineering of every part of the AI stack, memory, power, supply chain (TSMC, ASML, etc), in parts about leadership & psychology, and in parts personal & philosophical about life, consciousness, mortality, and human nature. It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction 0:33 - Extreme co-design and rack-scale engineering 3:18 - How Jensen runs NVIDIA 22:40 - AI scaling laws 37:40 - Biggest blockers to AI scaling laws 39:23 - Supply chain 41:18 - Memory 47:24 - Power 52:43 - Elon and Colossus 56:11 - Jensen's approach to engineering and leadership 1:01:37 - China 1:09:50 - TSMC and Taiwan 1:15:04 - NVIDIA's moat 1:20:41 - AI data centers in space 1:24:30 - Will NVIDIA be worth $10 trillion? 1:34:39 - Leadership under pressure 1:48:25 - Video games 1:55:16 - AGI timeline 1:57:29 - Future of programming 2:11:01 - Consciousness 2:17:22 - Mortality

New Mckinsey report - AI agents are quietly taking over the retail shopping cart and could mediate $3 Tn to $5 tn of global consumer commerce by 2030. Instead of just suggesting a product, an AI agent can now scan multiple stores, check inventory, and build a ready-to-buy shopping cart. This shift is happening across 6 different levels of automation. At the lowest level, the AI just compares prices and features so a human can make the final choice. At the highest level, your personal AI agent negotiates directly with a store's AI agent to get the best price and shipping terms. This progression means brands will increasingly compete to win over algorithms rather than just human shoppers. For this to work, retail stores must make their product catalogs and return policies easily readable by software via application programming interfaces. If a brand only focuses on looking good to humans but hides its inventory data, the AI agents will simply ignore it. Stores that expose their pricing and stock data through clear software connections will dominate this new landscape, while those relying purely on flashy marketing will lose out as machines make the actual purchasing choices. Automation ranges from simple product comparisons to full machine-to-machine negotiation. Retailers must make their inventory and policies machine-readable to survive.