Deep editorial assessments of what technology changes—and what the industry is still getting wrong.
Prime Air wants to go from 11 U.S. locations to nearly 500 cities and towns by year-end. At that scale, the aircraft is no longer the interesting system. The network around it is.
Prime Air’s jump toward nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns matters less for the aircraft than for what Amazon is trying to make ordinary: a 30-minute delivery option embedded in the same checkout as everything else.
Proxima models inventory before Target moves it. A 2.5% lift in shelf availability from a small fresh-food pilot shows why simulation may matter more to retail AI than another shopping chatbot.
After a decade of steering shoppers toward Walmart Pay, the largest U.S. retailer is embracing Apple Pay, Google Pay and contactless cards. That is less a payments upgrade than a rethink of where control in checkout actually matters.
Contactless payments are coming to every U.S. Walmart and Sam’s Club by year-end. The technology is ordinary; Walmart deciding it should be ordinary at checkout is the strategic shift.
VusionCloud now manages 522 million connected electronic shelf labels. The bigger signal is the recurring software and media business growing around hardware that used to do one job: show a price.
The Korean retailer is putting a curated K-beauty assortment into roughly 580 U.S. Sephora stores. The real product may be Olive Young’s ability to decide what deserves the shelf.
Cloud revenue is accelerating, Qwen is inside shopping, and merchant agents are automating store work. Alibaba’s advantage is that it can monetize AI on both sides of a transaction.