Sephora U.S. has announced its first-ever “Delivered to Beauty” activation, in partnership with Lyft Media. From July 7-10, the beauty retailer is offering Lyft ride credits (up to $20 off) to shoppers in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle, enabling the shoppers to be “delivered” to a participating Sephora location. Once they arrival in the store, shoppers can receive guidance from Sephora’s beauty advisors, along with a personalized “skin scan,” exclusive product sampling and $10 off any order (over $50) at checkout. The activation is part of Sephora’s new “Get Beauty from People Who Get Beauty” campaign, which aims to showcase the value of “trusted and personalized expertise provided by Sephora.” As part of the activation, which was developed in partnership with Lyft Media, select vehicles will be custom wrapped with Sephora branding, transforming the journey into an extension of the beauty experience itself, the company said. “At Lyft, we want to connect people with the places they love, and our partnership with Sephora really leans into that,” said Suzie Reider, executive VP of Lyft Media and Business. “It’s a natural collaboration: a rider steps out of their Lyft, transported by a driver who knows their way around their communities, and enters Sephora’s best-in-class shopping experience that offers expert guidance, too.”
Wegmans is testing Instacart smart carts that automatically recognize items as they are placed in the cart and track spending, provide product recommendations and access to deals based on customer’s location in the store to offer seamless in-store CX
Wegmans Food Markets is testing Instacart Caper Cart smart carts at a store in Syracuse, N.Y. This marks the first deployment of Caper Carts at Wegmans, as part of an initial in-store program offering customers a smarter, more seamless way to shop in-store. Part of the Instacart Connected Stores platform, Caper Carts are equipped with cameras, a built-in scale, and location sensors connected to Nvidia Jetson hardware which work together with an edge AI system to automatically recognize items as they are placed in the cart. Once products are added, customers can watch their running cost total, similar to an online shopping cart. Caper Carts also feature an interactive screen that tracks spending, provides access to deals, and offers product recommendations based on the customer’s location in the store and the carts’ contents. Wegmans customers can log in to their Shoppers Club loyalty account on the cart’s screen to shop with a Caper Cart. When finished, customers can check out directly from the cart. “Caper Carts are transforming everyday grocery shopping into a faster, more personalized experience,” said David McIntosh, chief connected stores officer at Instacart.
CharmKey’s AI keyboard app lets users select from built-in tone presets to instantly rewrite any message for the right context and offers expertly crafted chat templates for high-pressure moments, rooted in psychology and social dynamics
Startup CharmKey, a smart AI keyboard app, is redefining how people communicate—by helping them say exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. CharmKey isn’t just another keyboard—it’s a social communication assistant. In the age of digital relationships and remote work, messaging is your first impression. Misreading tone or replying too late can cost opportunities or lead to misunderstandings. CharmKey bridges that gap, making sure users feel confident, understood, and in control—without overthinking every word. Key Features: Instant Tone Switching: Users can select from built-in tone presets—like Polite, Professional, Chill, or Flirty,—to instantly rewrite any message for the right context. One text can now fit multiple situations with one tap. AI Reply Generator: Stuck on how to respond? CharmKey drafts natural, thoughtful replies instantly. Whether it’s romantic, friendly, or business, users can skip the stress of writing and sound confident every time. Emotion Analysis from Screenshots: CharmKey lets users upload screenshots of conversations to decode hidden emotions, red flags, or signals of romantic interest—helping them decide what to say next and avoid awkward missteps. Plug-and-Play Chat Templates: From breaking the ice to confessing feelings, CharmKey offers expertly crafted chat templates for high-pressure moments—rooted in psychology and social dynamics. Create Your Own Tone: Advanced users can customize or build their own tone presets, giving full control over how they sound in different conversations—whether it’s charming, assertive, or playfully mysterious.
Whatsapp rolls out voice calling feature for large businesses; to explore AI-powered product recommendations on merchant sites
Whatsapp is introducing the ability for large businesses to reach customers through voice calls, which will allow the app to explore the use of AI-powered voice agents. The company is also looking into using AI to recommend products to users. While the company doesn’t charge for its AI features at the moment, there is a possibility that it could put a price tag on that after it achieves scale. Today, small business accounts can already chat with customers over voice on WhatsApp, but larger business accounts haven’t yet had the ability. In the next few weeks, larger businesses will be able to access this feature via the API. This will allow customers to place voice calls to businesses and allow businesses to call back customers. WhatsApp said it will soon add a way for customers to send and receive voice messages from businesses, too. By enabling voice pipelines, companies could set up an AI-enabled voice agent through a startup like Vapi, ElevenLabs, Coval, or Phonic to run their customer service over WhatsApp. In addition, an AI-powered chat-based customer support and outreach feature that began testing last year is now being expanded to more merchants in Mexico. In addition, WhatsApp is looking to AI to power product recommendations on a merchant’s site.
Chuck E. Cheese’s spin-off arcade concept for adults combines a rotating mix of retro classics with the hottest new titles, features retro-themed merchandise and is overseen by an animatronic character to create a “a nostalgic nod” to the company’s history
Chuck E. Cheese has launched Chuck’s Arcade, which combines a rotating mix of retro classics with the hottest new titles, including state-of-the-art racing simulators and immersive virtual reality hits. Included in the curated collection of retro legends are such offerings as Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Mortal Kombat, Donkey Kong and Centipede. Select arcade locations also feature retro-themed merchandise. The assortment includes classic logo apparel, collectible toys, novelty candy and prize redemption items. Each Chuck’s Arcade is overseen by an animatronic character such as Chuck E. Cheese or one of the other familiar figures from the brand’s past. The characters, however, do not perform as they do at Chuck R. Cheese locations. Instead, they stand watch in what is described as “a nostalgic nod” to the company’s history. No two Chuck’s Arcade locations are exactly alike, the company said. Instead, each offers a unique environment. The arcade was created for adults and lifelong fans who grew up “surrounded by the electric glow of arcade screens, the symphony of digital soundtracks and the thrill of chasing high scores with friends long into the night.”
Tailor’s platform enables enterprises to build their own ERP stack using its composable, headless architecture that decouples the data and logic layer from the UI, allowing for highly customizable workflows and easy integration with best-of-breed SaaS tools
Tailor, a headless ERP platform for modern retail businesses, announced an additional close of its Series A round, bringing the total raised to $22 million. The new investors include JIC Venture Growth Investments (JIC VGI), a Japanese government-backed investment fund, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Y Combinator, which participated in Tailor’s seed round, also increased its investment. This second close reflects growing global demand for flexible, API-first business systems that help enterprises move beyond the limitations of monolithic ERPs. “Tailor’s platform serves an increasingly complex supply chain landscape and we believe Tailor has the potential to rethink the ERP systems that power global commerce and operational agility,” said Andrew Schoen, Partner Technology Investing Team, at NEA. Tailor enables mid-market and enterprise companies to build and evolve their own ERP stack with speed and flexibility. Its composable, headless architecture decouples the data and logic layer from the user interface, allowing for highly customizable workflows and easy integration with best-of-breed SaaS tools. With Tailor, companies can: Orchestrate cross-system workflows with customizable modules for inventory, purchasing, fulfillment, finance, and more; Replace or integrate with legacy systems without re-architecting core infrastructure; Give developers and AI agents programmatic access to business logic and operational data; Deliver internal tools or customer-facing experiences with custom UIs
Retailers increasing investment in payment orchestration platforms, tokenization and customer vaulting systems to enable them to own CX relationship end-to-end and gain 360-degree view of the customer for effective segmentation, retention and lifetime value extraction
Once seen as a back-end utility, payments are now central to customer experience and brand differentiation, with innovations like BNPL and embedded finance reshaping how consumers interact with retailers. Video game commerce firm Xsolla is partnering with Affirm to bring BNPL to video game storefronts. The move shows that retailers large and small, digital and brick-and-mortar, are embracing embedded finance and the potential of payments as a lever for growth. Payments are moving from a stealth driver of customer loyalty to a front-and-center strategy for customer retention and lifetime value extraction. This shift is driving greater investment in payment orchestration platforms, tokenization and customer vaulting systems, allowing merchants to deliver a seamless experience while unlocking deeper insights into purchase behavior. Outside of owning the customer relationship end-to-end, another reason retailers are turning to payments as a growth lever is due to data. By consolidating payment rails and unifying back-end systems, retailers can achieve a 360-degree view of the customer. This deep insight allows retailers to understand customer segments, such as whether they should be classified as a “luxury buyer” or a “budget buyer,” and to identify patterns including cart abandonment or cross-category spending. With the convergence of data, customer experience, FinTech innovation and loyalty programs, retailer-driven payments optionality and financial services are emerging not just as a function of commerce, but as a fundamental enabler of brand differentiation and revenue expansion.
AiOpti Media’s AI-powered attribution tech uncovers overlooked, high-intent, and fringe audience segments using first-party data and resolves anonymous website visitors into verified, privacy-compliant identities without relying on cookies
Hallucinations will persist whenever LLMs operate in ambiguous or unfamiliar territory, unless there is a fundamental architectural shift away from black box statistical models. There are essentially two options for high-risk use cases given the current state of LLM evolution: Adopt a hybrid solution: hallucination-free, explainable symbolic AI for high-risk use cases, LLMs for everything else. Leave out high-risk use cases, as suggested in #2 above, but that leaves the benefits of the AI unrealized for those use cases. However, the benefits of AI can still be applied to the rest of the organization. The following rank-ordered list is the steps you could take to limit hallucination. 1) Apply hallucination-free, explainable, symbolic AI to high-risk use cases. This is the only foolproof way to eliminate the risk of hallucination in your high-risk use cases. 2) Limit LLM usage to low-risk arenas. Not exposing your high-risk use cases to LLMs is also foolproof but does not bring the benefits of AI to those use cases. Use-case gating is non-negotiable. 3) Mandatory ‘Human-in-the-Loop’ for critical decisions. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a start, but enterprise deployments need qualified professionals embedded in both model training and real-time decision checkpoints. 4) Governance. Integrate AI safety into corporate governance at the outset. Set clear accountability and thresholds. ‘Red team’ the system. Make hallucination rates part of your board-level risk profile. Follow frameworks like NIST’s AI RMF or the FDA’s new AI guidance 5) Curated, Domain-Specific Data Pipelines. Don’t train models on the internet. Train them on expertly vetted, up-to-date, domain-specific corpora 6) Retrieval-Augmented Architectures (not a comprehensive solution). Combine them with knowledge graphs and retrieval engines. Hybrid models are the only way to make hallucinations structurally impossible, not just unlikely.
OpenAI enables retailers to build AI shopping agents that can search for products, add items to a cart, and generate checkout links without requiring authentication by connecting the store’s URL directly to the OpenAI Responses API
OpenAI unveiled a way for retailers to create artificial intelligence (AI) shopping assistants in Shopify. With a few clicks, developers can now connect the Storefront Managed Compute Platform (MCP) server directly to the OpenAI Responses API to build agents that can search for products, add items to a cart, and generate checkout links — all without requiring authentication. Go to the OpenAI Playground, under Tools, add MCP Server. Click on Shopify and add your store’s URL to create the AI shopping assistant. Now when users type, “I am looking for a lightweight men’s button up shirt for a vacation,” for example, the assistant will search for options from your inventory to show the shopper. If the shopper picks one of the options, the assistant can automatically move it to checkout. The move reflects OpenAI’s broader strategy to move deeper into offering shopping capabilities. Rival Perplexity already offers a shopping assistant within its AI chatbot. Shopify is one of the merchants whose products can be found through Perplexity. Google introduced Gemini Robotics On-Device, an AI model that runs directly on robots without the need for an internet connection. Amazon unveiled DeepFleet, an AI model that acts as a traffic controller for warehouse robots, improving travel efficiency by 10%.
Rising traffic on websites by bots and by AI agents would require brands to redefine the value chain of traffic acquisition and loyalty program, establish KPIs in every step of the search process and optimize the indexation and interactions to offer agents frictionless access to site content
While customers pay attention to what companies and brands do with their communication strategies, the rise of AI can pull their attention away from traditional browsing during e-commerce shopping. AI agents, which can take actions based on preferences “learned” from users, could make online shopping even more targeted. Adrien Menard, CEO and cofounder of retail SEO and GEO platform Botify says, “We are seeing an increase in the traffic on websites by bots and by AI agents. The AI agents are going to browse the web, search for information, visit websites and potentially make a decision on the behalf of the consumer or everyone. This is [in the] early stage of what it can be in a few years from now, but is a reality. And the reality is that when you’re a brand, you need to take that into consideration, because those AI agents deserve the best user experience. I think it’s fascinating because it means that the value chain of the traffic acquisition of a retail company and the loyalty program that you can put in place, everything is going to be redefined because you’re not going to market your solution the same way to a consumer or to an AI agent. It means that brands need to refine their measurement framework. They need to have KPIs in every step of the AI search process. It’s about the quality of the website, the indexation of the website in Google, ChatGPT, etc. It’s about understanding how people search on Google and on ChatGPT, and see if there are differences. It’s about measuring your share of voice when someone is searching with keywords, or with prompts related to what you can have available on the website. And, of course, it’s about understanding the contribution to the revenue of those channels. This is the AI search panel, and brands need to be equipped with the right analytics for each stage. The second step is once you know what is happening, you want to influence the AI search process, particularly the indexation and the interactions made by the AI search with your website. Before AI search systems can generate an answer, they first need to know everything about your brand. They need to know who you are, your turnover, your product, your product availability, the reviews, the prices, the marketing strategy, et cetera. To do so, they need to capture your website and put it back into their indexation or learning database. This is a process that should be optimized. This is the very first action that needs to be taken because if the system doesn’t understand who you are and what you have available on the website, they will never reuse it to generate the answer. This is even more critical when you consider that the internet is changing all the time. Prices are updated every day. Stock availability is, by definition, updated the minute something is purchased. The reviews, same thing. There are processes that can be done automatically that guarantee that your content is understood by the AI search system. This is the reality of what we have been doing with the customers, and what has impacted tremendously their visibility, traffic, and revenue impact generated by these emerging AI search systems.