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Sorry, mom. The shopping bots suggested a bathrobe for Christmas

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Amazon’s AI-infused Rufus shopping assistant has new features that make it a “faster, more useful, state-of-the-art shopping companion.” Google’s agentic checkout feature “can do the heavy lifting to help you get the perfect item without blowing your budget.” OpenAI on Monday unveiled a free ChatGPT tool it says can generate a personalized gift-buying guide.

New artificial intelligence shopping tools are sprouting right and left just in time for the holidays, when US consumers are expected to spend a record $253 billion online. Technology companies and retailers are rushing to get ahead of a shift in consumer behavior that prognosticators say will one day see people using autonomous agents to research, price and buy products rather than plugging queries into a search engine.

E-commerce hasn’t changed all that much over the past 20 years, and there are signs people are itching for something new. More than 1 in 3 US consumers said they have used AI tools to assist in online shopping, mostly for product research, according to a September survey conducted by Adobe Inc. And the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. forecasts that so-called agentic commerce — a rubric for automated agents aiding purchases or handling transactions entirely — could explode into a $1 trillion business in the US by 2030.

McKinsey could be right, but for the time being, agentic commerce is in an awkward experimental phase, with companies struggling to solve various technical challenges and negotiate partnerships even as they push out a variety of tools and features to see what works and what doesn’t.

Bloomberg asked several AI bots — including Amazon’s Rufus, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Walmart Inc.’s Sparky — what to buy mom for Christmas. The top suggestion: a cozy bathrobe. Sparky recommended a pink hooded number emblazoned with “Mama Bear,” and ChatGPT suggested buying the robe from Victoria’s Secret. Perplexity Inc.’s AI bot proffered another option found on many gift guides: a $20 wooden photo frame from Etsy.

“There are a lot of really big bets being made right now that consumers want to shop differently and that chat is the way they want to start shopping,” said Emily Pfeiffer, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “I don’t think this is going to have a huge impact on the way we shop this holiday season.”Play Video

The appeal of AI-aided commerce is obvious. Navigating through millions of products on Amazon, Walmart, Etsy and other retailers can be a tedious process that involves checking desired feature boxes, combing through reviews and scrolling through one advertisement after another. Telling a chatbot to “Find me a pair of well-reviewed hiking boots in my size, under $100, and available for delivery or pickup by Friday,” seems like a much more user-friendly and intuitive experience. And there are early indications that shoppers referred to a website following a conversation with ChatGPT are more informed and prepared to buy than those who conducted a typical Google search, according to Similarweb Ltd., which monitors website traffic and app use.

But for the most part, bots haven’t yet meaningfully improved shopping. Amazon Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy recently gave rivals’ technology a mixed review, noting that agents aren’t very good at tailoring shopping to individual consumers and often display incorrect pricing and delivery estimates.

Retailers’ websites — built to be browsed by humans poking around with clicks and eyeballs — have added machine-readable interfaces over the years for automated tools like web-crawling robots, or for partners to manage inventory. But they weren’t designed to hand off purchasing authority to third parties. That’s why many shopping chatbots essentially grab product listings and then present a user with a web link to buy on that retailer’s site — not much of an advancement over the way things have been done for years.

Bot makers are working to solve various technical challenges. Anthropic PBC and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, for example, have built protocols designed to referee how agents communicate, helping translate queries made in human language into something capable of navigating a catalogue. Microsoft Corp. earlier this year announced a set of tools that helps retailers and other companies translate their websites to a medium agents can more readily interact with. Companies are also working with AI models, backed by immense computing power, that can understand what’s rendered on a web browser and click through menus to make an order.

As with any AI tool, efficacy depends largely on the data it feeds on. Retailers, keen to retain a competitive edge over rivals, have long guarded customer information like purchase history and customer reviews that bots could scrape to improve the shopping experience. Amazon, which captures about 40 cents of every dollar spent online in the US, has maintained a walled garden and doesn’t currently permit autonomous shopping on its site. In a warning shot that could have implications for agentic shopping,  the e-commerce giant recently sued Perplexity to try and stop the startup from helping shoppers buy items on its marketplace.

Letting in Perplexity and others could damage Amazon’s advertising business, which is expected to generate almost $70 billion this year by persuading shoppers to click on ads while searching for products. Amazon is developing its own shopping bots. Rufus, launched in February 2024, can browse Amazon’s site, recommend products to shoppers and put them in a cart. In April, the company also introduced a feature — still in public testing — called Buy For Me, which is designed to let shoppers purchase items from other retailers’ sites in the Amazon shopping app.

Walmart has shown itself more willing to work with outside companies. The chain in October said shoppers would be able to purchase apparel, electronics, packaged food and other products directly on ChatGPT by pushing a buy button. The feature is rolling out in stages and is initially limited to single-item purchases, not how shoppers typically buy from the world’s largest retailer.

Partnerships with big retailers and payments processors will be crucial for the likes of OpenAI and Perplexity to become serious players in shopping. The ultimate goal is to let users browse and buy directly in their apps without having to leave. Perplexity this week announced it was incorporating PayPal checkout options into its offering.  Without giving people an easy way to buy things, the AI startups will be limited to conducting research, said Juozas Kaziukenas, an independent e-commerce analyst.

“It reminds me of searching online for a recipe and you end up on a website that wants you to read a 10,000-word family story before it tells you what you need to make a meatloaf,” he said. “For some queries, ChatGPT will just throw up a wall of text on you. We have to see how this morphs into something that’s cool to use.”

In Bloomberg’s gift-for-mom experiment, Amazon’s Rufus was the only bot that tried to learn more before answering. It asked about her interests and hobbies as well as the price range. After learning that mom is a fan of classic films, Rufus suggested a DVD set of movies starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

OpenAI is moving in a similar direction with its latest shopping tool. It asks clarifying questions and draws its answers from reviews published on  websites, such as Reddit, which the company said may be considered more trustworthy than paid marketing or reviews posted on a product page. Users can use a dedicated “shopping research” button in the chat interface and describe what they’re looking for using instructions like “find a small couch for a studio apartment” or “I need a gift for my 4-year-old niece who loves art.”

Instead of immediately generating a text response, the research tool will ask for more information in a quiz format, taking into consideration possible factors such as budget, color preferences and the desired size of the item. As it gathers information from the web, it will suggest 10 to 15 items along the way, and users will be prompted to click “more like this” or “not interested” to refine the final list. 

In a reminder that shopping bots are a work in progress, OpenAI recommended that users visit merchant sites for the most accurate details and cautioned that the new tool “might make mistakes about product details” including price and availability.



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The 9 most disruptive deals of Trump’s first year back in the White House

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January 20, 2026

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President Trump lives on deals: “That’s what I do—I do deals,” he once told Bob Woodward. On the one-year anniversary of his second presidency, he’s pushing hard to make his biggest, most disruptive deal ever, one that would bring Greenland under the control of the U.S.—and the global business community is still scrambling to adapt to his approach. Here are nine of Trump’s most unorthodox deals from the past year.

Nine deals that shook the business world

April 2, 2025: Reciprocal tariffs

Trump imposes “reciprocal tariffs” on 57 countries, with each tariff understood as an opening bid in a negotiation. Several countries have since made deals. The one-on-one negotiations, unlike the multilateral system of the past 80 years, can be chaotic for companies and economies

June 13: U.S. Steel “Golden Share”

In return for allowing Nippon Steel to buy U.S. Steel, Trump requires that the U.S. receive several powers over the company, including total power over all the board’s independent directors and vetoes over locations of offices and factories. 

July 10: MP Materials

The U.S. pays $400 million for a large equity share in MP and signs a contract to buy all of MP’s rare earth magnets for 10 years. The reason for the equity stake was not disclosed.

July 14: Nvidia, Part 1

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Trump reverses the U.S. ban on selling Nvidia H20 chips to China in exchange for Nvidia paying the U.S. 15% of the revenue.

July 23: Columbia University

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The Trump administration restores $400 million of canceled federal research funding for the university under an unprecedented multipoint deal. For example, Columbia must supply data to the federal government for all applicants, broken down by race, “color,” GPA, and standardized test performance. A few other schools later make similar deals.

August 6: Apple

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At a public appearance with Trump, CEO Tim Cook announces Apple will invest an additional $100 billion in the U.S. over four years; Trump announces Apple will be exempt from a planned tariff on imported chips that would have doubled the price of iPhones in the U.S.

August 22: Intel

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Intel trades the U.S. government a 9.9% equity stake in exchange for $8.9 billion that might already be owed to Intel under the CHIPS and Science Act. The deal is unusual because the company was not in immediate danger or significantly affecting the economy.

December 8: Nvidia, Part 2:

Trump reverses the U.S. ban on selling powerful Nvidia H200 chips in exchange for Nvidia paying the U.S. 25% of the revenue. Both Nvidia deals are unusual because the payments to the U.S., based on exports, appear to be forbidden by the Constitution. 

December 19: Pharma

Alex Wong—Getty Images

Nine pharmaceutical companies make deals with Trump that are intended to lower drug prices. This is unusual because Trump negotiated separate deals with each company, and the terms have not been released.

All eyes this week will be watching President Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the president has hinted he’ll announce some high-stakes agreements. Expect the unexpected.

A version of this piece appears in the February/March 2026 issue of Fortune.



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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s biggest AI bubble warning yet is a challenge to the Fortune 500

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January 20, 2026

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been leading the charge on artificial intelligence (AI) for years, owing to his long alliance with OpenAI’s Sam Altman and the groundbreaking work from his own AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, particularly with the Copilot tool. But Nadella has not spoken often about the fears that rattled Wall Street for much of the back half of 2025: whether AI is a bubble. 

At the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Nadella sat for a conversation with the Forum’s interim co-chair, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, explaining that if AI growth spawns solely from investment, then that could be signs of a bubble. “A telltale sign of if it’s a bubble would be if all we are talking about are the tech firms,” Nadella said. “If all we talk about is what’s happening to the technology side then it’s just purely supply side.”

However, Nadella offers a fix to that productivity dilemma, calling on business leaders to adopt a new approach to knowledge work by shifting workflows to match the structural design of AI. “The mindset we as leaders should have is, we need to think about changing the work—the workflow—with the technology.”

Growing pains

This change is not wholly unprecedented, as Nadella pointed out, comparing the current moment to that of the 1980s, when computing revolutionized the workplace and opened up new opportunities for growth and productivity and created a new class of workers. “We invented this entire class of thing called knowledge work, where people started really using computers to amplify what we were trying to achieve using software,” he said. “I think in the context of AI, that same thing is going to happen.”

Nadella argues that AI creates a “complete inversion” of how information moves through a business, replacing slow, hierarchical processes with a view that forces leaders to rethink their organizational structures. “We have an organization, we have departments, we have these specializations, and the information trickles up,” Nadella said. “No, no, it’s actually it flattens the entire information flow. So once you start having that, you have to redesign structurally.”

That shift may be harder for some Fortune 500 companies as structural changes could be accompanied by uncomfortable growing pains. Nadella says that leaner companies will be able to more easily adopt AI because their organizational structures are fresher and more malleable. On the other hand, large companies could take time to adopt new workflows.

Despite widespread adoption of AI, the 29th edition of PwC’s global CEO survey found that only 10% to 12% of companies reported seeing benefits of the technology on the revenue or cost side, while 56% reported getting nothing out of it. It follows up on an even more pessimistic finding about AI returns from August 2025: that 95% of generative AI pilots were failing.

PwC Global Chairman Mohamed Kande spoke to Fortune’s Diane Brady in Davos about the finding that many CEOs are cautious and lack confidence at this stage of the AI adoption cycle. “Somehow AI moves so fast … that people forgot that the adoption of technology, you have to go to the basics,” he explained, with the survey finding that the companies seeing benefits from AI are “putting the foundations in place.” It’s about execution more than it is about technology, he argued, and good management and leadership are really going to matter going forward.

“For large organizations,” Nadella told Fink, “there’s a fundamental challenge: Unless and until your rate of change keeps up with what is possible, you’re going to get schooled by someone small being able to achieve scale because of these tools.”

New entrants have the advantage of “starting fresh” and constructing workflows around AI capabilities, while larger firms will have to contend with the flattening effect AI has on entire departments and specializations. 

To be sure, Nadella says that large organizations have kept an upper hand, especially when it comes to relationships, data, and know-how. However, he maintains that firms must understand how to use those resources to their advantage to change management style, then that could pose a major roadblock.

“The bottom line is, if you don’t translate that with a new production function, then you really will be stuck,” he said.



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BlackRock’s billionaire CEO warns AI could be capitalism’s next big failure after 30 years of unsustainable inequality after the Cold War

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January 20, 2026

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BlackRock CEO Larry Fink opened the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with a stark message to the global elite: AI’s unfettered growth risks pummelling the world’s working and professional classes. Beyond that, he warned that it could be capitalism’s next big failure after a 30-year reign after the Cold War that has failed to deliver for the average human being in society.

In his opening remarks on Tuesday at the gathering of thousands of executives and global leaders, the billionaire boss of the world’s largest asset manager—often called one of Wall Street’s “Masters of the Universe”—said that as those in power discuss the future of AI, they risk leaving behind the vast majority of the world, just as they have for much of the last generation.

“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, more wealth has been created than in any time prior in human history, but in advanced economies, that wealth has accrued to a far narrower share of people than any healthy society can ultimately sustain,” Fink said.

Fink, who has used his annual BlackRock letters and annual appearances at Davos to set the agenda for a more progressive kind of capitalism, even one that is arguably “woke,” making him at times the face of ESG and of stakeholder capitalism, warned that the gains of the tremendous wealth creation since the 1990s have not been equitably shared. And the capitalist ideology driving AI development and implementation forward could come at the expense of the wage-earning majority, he added. 

“Early gains are flowing to the owners of models, owners of data and owners of infrastructure,” Fink said. “The open question: What happens to everyone else if AI does to white-collar workers what globalization did to blue-collar workers? We need to confront that today directly. It is not about the future. The future is now.” 

Fink’s past critiques of capitalism

Fink, who was appointed interim co-chair of the World Economic Forum in August 2025, replacing founder Klaus Schwab, has long espoused the reshaping of capitalism, seeing it as a responsibility of large asset managers like himself. Fink was formerly vociferous about the importance of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) investing, and has argued that climate change is reshaping finance, creating an imperative for executives to reallocate their capital to address the crisis accordingly. In a 2022 letter to investors, published the day before the Davos summit, Fink emphasized a model of “stakeholder capitalism” of a business’s mandate to serve not just shareholders, but employees, consumers, and the public.  

Fink’s new primacy in Davos is the first without Schwab, following allegations that he had expensed more than $1 million, billed to the World Economic Forum, on questionable travel spending, as well as claims of workplace misconduct and research report manipulation. The BlackRock chief emphasized the need for the gathering to demonstrate its legitimacy in part by showing that it’s concerned with more than just swelling growth of companies and countries, but also the economic welfare of its employees and citizens.

“Many of the people most affected by what we talk about here will never come to this conference,” Fink said. “That’s a central tension of this forum. Davos is an elite gathering trying to shape a world that belongs to everyone.”

Though BlackRock announced in early 2025 it would roll back many of the diversity, equity, and inclusion goals it created a few years before, Fink has once again used his spotlight to call on leaders to transform their capitalist sensibilities, this time in how they imagine the AI future.

The cost of the AI boom

Last year capped an explosion of growth in the AI sector, with Morningstar analysts finding a group of 34 AI stocks, including Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft, shot up 50.8% in 2025. AI firms and investors have seen their wealth skyrocket in the past year, with Per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the median increase in net worth last year was nearly $10 billion among the 50 wealthiest Americans. Google co-founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin, for example, got $101 billion and $92 billion richer, respectively, in 2025.

The BlackRock CEO noted these gains, however, have been reserved for the richest few, alluding to a K-shaped economy of the rich getting richer, while the poor continue to struggle: The bottom half of Americans, in short, are not cashing in on the AI race. Although Fink didn’t get into the politics of utilities setting electricity prices, it seems the poor are actually paying higher bills to support the data centers powering the AI boom. According to Federal Reserve data, the poorer demographic owns about 1% of stock market wealth, translating to about 165 million people owning $628 billion in stock. Conversely, the top 1% of wealthiest households own nearly 50% of corporate equity.

Fink’s framing of the post-Cold War era as one of exploding inequality represents a mainstreaming of a once niche view that has become increasingly mainstream in the 21st century. While the triumph of the west over communism was seen as the ultimate victory for capitalism, as epitomized by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, history has in fact continued. The unprecedented rise of China as an economic superpower, through its fusion of socialism and capitalism “with Chinese characteristics,” has complicated the narrative, as has the inequality alluded to by Fink. 

An internal critic of the post-Cold War world order is Andrew Bacevich, a military veteran and historian who likened the collapse  of the Soviet Union in 1989 as “akin to removing the speed limiter from an internal combustion engine.” Bacevich’s 2020 book The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory, was an early articulation of the once niche viewpoint that Fink lent support to on Tuesday.

What AI’s growth means for workers

Similarly, the risks of the AI boom on workers extends beyond who has a stake in the technology industry’s growth. Nobel laureate and “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton has previously warned this explosion of wealth for the few will come at the expense of white-collar workers, who will be displaced by the technology.

“What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” Hinton said in September. “It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”

Some companies have already leaned into culling headcount to grow profits, including enterprise-software firm IgniteTech. CEO Eric Vaughan laid off nearly 80% of his staff in early 2023, according to figures reviewed by Fortune. Vaughan said the reductions happened during an inflection point in the tech industry, where failure to efficiently adopt AI could be fatal for a company. He’s since rehired for all of those roles, and he would make the same choice again today, he told Fortune.

According to Fink, sustaining a white-collar workforce will depend on the world’s most powerful people creating an actionable plan that will defy the critiques of capitalism that has, so far, stood to predominantly benefit them.

“Now with abstractions about the jobs of tomorrow, but with a credible plan for broad participation in these gains, this is going to be the test,” Fink said. “Capitalism can evolve to turn more people into owners of growth, instead of spectators watching it happen.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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