Standardized Shopping
By late 2024, it was evident that AI chatbots were a hot spot for commerce tech.
In early 2025, it seems like it’s all anyone can talk about. Thus arrives Google’s latest open standard, the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).
The standard uses agents that can work across different stages of the buying process, rather than having to establish connections with a variety of different agents, TechCrunch reports.
According to Google, UCP will soon be available for users purchasing certain Google product listings available in AI search mode and Gemini apps.
Agentic AI is “really good at finding people who have specific interests and finding the product that is just perfect for them,” Shopify CEO and Founder Tobi Lütke told TechCrunch, calling the results a “kind of serendipity.”
Shopify’s recently announced integration with Microsoft Copilot also went live today, furthering the chatbot checkout trend. (Try saying that five times fast.)
Through Google, brands will soon be able to offer discounts to users when looking for product suggestions in AI mode (a trend that several industry leaders predicted would be a necessity for earning consumer trust).
Will ecommerce websites exist on their own by 2027? Guess it depends how good the discounts are.
X-Rated Content
If you, like so many people in the ad tech industry, went from the holiday break straight to CES, you may not have heard what’s happening with Grok right now.
So here’s the TLDR: xAI’s chatbot product, Grok, is currently being used to generate thousands of sexual, nonconsensual (and sometimes graphically violent) images of women and children, both on the X platform and the standalone app.
So far, the closest to an official statement is a post from X’s safety team, which claims the company is “working with local governments and law enforcement.”
Speaking of governments, Malaysia and Indonesia were the first countries to order a temporary restriction on Grok. Other countries and independent watchdog groups have opened investigations and issued stern warnings, the latest being the UK’s Ofcom.
Rather than remove the capability to undress women and children, xAI’s only change as of this writing has been to restrict the feature to paying subscribers. Users who ask Grok to generate sexualized pics of women and children are now served a message that says image generation is limited to Premium subscribers.
Which, by the way, is the same membership required of all advertisers on X.
Opportunity In Discord
Discord is going to take a run at it.
Going public, that is.
Bloomberg reports that Discord, a chat and gaming app that is one of the last remaining privately held social platforms with hundreds of millions of regular users, has filed for an IPO in large part due to its ambitions for a scaled ad business.
This is the moment for Discord.
Reddit stock has more than quadrupled since it IPO’d almost two years ago. Investors love to see a growing ad business – and Discord started its ad biz, which it calls “Quests,” last year.
Discord has speedrun through numerous potential business models in the past. It was positioned as a quasi-Slack competitor for a spell and has B2B-esque workplace users. It also tried entertainment and app store-style marketplace sales.
But advertising is the pillar that’s stuck, unsurprisingly.
Discord can also use 2026 as a cloak. The company may own an unseemly underbelly of an online hangout. But given the market’s acceptance of Reddit, which had similar issues, not to mention the artist formerly known as Twitter making everyone else look prudish, investors could easily overlook Discord’s problems.
But Wait! There’s More!
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s statement against the Trump administration’s legal threats has inspired investors to pull out of their US-based assets. [Fortune]
Yahoo DSP is catching the attention of media buyers. [Digiday]
Paramount Skydance refuses to take no for an answer, announcing plans to sue Warner Bros. Discovery and to nominate new directors to its board. [Bloomberg]
Why are there more A-list celebrities in TV commercials these days, anyway? [Business Insider]
Nintendo denies using AI-generated humans in a recent ad campaign in response to online outrage. [IGN]
You’re Hired!
Meta hires banking executive and former Trump administration official Dina Powell McCormick as president and vice chairman. [Axios]
John Osborn joins digital ad platform SeenThis as President US. [release]
Demandbase appoints Rachel Truair as CMO to grow the company and spur AI innovation. [release]
Full-service agency Hart appoints Marc Paulenich as CEO. [blog]
