What Happens When AI Obliterates Your Business Model?

Today on the AI Daily Brief, what happens when AI undercuts your business model, even when your product is doing great? Before that in the headlines, is our AI Personal Assistant going to live? In our email inbox, the AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Alright friends, quick announcements before we dive in. Thank you. First as always to our wonderful sponsors today. That's kpmg, Zencoder and Super Intelligent. If you would like a blissfully ad free version of the show, you can get that at patreon.com aidaily brief or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. To learn about sponsoring the show, check out AIDAILY Brief AI it's Bullet 3. There's also an email there. And while you're there, there's so many other things that you can check out as well. I announced yesterday that we've got this new Strategy Compass platform coming and I am signing up people for the beta. You could also find the link to our AI New Year's resolution community. We're on week two of 10 or you can find out more about AIDB Intel. I've got some big announcements on that front coming up, so definitely sign up there@aidbintel.com basically if you want to learn anything about the podcast and its broader ecosystem. Aidelibriief AI and with that out of the way, let's talk AI. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines edition. All the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. One of the great white whales of the AI space is the quest to build the AI personal assistant. So many people are thinking about how they become the default personal assistant and what that means in terms of their ability to retain users. And with its latest move, Google is pointing out that maybe the place for that to live is just about the most obvious place you can imagine. This week, Google announced a big AI overhaul for, you guessed it, Gmail. First up, Google is bringing AI search to the inbox. Users can now search using natural language rather than keywords. Google gave the example of being able to ask who was the plumber that quoted for the bathroom renovation last year. The response will then be an AI Overview style summary with links to relevant information, saving users from hunting around for key pieces of information. There's also two new tabs labeled Suggested to DOS and Topics. To catch up on these features, both scour your emails to populate useful lists suggested to DOS will detect things you might need to take action on, like a bill coming due or an appointment to confirm. While topics to catch up on will give you a passive list to keep you up to date on things like E commerce, order tracking or financial statements. In addition, Google is moving more Gemini features from the paid tier to their free product. All users can now use the Help Me Write feature to polish emails or generate first drafts. There's also an AI Generated Suggested Replies feature that can offer up one click responses based on your writing style. I've also noticed that outside of just trying to imitate your style, it can get the context of emails where you repeat yourself a lot and simply suggest them up front. I have a very standard response I send back for example to sponsorship inquiries and at this point Gmail knows to just suggest that whenever there's a sponsorship inquiry. Speaking to the AI generated lists, Blake Barnes, the VP of Product for Gmail, said, this is us delivering on Gmail proactively having your back, showing you what you need to do and when you need to do it. Don't worry, the traditional inbox will remain available. This is simply a new view you can toggle in and out of as you please to cut through the noise of your incoming mail. Now, honestly, I've been a little bit surprised by the response, which has been kind of positive. Maybe I'm just jaded and expect everyone to hate everything instantly, but what you're seeing is responses like this one from Koho Okada who writes, if this helps me stop missing bills and important emails, I'm all in AI that actually saves time over everything else. Chung Fan wrote. Gmail's new AI inbox feature automatically creates a to do list for you based on important email and calendar events. If this actually works, well, inject it directly into my veins. So I don't know man, I guess we gotta go try this out now. Next up, a bit of chip in geopolitical news, Nvidia is ramping up production of AI chips for China, but Beijing is throwing on the brakes. During a Tuesday Q and A at CES, Jensen Huang said that Chinese demand for H2 hundreds is quite high after the Trump administration announced the advanced chips would be available for export. Last month, he said, we fired up our supply chain and H2 hundreds are flowing through the line. Huang said that Nvidia is, in the his words, final innings of sorting out the paperwork in Washington. But on the Chinese side, he said, we learn about everything through purchase orders. We're not expecting any press releases or large declarations. On Wednesday, however, the information reported that those purchase orders are getting pulled. Beijing has reportedly told tech firms to halt orders While the terms required to access chips are decided, the Chinese government is of course stuck between allowing the H2 hundreds into the country, giving their tech companies access to more powerful chips, or, on the other hand, keeping American chips out of the country in order to bolster domestic chip makers like Huawei. The issue is that the chips that are available domestically are still fairly far behind. The report states that Beijing is expected to mandate domestic chip orders in exchange for approving Nvidia imports. Liu Pengu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in the US Said China is committed to basing its national development on its own strengths and is also willing to maintain dialogue and cooperation with all parties to safeguard the stability of global industrial and supply chains. Later in the day, Reuters added, reporting that Nvidia is asking for cash in the bank to secure Chinese orders. Sources said that they're demanding full payment in advance to hedge against uncertainty in Beijing's approval process. The unusually strict terms also include no option to cancel, no refunds and no ability to alter configurations once the orders are placed. These sales are a huge financial commitment for Nvidia, and Beijing's approvals could make or break their year. They already have 700,000 H200 in inventory, but reports suggest more than 2 million Chinese orders have already been placed. What's more, H200 demand from the rest of the world is now close to zero now that Blackwell chips are available, so additional production is a big risk. Last year, Nvidia guided that Chinese demand could add between 2 billion and 5 billion to their quarterly revenue on the order of a 5% bump. However, at $20,000 a pop, 2 million orders is closer to 50 billion in revenue, around 40% of their full year revenue for 2025. Staying on Beijing for a moment, the Chinese government is also disrupting Meta's plans as they consider intervening in the Manus acquisition. Over the winter break, Metta announced the $2 billion acquisition of Manuscript. A big part of the narrative was that Manus had figured out a playbook for Chinese startups to court lucrative deals from U.S. tech companies. While Manus was founded in China, they relocated to Singapore last year in an apparent plan to avoid regulatory issues from both Beijing and Washington. It seems that that plan has not quite worked the way that they had hoped. The Financial Times reports that the Chinese Commerce Ministry is assessing whether Manus relocation and subsequent sale required a technology export license under Chinese law. Sources said the review is still in the early stages and might not lead to formal investigation. However, the license requirement could give Beijing a way to influence the deal up to and including forcing it to be unwound. The South China Morning Post reported on the story in the context of a broader trend called chuhai are going to see where Chinese tech firms and startups establish overseas subsidiaries, they write. Beijing has been exploring ways to assert a say in cross border transactions that involve Chinese technology, data, talent or markets. Sources said then that allowing the Manus deal to go through is viewed as a dangerous precedent that could encourage more Chinese startups to relocate offshore. Shifting over to AI and Commerce Salesforce reports a huge uptick in AI shopping in their annual holiday survey. This holiday season saw a large increase in sales compared to 2024, with 12% growth globally and 9% in the U.S. other data showed that this was generally about inflation, with the increase largely seen in the value of goods purchased rather than an increase in volume. Salesforce viewed this shift in consumer behavior as being about shoppers being more discerning about how they spend their money, and the thought is that AI is playing a major role in helping consumers make decisions. The holiday saw 20% of all retail sales powered by AI and agents, either through recommendations or agentic shopping. The share of traffic from ChatGPT and perplexity doubled this year and conversion rates were way up. AI searches were nine times more likely to convert into sales than social media referrals. Kayla Schwartz, the director of consumer insights at Salesforce, said one of the biggest stories of the 2025 holiday shopping season is consumers leaning into these tools, both on site branded agents as well as off site third party agents, and seeing how AI was really aiding and abetting the other aspects of the shopper journey, particularly within customer service. Now on this theme of shopping, while many AI companies are building shopping features, Amazon seems to be getting out to an early lead. Earlier this week there was a controversy around Amazon displaying products available from small retailers who don't stock their products through Amazon. Some retailers objected, stating that Amazon didn't have approval for the listings. Others mentioned errors with the listings, including out of date product information or out of stock items. It turns out the listings were part of a new feature called Buy for Me, which uses AI agents to buy the products from third party websites. Amazon appears to have obfuscated the entire process, presenting customers with a single button that they wouldn't even know is an AI feature. What's interesting is that this is a form of agentic shopping that OpenAI and others had envisioned last spring as the features were coming to market. The original plan was to have a web agent able to gather products from anywhere on the Internet and serve them up in a chatbot session. That approach ran into snags, with many online shopping websites blocking the crawlers that enabled it. That led instead to OpenAI partnering with large retailers like Shopify and Etsy for data access. Chief among the sites blocking web crawlers was Amazon, obviously not keen on their customers buying through ChatGPT instead of their own front end. It seems that Amazon is using their leading online marketplace as a moat while also using agentic shopping to tap into demand for smaller retailers. Ironically, the Buy for Me feature allows Amazon to tap into Shopify stores without needing to partner directly. For the moment, Amazon seems to have the most complete and functional agentic shopping experience, and it's completely housed within the standard Amazon website that people are already comfortable using, writes the information. By taking a more collaborative and slow rolling approach, OpenAI and Shopify could risk ceding ground to Amazon, especially since it's still early days of people getting used to the idea of AI doing their shopping. One more on this topic, Microsoft has added agentic shopping to their Copilot experience as well. A new feature called Copilot Checkout was unveiled at the NRG Retail Conference on Thursday, allowing users to shop without leaving the app. Like other AI shopping features, consumers can use the chatbot to perform product research and compare prices than Checkout without ever leaving the app. The feature is now live in the US and includes integrations for Shopify, PayPal, Stripe, and Etsy. Microsoft is also reinforcing the narrative that chatbot conversations seem to have much greater intent than other forms of online interaction. Microsoft said that shopping sessions that include copilot led to 53% more purchases within the first 30 minutes than those without AI. In addition, they said that shopping sessions using copilot are 194% more likely to result in a purchase. I actually talked about this AI commerce theme on someone else's podcast that'll be coming out in a couple weeks. I think it's quietly one of the big trends that's happening right before our eyes, even if we're not talking about it all that much. For now, though, that is where we will wrap the headlines. Next up, the main episode. All right, let's talk about the signal versus the noise in enterprise AI. The challenge right now isn't just about what's possible, it's about what's practical. That's the entire focus of the youe Can With AI podcast I host for kpmg. Season one Cut through the hype to focus on deployment and responsible scaling. Season two goes a level deeper. We're bringing together panels of AI builders, clients and KPMG leaders to debate the strategic questions that will define what's next for AI in the enterprise. Six episodes packed with frameworks you can actually use. Find you can with AI wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe now so you don't miss the new season. If you're using AI to code, ask yourself, are you building software or are you just playing prompt roulette? We know that unstructured prompting works at first, but eventually it leads to AI slop and technical debt. Enter zenflow. Zenflow takes you from vibe coding to AI first engineering. It's the first AI orchestration layer that brings discipline to the chaos. It transforms freeform prompting into spec driven workflows and multi agent verification where agents actually cross check each other to prevent drift. You can even command a fleet of parallel agents to implement features and fix bugs simultaneously. We've seen teams accelerate delivery 2x to 10x. Stop gambling with prompts, start orchestrating your AI. Turn raw speed into reliable production grade output at Zenflow Free Today's episode is brought to you by Superintelligent. Superintelligent is a platform that, very simply put, is all about helping your company figure out how to use AI better. We deploy voice agents to interview people across your company, combine that with proprietary intelligence about what's working for other companies, and give you a set of recommendations around use cases, change management initiatives that add up to an AI roadmap that can help you get value out of AI for your company. But now we want to empower the folks inside your team who are responsible for that transformation with an even more direct platform. Our forthcoming AI Strategy Compass tool is ready to start to be tested. This is a power tool for anyone who is responsible for AI adoption or AI transformation inside their companies. It's going to allow you to do a lot of the things that we do at Superintelligent, but in a much more automated, self managed way and with a totally different cost structure. If you are interested in checking it out, go to aidailybrief AI Compass, fill out the form and we will be in touch soon. Foreign welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines edition. All the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. One of the great white whales of the AI space is the quest to build the AI Personal assistant. So many people are thinking about how they become the default personal assistant and what that means in terms of their ability to retain users. And with its latest move, Google is pointing out that maybe the place for that To Live is just about the most obvious place you can imagine. This week Google announced a big AI overhaul for, you guessed it, Gmail. First up, Google is bringing AI search to the inbox. Users can now search using natural language rather than keywords. Google gave the example of being able to ask who was the plumber that quoted for the bathroom renovation last year. The response will then be an AI Overview style summary with links to relevant information, saving users from hunting around for key pieces of information. There's also two new tabs labeled Suggested to DOS and Topics to catch up on these features, both scour your emails to populate. Useful lists suggested to DOS will detect things you might need to take action on, like a bill coming due or an appointment to confirm, while Topics to Catch up on will give you a passive list to keep you up to date on things like E commerce, order tracking or financial statements. In addition, Google is moving more Gemini features from the paid tier to their free product. All users can now use the Help Me Write feature to polish emails or generate first drafts. There's also an AI Generated Suggested Replies feature that can offer up one click responses based on your writing style. I've also noticed that outside of just trying to imitate your style, it can get the context of emails where you repeat yourself a lot and simply suggest them upfront. I have a very standard response I send back for example to sponsorship inquiries and at this point Gmail knows to just suggest that whenever there's a sponsorship inquiry. Speaking to the AI generated lists, Blake Barnes, the VP of Product for Gmail, said, this is us delivering on Gmail proactively having your back, showing you what you need to do and when you need to do it. Don't worry, the traditional inbox will remain available. This is simply a new view you can toggle in and out of as you please to cut through the noise of your incoming mail. Now honestly, I've been a little bit surprised by the response, which has been kind of positive. Maybe I'm just jaded and expect everyone to hate everything instantly, but what you're seeing is responses like this one from Koho Okada who writes, if this helps me stop missing bills and important emails, I'm all in. AI that actually saves time over everything else. Chung Fan wrote. Gmail's new AI inbox feature automatically creates a to do list for you based on important email and calendar events. If this actually works, well, inject it directly into my veins. So I don't know man, I guess we gotta go try this out now. Next up, a Bit of chip in geopolitical news, Nvidia is ramping up production of AI chips for China, but Beijing is throwing on the brakes. During a Tuesday Q and A at CES, Jensen, Huang said that Chinese demand for H2 hundreds is quite high. After the Trump administration announced the advanced chips would be available for export last month, he said, we fired up our supply chain and H2 hundreds are flowing through the line. Huang said that Nvidia is in the his words final innings of sorting out the paperwork in Washington. But on the Chinese side, he said, we learn about everything through purchase orders. We're not expecting any press releases or large declarations. On Wednesday, however, the information reported that those purchase orders are getting pulled. Beijing has reportedly told tech firms to halt orders while the terms required to access chips are decided to. The Chinese government is of course stuck between allowing the H2 hundreds into the country, giving their tech companies access to more powerful chips, or on the other hand, keeping American chips out of the country in order to bolster domestic chip makers like Huawei. The issue is that the chips that are available domestically are still fairly far behind. The report states that Beijing is expected to mandate domestic chip orders in exchange for approving Nvidia imports. Liu Pengu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in the US Said China is committed to basing its national development on its own strengths and is also willing to maintain dialogue and cooperation with all parties to safeguard the stability of global industrial and supply chains. Later in the day, Reuters added, reporting that Nvidia is asking for cash in the bank to secure Chinese orders. Sources said that they're demanding full payment in advance to hedge against uncertainty in Beijing's approval process. The unusually strict terms also include no option to cancel, no refunds and no ability to alter configurations once the orders are placed. These sales are a huge financial commitment for Nvidia, and Beijing's approvals could make or break their year. They already have 700,000 H200 in inventory, but reports suggest more than 2 million Chinese orders have already been placed. What's more, H200 demand from the rest of the world is now close to zero now that Blackwell chips are available, so additional production is a big risk. Last year, Nvidia guided that Chinese demand could add between 2 billion and 5 billion to their quarterly revenue on the order of a 5% bump. However, at $20,000 a pop, 2 million orders is closer to 50 billion revenue, around 40% of their full year revenue for 2025. Staying on Beijing for a moment, the Chinese government is also disrupting Meta's plans as they consider intervening in the Manus acquisition. Over the winter break, Meta announced the $2 billion acquisition of Manus. A big part of the narrative was that Manus had figured out a playbook for Chinese startups to court lucrative deals from U.S. tech companies. While Manus was founded in China, they relocated to Singapore last year in an apparent plan to avoid regulatory issues from both Beijing and Washington. It seems that that plan has not quite worked the way that they had hoped. The Financial Times reports that the Chinese Commerce Ministry is assessing whether Manus relocation and subsequent sale required a technology export license under Chinese law. Sources said the review is still in the early stages and might not lead to formal investigation. However, the license requirement could give Beijing a way to influence the deal, up to and including forcing it to be unwound. The South China Morning Post reported on the story in the context of a broader trend called called chuhai are going to see where Chinese tech firms and startups establish overseas subsidiaries, they write. Beijing has been exploring ways to assert a say in cross border transactions that involve Chinese technology, data, talent or markets. Sources said then that allowing the Manus deal to go through is viewed as a dangerous precedent that could encourage more Chinese startups to relocate offshore. Shifting over to AI and commerce Salesforce reports a huge uptick in AI shopping in their annual holiday survey. This holiday season saw a large increase in sales compared to 2024, with 12% growth globally and 9% in the U.S. other data show that this was generally about inflation, with the increase largely seen in the value of goods purchased rather than an increase in volume. Salesforce viewed this shift in consumer behavior as being about shoppers being more discerning about how they spend their money. And the thought is that AI is playing a major role in helping consumers make decisions. The holidays saw 20% of all retail sales powered by AI and agents, either through recommendations or agentic shopping. The share of traffic from ChatGPT and perplexity doubled this year and conversion rates were way up. AI searches were nine times more likely to convert into sales than social media referrals. Kayla Schwartz, the director of consumer insights at Salesforce, said one of the biggest stories of the 2025 holiday shopping season is consumers leaning into these tools, both on site branded agents as well as off site third party agents, and seeing how AI was really aiding and abetting the other aspects of the shopper journey, particularly within customer service. Now on this theme of shopping. While many AI companies are building shopping features, Amazon seems to be getting out to an early lead. Earlier this week, there was a controversy around Amazon displaying products available from small retailers who don't stock their products through Amazon. Some retailers objected, stating that Amazon didn't have approval for the listings. Others mentioned errors with the listings, including out of date product information or out of stock items. It turns out the listings were part of a new feature called Buy for Me, which uses AI agents to buy the products from third party websites. Amazon appears to have obfuscated the entire process, presenting customers with a single button that they wouldn't even know is an AI feature. What's interesting is that this is a form of agentic shopping that OpenAI and others had envisioned last spring as the features were coming to market. The original plan was to have a web agent able to gather products from anywhere on the Internet and serve them up in a chatbot session. That approach ran into snags, with many online shopping websites blocking the crawlers that enabled it. That led instead to OpenAI partnering with large retailers like Shopify and Etsy for data access. Chief among the sites blocking web crawlers was Amazon, obviously not keen on their customers buying through ChatGPT instead of their own front end. It seems that Amazon is using their leading online marketplace as a moat while also using agentic shopping to tap into demand for smaller retailers. Ironically, the Buy from Me feature allows Amazon to tap into Shopify stores without needing to partner directly. For the moment, Amazon seems to have the most complete and functional agentic shopping experience, and it's completely housed within the standard Amazon website that people are already comfortable using, writes the information. By taking a more collaborative and slow rolling approach, OpenAI and Shopify could risk ceding ground to Amazon, especially since it's still early days of people getting used to the idea of AI doing their shopping. One more on this topic, Microsoft has added agentic shopping to their Copilot experience as well. A new feature called Copilot Checkout was unveiled at the NRG Retail Conference on Thursday, allowing users to shop without leaving the app. Like other AI shopping features, consumers can use the Chatbot to perform product research and compare prices, then check out without ever leaving the app. The feature is now live in the US and includes integrations for Shopify, PayPal, Stripe and Etsy. Microsoft is also reinforcing the narrative that chatbot conversations seem to have much greater intent than other forms of online interaction. Microsoft said that shopping sessions that include copilot led to 53% more purchases within the first 30 minutes than those without AI. In addition, they said that shopping sessions using copilot are 194% more likely to result in a purchase. I actually talked about this AI commerce theme on someone else's podcast that'll be coming out in a couple weeks. I think it's quietly one of the big trends that's happening right before our eyes, even if we're not talking about it all that much. For now, though, that is where we will wrap the headlines. Next up, the main episode.

0:00