In partnership with
Welcome Automaters, 👋
Here’s something juicy: consumers using AI assistants to discover and buy products online skyrocketed by a mind-blowing 200% in a single year! Not 50%. Not 100%. A full 200%!
This massive shift comes straight from Salesforce's brand new State of Commerce report, which surveyed over 3,000 corporate leaders, nearly 4,700 active buyers, and analyzed real-time shopping behavior across 1.5 billion consumers worldwide.
Here’s the situation now:
Scaling AI capabilities is officially the #1 strategy for commerce leaders.
Businesses are completely over AI pilots. 35% of agentic AI users are actively expanding their operations rather than running proofs of concept.
Core Operations: A massive 71% of commerce leaders agree that AI is now a core operational engine, while 86% confess that AI tools are driving consumer expectations through the roof!
In fact, the old keyword-based search model is starting to look ancient. According to ZDNet, that 86% spike in customer expectations is forcing a wholesale rethinking of everything from search interfaces to checkout flows. Consumers are ditching standard search bars because conversational AI actually talks like a human. The AI does not just return raw product listings. It understands context, asks smart follow-up questions, and guides buyers through complex decisions, even goes as far as to upsell.
Retailers who deployed conversational AI shopping assistants are already reaping the rewards, reporting significantly higher conversion rates and larger basket sizes compared to legacy search.
To keep up with consumer demand, nearly 9 out of 10 commerce professionals agree that AI search will be essential to product discovery within the next year.
To build out their capabilities, leaders are aggressively adding:
AI-Powered Personalization (46%) to dynamically tailor product flows.
Order Management (40%) for real-time tracking and automated reorders.
Content Management (39%) to enrich catalog data on the fly.
B2B Automation: Over 50% of corporate procurement tasks, including contract pricing and order tracking, are now mostly run by autonomous AI agents.
So, what is holding back total AI retail dominance? Tangled corporate data!
Only 27% of commerce organizations report having fully unified customer data across sales, service, marketing, and commerce teams.
That leaves nearly three-quarters of retail companies facing duplicate customer records, conflicting pricing, and fragmented customer service logs. It turns out legacy search infrastructure isn't the only thing struggling; backend data pipelines are desperately trying to catch up!
The Bottom Line:
AI shopping isn't an experiment anymore; it's the new standard operating model. Retailers who invested millions in legacy keyword search are racing to retrofit their architectures, but the winners of this shift will be the ones who connect their data pipelines, embrace conversational search, and deliver real human-level value!
Here's what we have for you today
🦾 Alibaba Launches Qwen3.8-Max With 2.4 Trillion Parameters As DeepSeek's V4-Flash Becomes the Cheapest Major AI Model to Run
Two major Chinese AI labs just had a Monday for the history books! One built a massive, multi-trillion-parameter super-brain, while the other built a ridiculously cheap model, and somehow both walked away looking like absolute geniuses.
Let’s start with the ultimate flex of raw computational muscle.
Alibaba officially unveiled Qwen3.8-Max, calling it the firm's largest and most capable model to date.
We’re talking about a staggering 2.4 trillion parameters (think of parameters as the tiny internal knobs a network tweaks to process context and generate smart answers). That puts it right behind Moonshot AI’s massive Kimi K3, which sits at 2.8 trillion parameters.
So how did Qwen3.8-Max perform? Well, shares of Alibaba immediately jumped 7% in Hong Kong trading following the announcement, but that’s not all:
Just like Kimi K3, Qwen3.8-Max effortlessly processes text, images, and video, handling context windows up to 1 million tokens at a time.
Leaderboard Stunner: It instantly became the top-ranked Chinese model on the crowdsourced Arena.AI benchmark (though still trailing Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and three Opus variants).
Visual Excellence: On Arena.AI's visual analysis leaderboard, it secured the #2 spot globally, sitting just behind a specialized Claude Fable 5 variant.
Meanwhile, DeepSeek Said: "Hold My Wallet!"
While Alibaba was gearing up to show off its massive parameter count, DeepSeek on Friday decided to attack from a completely different angle with its brand-new V4-Flash model.
According to research firm Artificial Analysis, V4-Flash was just crowned the absolute cheapest well-known AI model to run on the market today. And here’s why:
DeepSeek V4-Flash costs $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens, while placing average cost at 3 cents per test,
Kimi K3: $0.86 per test
GPT-5.6 Sol: $1.86 per test
Claude Fable 5: $3.15 per test
That makes DeepSeek over 100 times cheaper to execute than Fable 5!
But What About the Performance Catch? DeepSeek V4-Flash scored a 50 out of 100 on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index (which evaluates coding, complex logic, and workplace tasks).
To put that score in perspective:
It ties directly with Google’s Gemini 3.6 Flash (50/100).
It sits just a single point behind Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1 and Z.AI’s GLM-5.2 (51/100).
It trails Moonshot's Kimi K3 (57/100), as well as top-tier models like Claude Opus 5, Fable 5, and OpenAI's GPT-5.6, which scored nine or more points higher.
DeepSeek isn't stopping at the budget tier, either; they’re currently cooking up an enterprise-grade V4-Pro model, though an official release date remains under wraps.
The Bottom Line:
China’s tech ecosystem isn't choosing between "biggest" and "cheapest." It’s building both, at scale!
As Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at research firm Omdia, put it: "Chinese AI companies have found an important market. Many business workflows do not need the industry's very best model. They need models that are good enough, affordable, transparent, and accessible, and open-weight models help meet that demand."
P.S. Want more brain-melting AI news explained in plain English? Swing by our YouTube channel, The Automated, for full video breakdowns starting tomorrow!
The AI Buildout Needs These 10 Stocks
You don’t have to buy OpenAI or Anthropic to invest in AI. Each large language model requires specialized technology to keep running and growing.
MarketBeat’s The Infrastructure’s Backbone: 10 Stocks Powering the AI Buildout report reveals 10 companies supplying the memory, storage, connectivity, fabrication, power, and cooling behind AI’s next phase.
🧱 Around The AI Block
👿 A fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attack
🔒 How to lock down your AI chatbot privacy settings now.
🧑💻 Gemini Spark now has Chrome web-browsing capabilities.
😨 Chinese military researchers tap US AI models to train defence systems.
👩⚖️ EU announces new rules on AI transparency.
👨🏫 As computer science enrollments drop, artificial intelligence classes fill up.
😅 Influencers draw backlash for attending OpenAI’s first luxury trip.
💰 Microsoft pays cash. Amazon borrows. Here's how big tech funds its AI boom.
👩🎓 AI Tutorials
Microsoft 365 Copilot Security Risks & How to Protect Your Data.
And: How to Create and Use Perplexity Personal AI Chatbot Agents.
So tell us, what’s the single most annoying, tedious task in your daily workflow that you desperately wish an AI could just handle for you?
Hit reply and the next video might just be around your exact problem!
7 External Traffic Strategies. One question finally answered.
What actually moved your BSR?
Most eCommerce brands running external traffic can't answer that. Wrong channels, no real attribution, and at the end of the month, a dashboard full of activity and no proof of what drove revenue.
The brands getting it right aren't spending more. They've just stopped guessing.
They know which channels pull weight on Amazon listings, which ones look good in a report but bleed budget, and why creator and affiliate traffic consistently outperform paid social when it's set up correctly.
Levanta's free playbook breaks down all 7 strategies. Where each one works, where it falls apart, and what it takes to scale without it becoming a second job. If you're serious about moving your BSR without living inside PPC, this is worth 5 minutes.
🛠️ Trending Tools
For the UX & Conversion Strategists: Mocktomer deploys simulated AI shoppers to navigate your live site and uncover hidden friction points. It tests your pages against different consumer behaviors (like budget-conscious skimmers or impatient buyers) and gives you a clear experience report complete with real shopper quotes and plain-English fixes in minutes. Even better, it evaluates your site’s AI Readiness Score to show how models like ChatGPT and Claude view your brand versus your competitors.
For the App Developers & Indie Makers: AppIconKitchen streamlines the entire process of designing and exporting app icons across multiple platforms, by taking a simple text prompt and generating polished icon concepts in seven customizable visual styles. Once you pick a favorite, the platform automatically generates completely structured asset packages, including Xcode bundles, Android mipmap files, web favicons, and vector-ready assets, so you can drop them straight into your codebase.
For the Video Producers & Storytellers: Seedance 2.5 AI Video Generator brings serious power right to your browser. It lets you transform text, static images, audio, or 3D mockups into native 30-second 4K video clips complete with synchronized audio. With support for up to 50 multimodal references, it makes it surprisingly easy to maintain consistent characters, control camera angles, and build full-length social or product ads in a single shot.
🤖 AI Workout Of The Day: How to Plug Perplexity Into Your Google Chrome For Better Search Experience
Finding a needle in a haystack is hard, but finding a single factual sentence in a 14-page SEO-stuffed article is a nightmare. Usually, you’re stuck clicking "Next Page" like a digital caveman. But Perplexity AI has officially nuked "scrolling for answers" into the sun.
What makes this special: Think of Perplexity as the lovechild of Google and a very nerdy librarian who actually reads the books. It doesn’t just give you links; it reads the entire internet for you in real-time and writes a sourced, cited summary of the answer. It’s the tool that has search engines sweating because it values your time more than ad revenue.
How to Use It:
Step 1: Grab the Perplexity AI Companion in Chrome Web Store and add it to your browser.
Step 2: Click the Perplexity icon in your toolbar. It’ll ask you if you want to search the "Whole Internet" or just "This Page."
Step 3: If you’re on a massive article, click "This Page" and type "Summarize the main points for a 10-year-old."
Step 4: Boom. It spits out the facts with tiny numbers next to them. Click those numbers to see exactly where it got the info. No hallucinations allowed!
Step 5: And if you’re feeling lazy? Type gpt in your address bar, hit Tab, and ask your question directly. It’s a shortcut to instant genius.
Pro Tip: Use it on YouTube! Open a 20-minute video, hit the Perplexity extension, and ask for a summary. It’ll give you the highlights so you can skip the "Like and Subscribe" intro fluff.
Everything we know so far:
Real-Time Data: Unlike standard ChatGPT, Perplexity uses live web indexing to stay current (literally up to the second).
Source Transparency: Every claim is backed by a clickable link,perfect for winning arguments on the internet.
Comet Browser Integration: They’ve even launched a full "AI Browser" called Comet if you want this experience baked into the UI.
The Cost: Completely free for basic search. The "Pro" version ($20/mo) unlocks beefier models like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5.
💡 Prompts To Try for Brainstorming and Ideas:
Tell it about yourself: “I’m a 30-something-year-old writer who wants to publish engaging content on my blog. I like reading, writing, plants, traveling, and freelancing… What are some topics I could write about?”
Ask for a huge dump of ideas: “Generate a list of 50 headlines that have to do with XYZ.”
Input the key points you want to cover and ask for an outline: “Here are the four main points of my article—generate a detailed outline that expands on them.Is this your AI Workout of the Week (WoW)? Cast your vote!
That's all we've got for you today.
Did you like today's content? We'd love to hear from you! Please share your thoughts on our content below👇
What'd you think of today's email?
Your feedback means a lot to us and helps improve the quality of our newsletter.
