The Morning Download: AI Shopping Agent Spree

What's up: China's memory-chip champion; training AI to do your job; Walmart to expand drone-delivery fleet.

Good morning. Google on Sunday announced a new set of AI agent tools designed to help retailers manage shopping, support, and ordering within their own apps, WSJ Leadership Institute's Belle Lin reports. 

The tools, including a food-ordering agent that can do things like estimate how many pizzas a group needs from a user-uploaded photo (too early to talk pizza?), mark the latest salvo among vendors as e-commerce emerges as a battleground for AI agents.

OpenAI helped kick off the wave of AI-assisted shopping last fall with its Instant Checkout feature. In January, Microsoft announced its own checkout feature for its Copilot chatbot.

For retailers, the surge of new shopping tools presents both an opportunity and a risk as companies try to get ahead of AI-assisted commerce before it significantly reshapes how people shop.

“Things are moving at a pace that if you’re not already deep into [AI agents], you’re probably creating a competitive barrier or disadvantage,” Yael Cosset, Kroger’s chief digital officer and executive vice president, tells Belle.

The Cincinnati-based grocer, along with home improvement giant Lowe’s and pizza chain Papa Johns, are testing the new tools, which Google calls Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience.

It’s still early. AI agents are evolving quickly, and for tech leaders the focus is on making systems work smoothly together, connecting them to existing data, and, for now, partnering with multiple vendors.

That reality was underscored Sunday when Google also introduced a new standard called Universal Commerce Protocol, designed to help apps, merchants, and payment processors work together for purchases made by AI agents.

Lowe's Chief Digital and Information Officer Seemantini Godbole and Cosset at Kroger both say they are working with several tech vendors.

“I don’t want to be an AI expert in terms of building the agents,” Papa Johns Chief Digital and Technology Officer Kevin Vasconi tells the WSJLI. “I want to be an AI expert in terms of, ‘How do I use the agents?’”

ChangXin Memory Technologies, China’s national champion in memory chips, is preparing a $4 billion share offering after rapid technical progress that has narrowed the gap with industry leaders, WSJ reports.

The offering comes amid a global AI-driven memory shortage, but CXMT’s rise is constrained by geopolitics and legal scrutiny. U.S. export controls limit China’s access to advanced chip tools, while South Korean prosecutors allege CXMT benefited from stolen trade secrets tied to former Samsung Electronics employees.

Mercor, a Bay Area startup valued at $10 billion, is rapidly hiring tens of thousands of white-collar contractors to train AI, often in the very skills the technology may one day replace, WSJ reports.

The company recruits subject-matter experts ranging from doctors and lawyers to writers and filmmakers to review, critique, and refine AI outputs for clients including OpenAI and Anthropic. Pay can reach $250 an hour, drawing laid-off professionals amid a weak job market.

As backlash grows over nonconsensual, sexualized images of women and children linked to X’s AI chatbot Grok, Indonesia and Malaysia over the weekend became the first nations to ban the tool.

The U.K.’s communications watchdog also has launched an investigation into the matter, noting Monday that there are reports of images that "may amount to child sexual abuse material," WSJ reports.

U.S. Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico called upon Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai to suspend the X and Grok apps from their app stores until issues were addressed, warning that “turning a blind eye to X’s egregious behavior would make a mockery of your moderation practices,” CNBC reports. 

OpenAI and Common Sense Media said Friday they will drop rival California ballot proposals on children and AI chatbots and pursue a joint compromise, giving parents more control while stripping provisions that would have allowed families to sue large AI companies. 

Walmart says it plans to roll out delivery-by-drone at an additional 150 stores over the next year in partnership with drone operator Wing, a unit of Alphabet, WSJ reports. Its goal is to set up the service at more than 270 of its locations nationwide by the end of 2027. The retailer started offering drone delivery in the Dallas-Fort Worth region of Texas in 2022. 

The Defense Department has selected Owen West, a former energy trader at Goldman Sachs and Marine, to lead its Defense Innovation Unit, tasked with bringing startup technology into the U.S. military, WSJ reports.

OpenAI and SoftBank are each investing $500 million into SoftBank company SB Energy as part of their partnership developing artificial-intelligence infrastructure platform Stargate.

U.S. prosecutors are investigating Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over his testimony last summer about the central bank’s building renovation project, according to government officials with knowledge of the matter. (WSJ)

President Trump said he might block Exxon Mobil from drilling in Venezuela after the company’s top executive publicly acknowledged the barriers involved in doing business in the country. (WSJ)

Bob Weir, a co-founder of the Grateful Dead, an iconic American band thanks to its sunny, often-improvised meld of folk, blues, country and psychedelic rock, has died at age 78. (WSJ)

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The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.