AI Can Now Shop With Your Credit Card (Seriously)

Welcome back apprentices! 👋

The realm of business is changing fast — and today’s scroll holds a powerful new spell: giving your AI assistant the keys to your (virtual) wallet.

No joke — Visa and Mastercard just announced new tools that let AI agents shop and pay for things on your behalf. We’re talking full-on autonomous commerce. Your chatbot can now go from helpful sidekick to full-blown buyer, bookkeeper, and logistics wizard — if you let it.

Too soon? Too weird? Maybe. But if you’ve ever wished you had a clone to handle the boring stuff (ordering inventory, managing suppliers, booking hotels), you’ll want to see what this update unlocks.

So grab your wand — or just your coffee — and let’s break down the latest AI magic in a way that actually makes sense (and might save you a ton of time).

In today's email

• China’s Basically Breaking Up With U.S. Tech

• An AI DJ Hosted a Radio Show

• Bots Crashed a Reddit Debate

• AI Just Got a Wallet 

• ChatGPT Became a Personal Shopper

• AI Might Help Treat Alzheimer’s

• Even more AI magic

• Test the prompt

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Quick News 

🇨🇳 China’s President Xi just told the country it’s time to go full DIY on artificial intelligence — no more relying on U.S. chips, platforms, or cloud services. The goal? Total AI self-sufficiency. It’s like China just announced it's building its own tech toolbox and moving out of the shared garage. With rising global tensions, this could shape how AI gets built, used, and regulated around the world — and yes, it might even affect your favorite tools.

🎤 For months, Australian radio station CADA aired a four-hour daily show hosted by “Thy”—a smooth-talking DJ with great music taste and zero pulse. Turns out, Thy is an AI clone of a finance team employee, built with ElevenLabs, and listeners (all 72,000 of them) had no idea. There was no disclaimer, no winking emoji, just a robot spinning hip hop and R&B like it went to DJ school.

🎭 Researchers from the University of Zurich unleashed chatbots into Reddit’s r/changemyview, posing as trauma survivors and counselors (yes, really) and dropped over 1,700 sneaky AI comments — without telling anyone. The bots analyzed user histories to tailor replies and ended up being six times more persuasive than actual humans. Reddit wasn’t amused and is now serving legal receipts, calling it “deeply wrong on moral and legal levels.”

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Mastercard & Visa 
AI Just Got a Wallet – And It Knows You 

Visa and Mastercard just gave AI permission to go shopping on your behalf.

Yep. AI-powered agents can now browse, pick, and pay for things for you—whether it’s a birthday outfit or office printer paper. Thanks to Mastercard’s new Agent Pay and Visa’s Intelligent Commerce, your digital assistant isn’t just smart — it’s now financially empowered (don’t worry, you’re still the boss).

They’ve teamed up with the likes of Microsoft, IBM, OpenAI, and Stripe to roll this out globally — fast.

Is AI Shopping a Blessing or Budget Bomb?

Here’s what this means if you’re running a business, side hustle, or just trying to avoid another 4-hour Amazon spiral.

💎 Benefits:

• Time-saver: Automate buying supplies, negotiating with vendors, and paying invoices.
   Fact: The average SMB wastes 120 hours a year on manual purchasing. Yikes.
  

• Smarter choices: Your AI knows your preferences (and the weather), so it can recommend stuff you'll actually use.
  

• World domination (kinda): You can now buy internationally without sweat — just let your AI do it with tokenized virtual cards.
  

• New dev tools: Visa and Mastercard are opening APIs for devs, so expect smarter tools in your apps very soon.
  

🛑 Risks:

• Robot shopaholic? If not configured right, your AI might reorder 200 ergonomic chairs instead of 2.
  

• Learning curve: Don’t worry, you don’t need to code. But a little setup is needed upfront.
  

• Privacy & control: AI can pay — but only if you say so. Still, double-check where and how it's plugged in.
  

So… What’s the Deal?

Instead of you juggling tabs and receipts, imagine this:

☕ “Hey AI, get me the best deal on 100 branded coffee mugs and pay with the office card.”

AI browses. Compares. Buys. Done. 

That’s agentic commerce — where your AI becomes your personal shopping assistant, finance manager, and supply chain fixer. All built with secure tokens, payment rules, and clear limits so you stay in charge. (No late-night robot sneaker binges here.)

This is all happening right now. Visa already supports over 4.8 billion cards, and Mastercard is syncing with Microsoft Copilot and IBM’s watsonx to cover both consumer and business use cases.

Whether you're a solo freelancer, Etsy seller, or scaling startup — you can use this tech.

Don’t Wait for the Robots to Get Bored

• Ask your platform (Stripe, Checkout.com, etc.) if they’re integrating with Visa or Mastercard’s AI tools.
  

• Try a simple AI assistant that helps with invoices, scheduling, or product sourcing — Microsoft Copilot is a good start.
  

• Enable card tokenization with your bank so you're AI-commerce ready. Think of it like adding a seatbelt before handing over the keys.
  

Quick Stats to Sound Smart at Lunch

• 💳 Visa's system touches 150M+ merchants worldwide
  
  

• 🧠 Mastercard processes 2T+ transactions/year, now with AI agents
  
  

• 🤝 Partners include OpenAI, Microsoft, Stripe, Anthropic, Samsung
  
  

• 💰 AI-led commerce projected to hit $1T by 2027 (that’s trillion, with a “T”)

Bottom Line?
The future of business isn’t just digital — it’s autonomous.
And now, it knows how to check out.

OpenAI
ChatGPT Became a Personal Shopper — And It Doesn’t Even Take Commission 

OpenAI just gave ChatGPT a glow-up: now when you ask it for help buying stuff — like “funny costumes for my two dogs” — it shows scrollable product carousels, real-time prices, review summaries, and links to buy. It’s not ads, it’s not spam — it’s just ChatGPT being helpful (and stylish). The upgrade is live for everyone — including free users — and even pulls in your past preferences to skip stuff you’ve said you hate (looking at you, clown costumes ).

📌 What This Means (a.k.a. "Why Your Marketing Team Shouldn’t Skip This"):

• 🛍️ Product listings now come with images, prices, and AI-generated labels like “Budget-Friendly” or “Most Popular.”
  
  

• 🧠 ChatGPT remembers your vibe and filters recommendations (yes, it has memory — your shopping habits are now context-aware).
  
  

• 🧾 AI summarizes product reviews like a friend who actually reads them before buying.
  
  

• 💡 No ads or affiliate links — yet. But OpenAI might let merchants upload their product feeds soon, so keep your eyes peeled.
  
  

• 🔍 This turns ChatGPT into a legit search alternative for product discovery — and one that talks back.

What’s the Deal?

This is a Google-slap in slow motion. ChatGPT is casually stepping into product search, and users are staying in the chat instead of jumping to Amazon or Chrome. If you sell online and your product data isn’t ready for an AI assistant to digest? You might get skipped like last year’s Halloween costumes.

Start thinking beyond SEO. Clean up your product descriptions, reviews, and data feeds so they’re AI-readable. Because the next time someone types “What’s a good $30 desk lamp?” — they might not be asking Google. They’ll be asking ChatGPT… and your lamp better be ready for its close-up.

Research
AI Just Found a Hidden Switch in the Brain — and It Might Help Treat Alzheimer’s

Scientists at UC San Diego just pulled off something wild: they used AI to uncover a sneaky role played by a brain enzyme called PHGDH in Alzheimer’s — and then found a potential treatment, NCT-503, that could turn it off without breaking anything. 

In mouse trials, the drug improved memory and reduced anxiety (yes, actual mouse therapy sessions), and it can cross the blood-brain barrier — a huge deal in drug design. Even better? It could one day be taken as a pill, not through an IV.

Here’s What That Actually Means:

• 🧬 PHGDH isn’t just making brain fuel — it’s also secretly flipping genetic switches linked to Alzheimer’s. Plot twist.
  
  

• 🧠 The drug NCT-503 fits into a newly discovered “binding pocket” (think: secret on/off switch) that AI helped map out.
  
  

• 🧪 Mice who got the treatment did better on memory and anxiety tests. We don’t know if they got cheese as a reward.
  
  

• 💊 It could be a pill, not a hospital-grade infusion — huge upgrade in convenience and cost.
  
  

• 🧰 AI did the 3D modeling, prediction, and analysis work that would’ve taken humans years. We’re talking months, not decades.

And What’s the Real Deal?

This is  a peek into the future of medicine powered by AI. For decades, drug discovery has been expensive, slow, and full of guesswork. Now? AI is scanning molecules, spotting patterns, and speeding up breakthroughs. Today it’s Alzheimer’s. Tomorrow it might be diabetes, cancer, or... stress from back-to-back Zoom calls.

Even if you’re not in biotech, this is your wake-up call: AI isn’t just for chatbots and spreadsheets. It’s helping people solve complex problems — faster and smarter. 

Help Your Friends Level Up! 🔥

Hey, you didn’t get all this info for nothing — share it! If you know someone who’s diving into AI, help them stay in the loop with this week’s updates.

Sharing is a win-win! Send this to a friend who’s all about tech, and you’ll win a little surprise 👀

Even Quicker News 

🧠 Anthropic’s CEO says we’re racing to understand how AI thinks before it gets too smart to follow — like giving your calculator a personality and then realizing it’s hiding secrets. TL;DR: if your AI tool can’t explain itself, maybe don’t let it run your business (or your budget).

📱Turns out Samsung flirted with making Google’s Gemini the default AI on Galaxy phones — and now it’s Exhibit A in Google's antitrust drama. Moral of the story: when tech giants date, the lawyers always get invited.

🙅‍♂️ OpenAI’s latest update made ChatGPT a little too eager to please, agreeing with everything like your most desperate LinkedIn connection. Now it’s being retrained to stop complimenting bad ideas—and maybe say “no” once in a while.

Today’s Toolbox

🤖 At its Create 2025 event, Baidu launched two powerful — and shockingly cheap — AI models: ERNIE 4.5 Turbo and ERNIE X1 Turbo. With input token costs as low as $0.11 per million, Baidu claims performance that outpaces GPT-4o and beats competitor DeepSeek on reasoning benchmarks. It also unveiled Xinxiang, a multi-agent tool for automating 200+ tasks, and Huiboxing, a digital avatar platform. 

CEO Robin Li made it clear: Baidu’s not just innovating — it’s declaring a price war.

How This Affects You (And What to Watch Next):

• ERNIE 4.5 Turbo = Cheap + fast + multimodal (think images, text, data).
  
  

• ERNIE X1 Turbo = Advanced reasoning, priced 75% lower than DeepSeek R1.
  
  

• Use cases? Customer service chatbots, marketing content, code help, task automation — without breaking the bank.

Baidu’s new tools:

• Xinxiang: AI agents that can handle scheduling, drafting emails, customer follow-ups, etc.
  
  

• Huiboxing: Create virtual brand reps or avatars for livestreaming, content, and virtual support.
  
  

• How cheap is it really? About 0.2% of GPT-4.5’s cost, according to Baidu.
  
  

• Why now? China’s racing to close the AI gap with the West — and this release shows they're catching up fast.

What’s the Deal?

This is a roadmap to affordable automation. Baidu is pushing the AI cost floor way down while improving capabilities. And they're naming names — calling out DeepSeek’s higher hallucination rate and outdated text-only models. It signals a trend: AI that’s cheaper, faster, and more customizable is coming—and soon it’ll be in tools you already use.

Not ready to build your own AI? No problem. Start by checking if any of your existing platforms (like customer support, content creation, or CRM tools) are integrating ERNIE APIs or Baidu-powered agents. 

Cheaper AI = smarter automation with less risk. And don’t sleep on the avatars — digital salespeople could be your next hire.

🧪 Test the Prompt

A playground for your imagination (and low-key prompt skills).

Each send, we give you a customizable DALL·E prompt inspired by a real-world use case — something that could help you in your business or job if you wanted to use it that way. But it’s also just a fun creative experiment.

You tweak it, run it, and send us your favorite. We pick one winner to feature in the next issue.

Bonus: you’re secretly getting better at prompt design. 🤫

👑 The winner is…

Last week, we challenged you to test GPT-4o’s visual generation skills with this prompt.

Congrats to Andy from New York!🥳

Want to be featured next? Keep those generations coming!

🎨 Prompt: The Daily Routine Machine

“Design an enormous, over-engineered machine that automates your daily routine. Its core structure is built from [unexpected industrial material], and its moving parts are powered by [mundane personal item]. Add conveyor belts for caffeine, arms for endless notifications, and glowing UI panels for calendar syncing.
Style: intricate industrial cutaway drawing, rich lighting and metal textures, futuristic Rube Goldberg energy.”

We’ll be featuring the best generations in our next newsletter!

📊 Poll Results: AI in Schools

Every single vote landed on one option:

100% say “Good idea, but let’s teach critical thinking too.”

Looks like you all want brains and bots in the classroom.

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