Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Retail Trade, newest first.
Walmart said on October 21 that customers can send AI agents to shop for them, starting next month, through an Agent Gateway that connects approved agents over the Model Context Protocol. Each agent gets its own profile in the customer's account, and its purchases need approval by default or can run within a spending limit, such as $100. Walmart says the gateway can find a shopper's usual items without handing the agent their purchase history, and it will block agents that go beyond what the shopper intends or change payment methods. That runs against the trend: Amazon blocks shopping agents, and banks and airlines began doing the same this month.
Andon Labs runs a San Francisco corner store managed by Luna, an agent built on Claude Sonnet 4.6 with a $100,000 budget and a corporate card. Coverage framed the dismissal of an employee who was late for 17 of 23 shifts as the first firing carried out by a language model. The lab's own account is narrower: Luna had lost track of the attendance policy it wrote, recommended termination only after staff asked it to review its own rules, and initially proposed a warning. Humans made the call.
In an August 4 opinion, the Ninth Circuit vacated the injunction that had kept **Perplexity's Comet** browser off Amazon, holding that Amazon was unlikely to win its claim under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The panel found it was the user, not Perplexity, who accessed Amazon's computers, because the assistant reads screenshots on the user's own device rather than talking to Amazon's servers. It is the first federal appellate ruling on whether AI agents may act on a user's behalf across third-party sites. The court called the result fact-specific and left Amazon's contract claims alive.
For Global Accessibility Awareness Day on Thursday, Meta announced an expansion of its Be My Eyes partnership that lets blind and low-vision users start hands-free video calls with trusted friends, family, or trained support representatives by saying *"Hey Meta, Be My Eyes with [name]"* on Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses. Connected support partners include Tesco, Sony, Amtrak, Hilton, Zain, and Clearblue — covering retail, telecom, consumer electronics, healthcare, travel, and hospitality. Meta also added a customizable one-touch action button for frequent accessibility features, voice-only call controls coming to WhatsApp and Messenger, and a new Wearables Device Access Toolkit for third-party assistive-tech apps. Be My Eyes now reports more than one million blind users and more than ten million sighted volunteers worldwide.
Sierra, the customer-service AI agents platform founded by **Bret Taylor** (also OpenAI's chair), closed a $950 million round led by Tiger Global and GV at a post-money valuation above $15 billion. The company says over 40 percent of the Fortune 50 are customers, with annual recurring revenue jumping from $100 million in November to $150 million in February. Its agents handle mortgage refinancing, insurance claims, returns, and donor outreach — a signal that the race to own the enterprise AI agent layer has crystallized around a clear front-runner.
Gov. Wes Moore signed HB 895 — the Protection from Predatory Pricing Act — on April 28, making Maryland the first US state to outlaw "surveillance-based" personalized pricing for groceries. Food retailers above 15,000 square feet (and third-party delivery platforms) cannot set individualized prices based on a shopper's data, history, ethnicity, or income, and posted prices must hold for at least one full business day. The rules take effect October 1, 2026, with $10,000 first-offense and $25,000 repeat-offense civil penalties, enforced solely by the state Attorney General. Loyalty programs and promotional offers stay exempt — a carve-out consumer-rights groups call a meaningful loophole.