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Shopify opens its catalog up to more AI agents
Reading in data-saving mode. Read full article from The Verge website.
Published 10/13/2026 2:42:42 PM
Shopify opens its catalog up to more AI agents
Shopify previously announced a partnership with Meta’s Muse for AI-powered shopping and checkout.
Shopify previously announced a partnership with Meta’s Muse for AI-powered shopping and checkout.
More AI agents will soon be able to browse and purchase from Shopify listings, marking an expansion of the company’s agentic commerce ambitions.
Shopify announced Tuesday it will let shoppers configure their AI agents to purchase products on their behalf, giving more agents access to over a billion listings in Shopify’s catalog. (The catalog consists of both items on and off Shopify storefronts.) In September, Shopify announced it was partnering with Meta to allow its Muse agent to browse and purchase items on a human’s behalf; now, shoppers can use any agent without a partnership integration.
To set up the feature, customers connect an agent with their account on Shop, a Shopify-owned platform that consolidates orders, tracks packages, and recommends products. Like the Muse partnership, customers use the one-click Shop Pay feature to check out within the conversation with the agent. Orders placed through the agent are funneled back to the Shop app. Shopify is marketing the feature as a “personal shopper” that humans can give rules to, like setting budget guardrails or only displaying products with fast shipping. Buyers must approve each purchase.
E-commerce has become one of the battlegrounds in the era of AI — it’s no coincidence that many demos of agentic tools end with a transaction, whether it’s buying clothing, booking a flight, or ordering takeout on a human’s behalf. The tech industry, including big commerce players like Google and Amazon, are investing in AI-driven shopping tools where the end goal is an “agent” purchasing things for a human user. It’s also the basis of an ongoing fight between Amazon and AI companies like Perplexity — and more recently, Meta’s Muse — over whether agents should be able to shop on a customer’s behalf.
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The Genie 4 world model offers more realism and can create audio to accompany its interactive worlds.
The Genie 4 world model offers more realism and can create audio to accompany its interactive worlds.
Google announced today its Genie 4 world model for generating interactive experiences using AI. The company says the model has four main updates: It allows for more realistic worlds, lets users update an experience in real time with a natural language prompt, can generate audio, and uses Gemini 3.8 Flash under the hood to help with its simulations. It also can create experiences that are about two minutes long, up from one minute for the previous Genie 3 model.
Google is pitching Genie 4 as a tool that could be helpful for things like pre-visualization for filmmakers, prototyping game ideas, and making training scenarios for robots. But the company warns that, as simulations run longer, details and object permanence can shift over time.
I haven’t been able to try Genie 4 for myself — it’s launching first as a “research preview” to “trusted testers” — so I can’t tell you how it compares to the Genie 3-powered Project Genie, which I used to generate bad Nintendo knockoffs. But here are some examples from Google demonstrating what’s possible with the new model.
Genie 4 will be “coming soon” to Google AI Ultra subscribers, Google says, and the company has opened a waitlist where you can apply to be able to try it in Project Genie.
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An update to Firefox’s AI browsing experience can draw from your open tabs to help you fill out forms.
An update to Firefox’s AI browsing experience can draw from your open tabs to help you fill out forms.
Mozilla is updating Smart Window — Firefox’s AI-powered browsing experience — with a new feature that can help you fill out online forms based on your open tabs. As an example, Mozilla says Smart Window can pull information from your online portfolio or LinkedIn page to paste your work history into a job application.
You can try out this feature by clicking into a form with at least four text fields. From there, you’ll see an option to “Fill from sources,” which will show all of the tabs Firefox will draw from. You can then select or deselect tabs that you want Firefox to use, and the browser will generate suggestions based on the information in them. This feature currently supports text fields on web forms, but Mozilla is working to add support for dropdown menus and PDFs. Mozilla notes that data from your source pages is shared with Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, the AI model that generates the text suggestions.
Along with this update, you can now ask Firefox’s Smart Window to watch a certain webpage for sales, new job listings, and other updates. You can set up a task by typing “/watch” in the Smart Window chat, describing what you’re looking for, and adding the webpages you want to watch. Firefox can then check for updates on a daily or weekly basis, but only when the browser is open.
When Firefox detects the change you’re looking for, it will send you a notification through the Tasks button on the toolbar, or on your desktop (if you have desktop notifications enabled). Firefox will pause watching for updates if it doesn’t detect a change after 60 days, before stopping them completely after 90 days.
These two features are rolling out to the Smart Window beta on desktop in the US and Canada. They’ll be available in other countries in the “coming months.”
