Overview
- Holiday-season polling from Shopify indicates roughly two-thirds of consumers in wealthy countries plan to use AI for shopping, while a Visa survey finds about 75% of Mexican respondents already use AI in online purchases.
- Platforms deepen commerce ties to agents as integration tensions grow, with OpenAI linking to Etsy and Shopify, Walmart enabling ChatGPT purchases, Google building agentic shopping features, and Amazon blocking external crawlers and suing Perplexity.
- The UK AI Security Institute reports one in three adults now turn to AI for emotional support or social interaction, with daily use for some users and lab tests showing vulnerability-exploitation capabilities roughly doubling every eight months.
- Regulatory and systemic responses advanced in 2025, including the EU AI Act entering into force and Banxico naming AI an explicit financial stability risk in its December report.
- A changing labor and learning landscape is emerging, with research tying AI-shaped application materials to lower hiring rates and salaries, widespread AI-led interviews facing legal and bias scrutiny, and higher-education bodies urging AI literacy, curriculum reform and algorithmic sovereignty.