OpenAI has started implementing ads in ChatGPT.

The first ads appeared in the interface of the free version and the Go tariff for some users in the US. The company claims that the innovation does not violate privacy: advertisers receive only generalized statistics and do not see the history of correspondence.

Targeting works in real time — for example, when discussing cooking, the system will offer food delivery services, however, in dialogues about politics or health, advertising is completely prohibited.

Advertising revenues should compensate for the enormous costs of computing power.

What’s at stake for merchants.

That hesitation matters for merchants, especially as retailers and marketplaces race to build agentic AI directly into the shopping experience. Take, for instance, grocery giant Kroger. In November, the company announced that it was partnering with Instacart to provide “agentic shopping experiences” for its customers.

“Interacting with an AI agent makes shopping and meal planning as simple as a conversation, helping customers build their basket or offering meal suggestions, truly understanding what matters most to them,” Kroger Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer Yael Cosset said in a statement about the announcement.

Retail giant Amazon sits in an interesting spot, thanks to its Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform. Amazon executives are betting that shoppers will eventually come around on agentic commerce.

“It has a chance to be good for customers, has a chance to be really good for eCommerce,” Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s last earnings call in October.

He added that while Amazon’s marketplace is already great for customers who are shopping with a specific purchase in mind, agentic assistants will be able to play the role that an in-store salesperson would usually take on.

From Etsy’s vantage point, shoppers aren’t fully comfortable with agentic commerce yet, but momentum is building.

Amazon will launch a marketplace where publishers can sell their content to AI companies, according to Reuters.

Amazon expects the marketplace to become one of its key AI tools.

➡️ The information came amid negotiations between publishers and AI companies on the rules for using online content, both for training models and for generating responses to users.

Publishers are pushing for payment for use, expecting that payments will increase as the volume of use of their content increases.

Research: Neural networks make you work harder, not less.

Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, came to a paradoxical conclusion: the introduction of AI does not unload employees, but only increases the load. For eight months, the authors observed a technology company and found out that access to neural networks creates a productivity trap.

Employees who have been paid for their subscriptions have started volunteering to take on tasks that were previously outsourced, such as designers writing code and researchers doing engineering. The desire for maximum efficiency has led to people sending prompts even during meetings and lunch breaks. As a result, the workday is not shortened, but rather condensed.

❗️❗️❗️The Italian tax police are conducting searches at Amazon's headquarters.

The police suspect that Amazon had a permanent presence in Italy from 2019 to 2024.

However, the American company only started paying taxes in August 2024. The prosecutor's office believes that the marketplace evaded taxes worth $1.42 billion during this period.

The European Ariane 64 rocket successfully launched the American Amazon Leo satellites.

This was reported by the NSF portal. The Ariane 6 rocket with four solid-fuel boosters (Ariane 64) and 32 Amazon Leo (formerly Kuiper) satellites launched from the Kourou Space Center in French Guiana on February 12 at 19:50 Moscow time. The spacecraft launch mission lasted 114 minutes.

The flight was the first for the Ariane 64 variant. Previously, the Ariane 6 carrier was launched five times with two side solid-fuel boosters (in the Ariane 62 variant). This mission also marked the first use of an extended rocket head fairing.

Once in space, the 32 satellites will join Amazon’s Leo satellite internet constellation. Originally named Project Kuiper, Amazon rebranded the service in November 2025. Once operational, the constellation will offer broadband internet access to customers and communities worldwide, relaying data between Amazon’s ground stations and customer terminals.

🛍️ Argos Prepares Major Marketplace Update

📢 UK retailer Argos announced a major platform update — the company plans to open its marketplace to third-party sellers.

🔄 This move aims to expand product selection and compete with giants like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy.

📈 What this will bring: • more SKUs and suppliers on Argos • higher traffic and brand visibility • opportunities for local sellers to reach new audiences
Takeaway: Not only Chinese marketplaces are expanding — European retailers are also strengthening their marketplace ecosystems.

Trends for the future of commerce.

Let's start analyzing them together with the Tomorrow's Commerce 2026 report from VML.

AI assistants

🔴 Currently, only 3% of consumers use chatbots to find inspiration for a purchase, 4% to find the product itself, and 5% to find information about the product.

🔴 At the same time, 68% have tried tools like ChatGPT, and the demand for a seamless customer journey, fast transactions, and low prices remains high.

🔴 Soon, AI assistants will increasingly help consumers with this demand by searching and comparing products, reading reviews, and more.

🔴 Retailers and brands should adapt to bots by increasing their online presence, providing relevant expert data, and structuring product descriptions.

We continue to analyze the Tomorrow's Commerce 2026 report from VML.

Agent AI

🔴Within three to five years, neural networks will learn not only to answer questions, but also to perform actions for people: track discounts, communicate with retailers’ chatbots, and even make purchases.

🔴About half of consumers around the world are ready to let such neural networks act on their behalf (48%) and are happy to outsource the search for discounts (52%).

🔴 This will require sellers to optimize their products for AI, paying special attention to automatically tracked trust signals and creating interfaces for automated transactions between bots.

Em Altman accused companies of "AI-washing" in mass layoffs.

The head of OpenAI said that business is increasingly writing off staff cuts to the introduction of neural networks, although in fact layoffs were planned in advance for other reasons. In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Altman noted that the real displacement of people by artificial intelligence will only become widespread in a few years.

Nowadays, many corporations use the hype surrounding technology as a convenient excuse for making unpopular decisions.

Amazon, IBM, and Salesforce have previously openly acknowledged the connection between AI and layoffs.

IKEA sold out stuffed orangutans because of Punch the Macaque.

Store stocks in Japan, the US, and South Korea are completely depleted. The reason for the rush is the viral story of a baby macaque named Punch at Japan's Ichikawa Zoo. After his mother abandoned him, employees gave him a stuffed orangutan, which became a "surrogate mother" for the primate. Videos of Punch clinging to the toy even during conflicts with other monkeys have garnered millions of views.

The company promised to return the orangutans to the shelves as soon as stock is replenished.

Amazon has become the world's largest company by revenue.

Amazon's revenue increased by almost 12% to reach $716.9 billion. This is a record-breaking figure in the company's history. Amazon has taken the top spot in the Fortune Global 500 ranking. Previously, Walmart, an American hypermarket chain, was in the top spot for 11 consecutive years.

Experts say that without Amazon Web Services, the company's main growth driver, the online giant's revenue would have been much lower at $588 billion. However, in terms of market capitalization, Amazon has long surpassed Walmart ($2.2 trillion vs. $1 trillion).

Every fifth video in YouTube recommendations is "AI slop".

A study by Kapwing found that more than 20% of the videos the algorithm suggests to new users are low-quality AI videos. Analysts have identified 278 of the largest channels that generate only such content: in total, they have accumulated 63 billion views and bring about $117 million in revenue per year to their owners.

Such videos belong to the category of brainrot ("brain rot") — they are devoid of plot and meaning, but due to visual absurdity, they keep viewers' attention.

The most popular formats have become surreal cartoons and neural network-generated footage of disasters.

Your roadmap for tomorrow according to Tomorrow's Commerce 2026 report from VML.

📍 Audit and pilot automation: Identify high-volume warehouse tasks for robotics; test ROI in controlled environments

📍Explore robotics revenue streams: Assess whether to develop, partner, or service consumer or B2B robotics markets

📍 Design for robot compatibility: Rethink packaging and fulfilment for automated handling and last-mile robotic delivery

📍 Prepare workforce strategy: Plan for displacement, reskilling, and transparent communications; own the narrative early

📍 Make operations robot-readable: Extend agent-native commerce to include the physical specs robots need to handle and deliver products seamlessly.

ChatGPT is losing ground.

OpenAI's collaboration with the US Department of Defense has triggered a massive wave of uninstalls of the ChatGPT mobile app.

According to Sensor Tower, on February 28th—the day after the deal was announced—the number of app uninstalls in the US jumped by 295%. The typical daily uninstall rate over the past 30 days was 9%. While users are deleting ChatGPT, competitors are celebrating their triumph. Claude, an app from Anthropic, which previously refused a military contract "for reasons of conscience," has become a new favorite among Americans.

The world has signed the first AI ethics declaration.

More than 90 countries and organizations, including the United States, China, Russia, the European Union, and the United Kingdom, signed the first global document on the principles of AI development at the AI Summit in New Delhi. The key principle is equal access to technology.

AI is currently effectively monopolized. Stanford researchers estimate that over 90% of the leading developments in this industry are owned by the US and China, because this work requires the use of expensive computing power.

The summit participants believed that this was not a reason to close the market, and as a solution to the problem, they adopted the AI Democratic Diffusion Charter. This is a voluntary framework aimed at ensuring access to basic smart resources for countries that cannot create them on their own. However, the Charter does not contain any coercive mechanisms, and each country retains the right to regulate AI as they see fit.

Additionally, New Delhi announced unprecedented investments in the further development of AI, which will exceed $250 billion.

Attacks on data centers in the Middle East region are causing disruptions in services and logistics.

In recent days, the Middle East has experienced severe disruptions in the operation of internet infrastructure after attacks on several data centers. According to media reports, the attacks targeted facilities related to Amazon's cloud infrastructure, including sites in Bahrain and Dubai.

The incidents led to temporary disruptions in the operation of banking services, online platforms, and logistics systems in the region. Some online services were unavailable, and product deliveries faced delays.

To compensate for the loss of capacity, Amazon is redistributing the load to other server clusters. This increases the strain on the infrastructure and may slow down the performance of certain services.

Amazon launches new AI tools for sellers.

Amazon continues to implement artificial intelligence in tools for sellers.

A new AI tool, Dynamic Canvas, has appeared in Seller Central.

It allows sellers through ordinary text requests:

📍 to build analytical panels
📍to analyze sales
📍to predict growth
📍to receive recommendations for business development

AI automatically creates dashboards and analytical reports based on account data. In fact, Amazon is turning sales analytics into a dialogue with an AI assistant.

OpenAI has built ChatGPT into Excel with access to Bloomberg, Moody's, and S&P data.

The company has introduced a beta version of ChatGPT for Excel, an add-on based on GPT-5.4 that works directly within spreadsheets. The neural network can build financial models, update formulas, and explain the logic behind calculations.

The main advantage is integration with financial providers (Moody's, Dow Jones Factiva, MSCI, MT Newswire). Data can be pulled into the workspace without switching tabs, and the result can be exported to PDF or Word with automatic links to the sources. In investment banking tests, the new model achieved 87.3% accuracy compared to 43.7% for GPT-5.

Access is available to users at the Business, Enterprise, Edu, Pro, and Plus levels. A version for Google Sheets has been announced, but no release date has been set yet.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ranked 4th in the Forbes ranking.

Forbes published the 40th global list of billionaires. This year, the number of ultra-rich people reached a record high of 3,428.

The main driver of growth was the AI boom. Elon Musk remains the leader for the second year in a row. His net worth has increased by almost half a trillion dollars due to the merger of SpaceX and the startup xAI into a single entity with a valuation of $1.25 trillion.

Google founders Larry Page ($257 billion) and Sergey Brin ($237 billion) are ranked second and third, respectively. Jeff Bezos has dropped to fourth place, while Mark Zuckerberg has moved up to fifth place. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang entered the top 10 after his company's capitalization reached a historic high of $5 trillion.

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao ($110 billion) also made a triumphant return to the list after being pardoned by Donald Trump.

10 000 writers have released an empty book in protest against AI.

At the London Book Fair, they presented the publication of Don’t Steal This Book ("Don’t Steal This Book"). It has no text, and the entire content is a list of authors' names. Among the "co-authors" are Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Osman, and Philippa Gregory.

The event was organized by activist Ed Newton-Rex. He stated that the artificial intelligence industry is built on the labor of others and deprives creative people of their livelihood. The manifesto on the cover calls on the British government to reject the legalization of "creative theft" in favor of IT giants.