Thursday’s AI Report
• 1. 🛒 ChatGPT now a shopping platform?
• 2. 🎥 Make how-to videos with Guidde
• 3. 🌍 How Microsoft saved $500M using AI in customer service
• 4. ✅ Schedule your AI audit with Upscaile
• 5. ⚙️ Trending AI tools
• 6. 🧬 AI rivals call out “reckless” xAI
• 7. 🛑 Meta deal sparks Scale AI layoffs?
• 8. 📑 Recommended resources
Read Time: 5 minutes
📢 Tomorrow, this week’s episode of The AI Report Podcast drops: This week, Liam talks Eric Sui—indie hacker, builder, and creator of the Agents Playbook—to explore how to think and build like a true agentic founder. Set your clocks, this is gonna be big!
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ChatGPT now a shopping platform?
🚨 Our Report
After announcing a partnership with Shopify in April and hiring the former CEO of Instacart—Fidji Simo—in May, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that OpenAI is reportedly now developing a shopping checkout system that would allow users to complete purchases and transactions directly within ChatGPT.
🔓 Key Points
Currently, ChatGPT displays products and includes links that redirect users to external online retailers so they can complete their purchase, so this new checkout feature would keep people within the ChatGPT ecosystem.
Although the feature is in development, OpenAI has been demoing early versions and discussing partnership details, but essentially, retailers would pay OpenAI a commission for sales made within ChatGPT.
Many are predicting that this pivot could pose a threat to Google, as consumers are already turning to AI search engines for product discovery, bypassing traditional search engines, so this could reduce visits even further.
🔐 Relevance
Following on from the above, this venture into building shopping checkout features and partnering with online retailers signifies a significant shift in OpenAI’s revenue strategy. Currently, OpenAI’s main source of revenue comes from its premium subscriptions, leaving the “free version” as an untapped source of revenue… until now. This move would position ChatGPT as an all-in-one transactional platform (as opposed to being just a research one, as it is now) that could even compete with the likes of Amazon and Walmart.
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How Microsoft saved $500M using AI in customer service
Microsoft’s customer service and sales processes were time-consuming and resource-intensive, leading to high expenses and slow service delivery.
They deployed AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants to handle routine inquiries, reducing the workload on human agents.
These AI-driven enhancements in sales processes contributed to a 9% increase in revenue.
In customer service, Microsoft achieved higher customer satisfaction scores and saved $500M in call center costs by offloading simpler queries to AI.
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AI safety researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic have slammed xAI for its “reckless” and “irresponsible” safety culture, following weeks of scandals, including antisemitic comments from its latest model, Grok 4.
Although rivalry between AI companies is expected, these researchers appear genuinely concerned: “I didn’t want to post on Grok safety since I work at a competitor…but the way safety is handled is irresponsible.”
There seems to be a particular issue with xAI’s decision not to publish system safety cards, which detail AI model training methods and safety evaluations, so it’s unclear what safety training (if any) was done on Grok 4.
Scale AI—a data labeling company that annotates data used by leading AI firms—is about to lay off 200 employees (14% of its workforce) and 500 global contractors, reportedly to “streamline the business.”
However, this comes just one month after Meta hired Scale AI’s founder and CEO—Alexandr Wang—and other key staff members, to head up its new superintelligence lab, in return for a $14.3B stake in the company.
This left AI firms feeling violated, questioning whether their proprietary data could now be exposed, encouraging many (including Google and Microsoft) to review their partnerships.
Why is Scale AI cutting its workforce?
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