Meta is preparing to turn its smart glasses into a digital wallet, according to a reverse-engineering leak from Android Authority. Hours before the company’s Meta Connect keynote, evidence shows that Muse—the company’s new personal AI agent—is being tested as a replacement for Meta AI on smart glasses, complete with a native payment wallet called Meta…
When Meta launched Muse in September 2026, the promise was seamless utility: an agent capable of handling purchasing, booking, and email tasks on behalf of a user. Similar capabilities arrived with Apple’s Siri AI and the beta release of SpaceXAI’s GrokBot. These tools represent a shift from passive software to active agents that make real-world…
Agentic commerce is currently a study in mismatched expectations. The Agentic Commerce 2026 report notes that 42% of merchants are testing agentic workflows, yet a mere 3% of transactions actually involve agents. While 70% of industry leaders call this the most disruptive force in commerce, the reality is a fragmented mess of competing protocols. This…
The $100M Bet on Tax Compliance Agents Tax compliance is rarely the stuff of headlines, but it is exactly the kind of high-stakes, high-complexity problem that AI is currently being drafted to solve. Numeral, led by CEO Sam Ross and co-founder Matt DuVall, just secured a $100M Series C funding round led by Insight Partners.…
Roughly 61 million American consumers now begin their retail shopping research using AI. They have swapped the search box. What they have not swapped is where the money goes. Six in ten AI-assisted purchases still close on Amazon, according to new PYMNTS data. The search routine changed. The reward did not. This is the central…
Baselayer has raised $35 million in a Series A led by M13, with participation from Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital, and Matt Thompson of Socure. The round, announced September 22, marks the first dedicated capital injection into Know Your Agent identity infrastructure — the layer that lets banks, merchants, and platforms verify which AI…
The digital asset market is currently bifurcated by the regulatory architecture of the GENIUS Act, which has effectively forced a choice between bank-native tokenized deposits and yield-optimized stablecoin wrappers. At the center of this divide is Section 4(a)(11), which explicitly prohibits stablecoin issuers from paying interest or yield to holders. Tokenized deposits function as bank…
The 288-Launch Play At Stripe Sessions on April 29, 2026, the company unveiled 288 new products and features. The number itself is not the story. The story is what they cover: discovery, checkout, settlement, fraud prevention, and financial infrastructure — every layer an agent needs to move money from intent to settlement. “AI is the…
The holiday shopping season is no longer just about retail calendars; it is about the training schedules of our digital assistants. With Black Friday arriving on November 27, 2026, we are roughly nine weeks out from the start of the peak shopping window. For those considering delegating their gift lists to an AI, the time…
The Readiness Gap Only 11% of SMBs and 19% of large merchants currently qualify as agent-ready, according to the PYMNTS/Visa GDSI Merchant Edition. This stark statistic serves as the primary bottleneck for agentic commerce, separating the theoretical potential of autonomous shopping from the reality of digital retail. While the industry fixates on the reasoning capabilities…