Feeling that same holiday spirit, Perplexity just launched its own new shopping experience. It also learns your patterns based on past conversations so it can find items that match your aesthetic. A partnership with PayPal lets it go beyond research to provide checkout in the same user experience.
Just in time for Black Friday, ChatGPT introduced shopping research, which creates an in-depth guide in response to shopping questions. It can compare multiple items and ask clarifying questions, while building on its memory of you from past conversations. With 48% of consumers telling Adobe they plan to use AI for holiday shopping, the timing was perfect.
Scale Social AI has its own gift for quick services brands and restaurants: a QR code that customers scan to capture photos and videos of their experience. It then turns that content into short-form local ads. The company just raised $1.3 million in pre-seed funding to expand to other industries such as gyms and museums.
Meta has announced agreements with USA Today, People Inc., and other news publishers to pay for access to their content and link to their articles in its AI chatbot. It’s a sharp contrast to Perplexity, which the Chicago Tribune and New York Times are separately suing for allegedly scraping content and bypassing paywalls. Despite this deal, Meta apparently still opposes compensating publishers for news links in social media posts.