Today on the Watson Weekly: Google treats compute like a moat, Amazon finally figures out groceries, Vinted runs the Amazon playbook in Europe, Apple shows up late to the glasses party — and finally, The Investor Minute with 5 items this week from the world of venture capital, acquisitions, and IPOs.

The Watson Weekly is sponsored by Avalara - the agentic AI platform automating global tax and compliance for leading eCommerce brands. For more details: https://avalaratax.watsonweekly.com

Google's Compute Discipline — Compute isn't just infrastructure anymore, it's the moat.

Amazon's Grocery Crystallizes — The 2025 shareholder letter dropped a $150 billion gross grocery number.

Vinted's Breakout — 47% GMV growth to €10.8 billion.

Apple's Glasses Play: Late but Lethal

Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky break down three stories reshaping the consumer and tech landscape. First, why GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro are expected to unlock $13B in new retail spending — and which brands stand to win as 80% of users size down.

Then, Nike's latest innovation shake-up: new chief Andy Caine steps in as the stock slides 32%, with Project Amplify, Nike Mind, and Aerofit on the horizon.

The Watson Weekly Weekend edition is sponsored by Avalara - the agentic AI platform automating global tax and compliance for leading eCommerce brands. For more details: https://avalaratax.watsonweekly.com/

Finally, Amazon's $200B and Google's $185B infrastructure bets — and why Sundar Pichai spends an hour a week personally rationing compute.

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The Agentic Debate Series Lunch @ Shoptalk Las Vegas 2026, Presented by Logicbroker. Recorded live in Las Vegas on March 24, 2026. Rick Watson hosts an agentic commerce debate with three retail practitioners who aren't selling anything — just calling it like they see it.

Chris Silver (CTO, JustFoodforDogs), Gina Lombardo (VP of Digital, Retrofête), and Dave Finnegan (Managing Director, BlackFinn Partners) go head-to-head on three questions the entire industry is dancing around:

Will ads ever work inside AI agents — or does injecting ads into a trusted conversation destroy the whole model? Is agentic commerce actually going to drive incremental revenue, or is it a hype cycle with a nice deck? And the big one: are websites doomed when an AI agent can just buy for you?

The answers are more nuanced — and more honest — than what you're hearing from the main stage. Topics include cost-per-action ad models, why "retail therapy" isn't going away, how luxury brands could use agents to increase AOV, the consumer trust crisis around hallucinations, and why your product data strategy matters more than your payments infrastructure right now.

If you're a merchant trying to figure out what to actually do about agentic commerce in 2026, this is the conversation.

The Agentic Debate Series Lunch @ Shoptalk Las Vegas 2026, Presented by Logicbroker, was sponsored by Logicbroker, Avalara, SCAYLE, and Fortier.

Timestamps

0:00 - Introduction

01:45 - Rick Watson setting the scene/background

05:10 - Panel members welcomed

07:35 - Will ads ever work in a trusted medium?

24:43 - Sponsor message from Logicbroker CEO Omar Qari

24:13 - Agentic commerce: a nothingburger or incremental?

49:38 - Sponsor message from SCAYLE Commerce Engine, Jake Wright

52:07 - Are websites doomed?

#watsonliveatshoptalk #agenticcommerce #nothingburger #advertising #website

Amazon cuts USPS volume, BNPL shapes where Gen Z gets their teeth cleaned, and why your product data is now an AI infrastructure problem.

This Watson Weekly episode covers:

The Amazon-USPS tentative deal and what a 20% volume reduction actually signals about Amazon's logistics endgame.

The Watson Weekly is sponsored by Avalara - the agentic AI platform automating global tax and compliance for leading eCommerce brands. For more details: https://avalaratax.watsonweekly.com

New April 2026 data on Buy Now Pay Later — not an acquisition tool, a retention weapon.

Walmart-backed Eko and the quiet war for AI-ready product catalogs.

How Revolve turns an absurd return rate into a full-price sales machine.

The Investor Minute with Accenture's Ookla acquisition, ProfitMind's Series A, Lio's $30M procurement automation raise, and OpenAI buying Promptfoo.

Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky break down three retail stories that challenge conventional wisdom this week.

Revolve runs a 60% return rate — triple the online average — and just posted a 60% profit surge. They explain how baking return costs into margins and offering frictionless two-day shipping produces 80% full-price sell-through and a customer base that treats their bedroom like a fitting room. Physical storefronts in Aspen and LA are next.

The Watson Weekly Weekend edition is sponsored by Avalara — automated tax compliance built for Shopify merchants, from calculation to returns. For more details: https://avalara.watsonweekly.com/

Lowe's just launched Home Care Plus: $99 a year gets you two Red Vest associate visits for dryer vent cleaning, HVAC filter swaps, smoke detector batteries, and water heater flushes. The real story is what Lowe's gets in return — appliance age data and a direct line to upsell the aging homeowner market.

And Buy Now, Pay Later is no longer just a checkout option. Millennials and Gen Z are 13x more likely than Baby Boomers to choose a merchant based on available financing. Fifty-five percent of Gen Z say installment options influence their choice of healthcare provider. BNPL is now a customer acquisition channel — and merchants paying 4.5–5% in fees may be getting the better end of the deal.

Rick Watson breaks down four stories shaping e-commerce and retail this week:

Shopify's partner town hall reveals a company that treats API chaos as a brand attribute — and why that's a problem for any hyperscaler ambition.

Lowe's bets $99 can put a red vest inside your home twice a year, and why that physical touchpoint is worth more than any app can replicate.

The Watson Weekly is sponsored by Avalara — automated tax compliance built for Shopify merchants, from calculation to returns. For more details: https://avalara.watsonweekly.com/

USPS wants an 8% fuel surcharge — the first in its history — and what the gap between that and Amazon's 3.5% tells you about structural efficiency.

And Allbirds is done: not restructuring, not pivoting — dissolved, with a $4 billion brand selling for $39 million.

Plus the Investor Minute: Zipline's $200M Series H, Cintas acquiring UniFirst for $5.5B, OpenAI snapping up Astral, Puratos buying Dawn Foods, and why Bark isn't going private yet.

Apple just turned 50. Amazon quietly acquired two robotics companies. And Allbirds — once valued at $4B— sold for $39M. Rick Watson and Nick Kaplan work through what these three stories have in common: the relentless pressure to find a next act before the first one runs out.

The Watson Weekly Weekend edition is sponsored by Avalara — automated tax compliance built for Shopify merchants, from calculation to returns. For more details: https://avalara.watsonweekly.com/

Topics this week: whether Tim Cook's Apple needs a visionary or just needs to win in AI, what Amazon's Rivr and Fauna acquisitions tell you about where last-mile delivery is actually going, and why Allbirds is a cautionary tale that applies to almost every DTC brand built on a single product. Plus: ambient AI through AirPods, the Rounders theory of the AI market, and why Rick switched from ChatGPT to Claude.

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Rick Watson is out. Nick Kaplan is in — and he's not giving the mic back.

In this special Kaplan Wednesday episode, Nick takes the research prompts Watson built for his agentic commerce analysis and turns them on the very stories they were designed to interrogate.

On the docket: Adyen's white paper claiming infrastructure is the constraint on agentic commerce (it isn't — and their own 95% AML false positive rate says why). Shopify's one-toggle Agentic Storefront promise and the data ownership problem it quietly creates. Klaviyo and Reebok Europe's Locale Aware Catalogs announcement — and the 149,999 merchants who aren't Reebok. The EU AI Act, which starts enforcement in five months and would like a word with every agentic protocol on the market. And the number that breaks every GMV projection: only 14% of shoppers trust AI recommendations enough to transact.

The Kaplan Weekly is sponsored by Avalara. — automated tax compliance built for Shopify merchants, from calculation to returns. For more details: https://avalara.watsonweekly.com/

The constraint isn't infrastructure. It's trust. Build that first.

Happy April Fools. Rick will be back next week.

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#ecommerce #kaplanwednesday #AIact #watsonwednesday