We are honored to count you among the 1+ MILLION readers of our weekly newsletter. Please help grow our community by inviting your friends to subscribe.

If you’re new here, we celebrate the ways Artificial Intelligence is making our world more Human. Make sure you check my new book and community.

This week’s 5 top stories you can't miss:

1️⃣ Visa and Mastercard give AI agents credit cards

Visa has introduced Intelligent Commerce, enabling AI to shop and pay on behalf of consumers through partnerships with Anthropic, OpenAI, and others. Meanwhile, Mastercard is releasing ‘Agent Pay’ to embed payments into AI conversations.

The details:

• Intelligent Commerce uses AI-ready cards with tokenized credentials and user-set preferences to let AI agents find and buy items without exposing card data.

• Consumers can set spending limits and conditions while sharing basic purchase data to help personalize shopping recommendations.

• Mastercard’s ‘Agent Pay’ is a similar platform enabling easy payment experiences when interacting with AI agents to explore and shop products.

• The news comes alongside ChatGPT Search’s shopping upgrades and other shopping-focused agentic efforts from Perplexity, Amazon, and others.

My take:

The next step in the evolution of e-commerce is looking more like AI commerce, with payment rails being laid by the legacy giants to let AI agents purchase items directly for users instead of just finding and recommending. While agents may not yet be as capable as many expected, their time is coming soon.

2️⃣ Xi pushes for China’s AI self-reliance

Chinese President Xi Jinping just declared AI self-sufficiency as a national priority, promising government support to boost the development of AI chips, software, and talent, amid escalating tech rivalry with the U.S.

The details:

• Xi outlined a "new whole national system" approach, aiming to develop high-end chips and software while increasing AI education and talent development.

• The initiative includes expanded government policy support, IP protection, and research funding to overcome tech bottlenecks.

• Chinese chipmaker Huawei is reportedly testing a new advanced chip to offer a domestic alternative to NVIDIA processors, currently restricted by the U.S.

• Rumors have also spread about the upcoming release of DeepSeek R2, with price and training cost cuts, and the use of Huawei chips over NVIDIA.

My take:

Between a potential second ‘DeepSeek moment’ around the corner, domestic AI chip alternatives making U.S. export controls ineffective, and a quickly closing gap in models, China is putting its foot on the gas with a country-wide effort to grab hold of the AI lead — while proving it doesn’t need U.S. chips to succeed.

3️⃣GPT-4o gets rolled back after personality backlash

OpenAI just announced the reversal of a controversial GPT-4o update that made the model excessively agreeable and flattering in any context, igniting an industry-wide debate about AI personality tuning.

The details:

• Last week’s GPT-4o update aimed at improving personality inadvertently led to excessive sycophancy, with the AI validating even poor or harmful user ideas.

• OpenAI identified the cause as over-optimizing on short-term user feedback (like thumbs-up signals) without fully considering long-term interaction quality.

• OpenAI Head of Model Behavior Joanne Jang held an AMA on Reddit, providing insights on model training and plans for personality customization.

• Jang said the company is working on both a default personality for all users and preset offerings that users could customize on their own.

My take:

With hundreds of millions of ChatGPT users and models plugged into everything from mental health support to business operations, the stakes are high for tuning a personality that influences the masses. While OpenAI was quick to fix this issue, the sycophancy was glaring and viral — what happens when it’s more subtle?

4️⃣OpenAI competes with Google Shopping

OpenAI has updated its ChatGPT search feature to include a shopping feature that will make it "simpler and faster to find, compare, and buy products in ChatGPT."

The details:

• When a user asks a shopping-related query (eg. “Best espresso machines under $200”), ChatGPT will display product cards with images, prices, star ratings, and links to websites where they can buy the product.

• It’s initially being tested with fashion, beauty, home, and electronic goods, and OpenAI plans to integrate its ChatGPT memory feature to reference previous chats and provide more personalized shopping experiences.

• Alongside this update, ChatGPT will now also display trending searches when a user starts typing a question (like Google’s autocomplete feature) and enable users to use WhatsApp to get answers from ChatGPT.

My take:

This new shopping feature is a direct challenge to Google’s shopping feature, which has been criticized for prioritizing the products that pay for ad space over the most relevant products available—diluting the quality of its recommendations—so it will be interesting to see how OpenAI’s shopping feature compares, as OpenAI has established that its shopping results are completely organic (they’re based on available third party data like reviews, pricing, product descriptions), and its product recommendations are not sponsored, meaning OpenAI will not receive any commission for the products it displays.

5️⃣ Trump pushes AI into schools

President Trump has signed an Executive Order (EO) titled “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth,” which aims to educate teachers and students at the K-12 level about AI technologies and tools to improve educational outcomes and ensure the United States remains a global leader in this technological revolution.

The details:

• Bringing AI education into schools will nurture the next generation of US AI innovators, leading to new heights of scientific and economic achievement and preparing students for the workforce of the future.

• The EO calls for a task force, chaired by the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which will be responsible for developing online resources to teach AI literacy to K-12 students promptly.

• It also instructs the Secretary of Education to prioritize federal spending to provide teachers with the necessary resources to teach their students about AI and help them integrate it to reduce time-intensive administrative tasks.

My take:

Overall, the “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth” EO has been positively received by education leaders, with most believing that it’s an essential way to align American classrooms “to meet the demands of accelerating innovation and a rapidly changing workforce” and “to keep up American leadership in the global economy.” However, some have expressed concerns about how particular EO objectives will be achieved, as some stipulations are vague and lack deadlines.

[SPONSORED] JOIN ME and top business leaders at SAP's flagship event to explore their bold vision, breakthrough innovations, and real-world solutions transforming industries.

Register here for the Sapphire Virtual session or in-person in Orlando and Madrid.

• Hear from industry leaders using SAP to tackle today’s biggest challenges

• Get a first look at the latest updates to SAP Business Suite and Joule Agents

• Dive into real product demos, advanced analytics, and intelligent apps

The two posts you can't miss this week:

👉 🚨 This girl does not exist.

👉 🌍 I never used to think about Earth’s magnetic field.

Let us join hands to make our world more human! — Pascal

#artificialintelligence #intelligentautomation #futureofwork #AI #automation #management #technology #innovation