Apple picks Google, agentic shopping arrives, and Stack Overflow finally folds

Apple confirms Gemini will power the new Siri. AI shopping agents move from demo to default. And the data-pipeline implications of Stack Overflow's decline are starting to bite.

Apple’s AI strategy finally landed this week, agents started shopping for us, and the long tail of AI’s impact on traditional web traffic is starting to show.

Apple Intelligence will run on Google's Gemini

My take: This is the year's first landmark deal. Apple needed a foundation model partner, evaluated OpenAI, and went with Google. The new Siri will be noticeably better, which matters because hundreds of millions of people are about to get a much smarter AI assistant whether they sought it out or not. Expect rising customer expectations across every digital touchpoint.

Agentic shopping becomes real

My take: Google launched a Universal Commerce Protocol with Shopify and Walmart. Amazon has agents quietly buying products from third-party sites on customers' behalf. Microsoft is seeing 194% higher purchase rates when shoppers use Copilot Checkout. If you sell anything online, your AI-readiness is now a customer-acquisition issue. Make sure your product feeds, pricing, and checkout are agent-friendly.

AI tools are killing open-source business models

My take: Tailwind CSS revenue fell 80% despite the framework being more popular than ever. The reason: AI agents don't visit documentation pages, so the freemium model that funded everything broke. Worth thinking about if your business depends on traffic from technical users searching for answers. Search behaviour is shifting under your feet.

Stack Overflow usage back to 2008 levels

My take: Developers ask LLMs instead of forums now. There's a real second-order problem brewing here: next-generation AI models need fresh human-generated answers to train on. If you have specialist knowledge in your business, the data you're sitting on is becoming more valuable, not less.

ChatGPT Health and Claude for Healthcare both launched

My take: OpenAI's HIPAA-ready health experience lets users connect medical records and wellness apps for personalised insights. Anthropic is targeting providers with tools to navigate insurance and records. Meanwhile, Google scaled back its AI health overviews after getting things wrong. The trust gap between general-purpose AI and high-stakes domains is going to be a major theme this year.