b2b
30 articles about b2b in AI news
Walmart expands B2B services
Walmart is expanding its B2B services beyond retail, now offering plumbing, electrical, and general facilities maintenance to local convenience stores and small businesses, leveraging its existing infrastructure and vendor relationships.
B2B and B2C Companies Increase AI Investment as Agentic Commerce Gains Traction
A new report highlights a significant uptick in AI investment across both B2B and B2C commerce sectors, driven by the emerging trend of 'agentic commerce'—where autonomous AI agents handle complex customer journeys. This signals a strategic shift from basic automation to intelligent, end-to-end task management.
Money Printer AI Automates Outbound Sales: URL to Outreach
A new AI tool called Money Printer claims to automate B2B outbound sales. Users paste a website URL, and the system finds target companies, identifies decision-makers, writes personalized outreach, and initiates contact via email and phone calls.
Google-Anthropic 5 GW Deal: AI Capacity Pre-Sold at Gigawatt Scale
Google and Anthropic signed a 5 GW compute deal, pre-selling AI capacity at gigawatt scale and reshaping infrastructure financing.
Time's First AI A-List: Alibaba, ByteDance, Zhipu AI Make Cut
Time magazine named Alibaba, ByteDance, and Zhipu AI among its first AI-specific top 10 list, alongside six US companies and France's Mistral AI. The recognition highlights China's growing global influence through open-source models and consumer AI apps.
Pinterest Builds Dedicated Conversion Candidate Generation Model
Pinterest details the design and deployment of a dedicated shopping conversion candidate generation model, replacing engagement-based retrieval. Key innovations include a parallel DCN v2 and MLP architecture (+11% recall) and a unified multi-task approach that boosted conversion recall by +42% over their 2023 model.
PerfectSquashBench Tests Image Model Anchoring Bias vs. Text Models
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick released PerfectSquashBench, a test showing image generation models exhibit stronger anchoring bias than text models, getting 'stuck' on initial directions and requiring context window clearing.
Shopify Engineering details 'Flow generation through natural language'
Shopify Engineering describes a 2026 approach to generating complex workflows (flows) from natural language prompts using an agentic modeling framework, enabling non-technical users to create automation.
ECLASS-Augmented Semantic Product Search
Researchers systematically evaluated LLM-assisted dense retrieval for semantic product search on industrial electronic components. Augmenting embeddings with ECLASS hierarchical metadata created a crucial semantic bridge, achieving 94.3% Hit_Rate@5 versus 31.4% for BM25.
LLMAR: A Tuning-Free LLM Framework for Recommendation in Sparse
Researchers propose LLMAR, a tuning-free recommendation framework that uses LLM reasoning to infer user 'latent motives' from sparse text-rich data. It outperforms state-of-the-art models in sparse industrial scenarios while keeping inference costs low, offering a practical alternative to costly fine-tuning.
Research Paper Proposes Security Framework for Autonomous AI Agents in Commerce
A Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) paper analyzes the emerging threat landscape for autonomous LLM agents conducting commerce. It identifies 12 attack vectors across five dimensions and proposes a layered defense architecture. This is a foundational security analysis for a nascent but high-stakes technology.
BBC Reports AI Chatbots Are Primary Health Advice Entry Point
The BBC reports AI chatbots have become a major front door for health advice. New evidence indicates hybrid human-AI systems outperform pure AI models in healthcare contexts.
MiniMax AI Powers Wati's Astra Voice 2.0 for WhatsApp Business
MiniMax AI is providing its voice technology to power Wati's Astra Voice 2.0 platform, enabling businesses to deploy conversational voice AI on WhatsApp in multiple languages.
AI Models Dumber as Compute Shifts to Enterprise, Users Report
Users report noticeable performance degradation in major AI models this month. Analysts suggest providers are shifting computational resources to prioritize enterprise clients over general subscribers.
New Research Establishes State-of-the-Art for Virtual Try-Off with
A new arXiv paper introduces a systematic framework for Virtual Try-Off (VTOFF)—reconstructing a garment's canonical form from a worn image. The Dual-UNet Diffusion model achieves state-of-the-art results on standard datasets, providing foundational insights for this emerging computer vision task.
Samsung Projects Record $14.6B Q1 Profit on 300% DRAM Price Surge
Samsung Electronics expects a record Q1 operating profit of 20 trillion won (~$14.6B), nearly triple YoY, fueled by soaring AI-driven demand and a 300% price increase for DRAM chips.
ElevenLabs Voice Cloning API Priced from $5 to $1,320/Month
ElevenLabs' AI voice cloning service has published pricing tiers from $5 to $1,320 per month. This formalizes the cost structure for developers and businesses integrating synthetic speech.
OpenAI Projects $2.5B in 2026 Ad Revenue, Targets $100B by 2030
OpenAI projects $2.5 billion in advertising revenue for 2026, with plans to scale to $100 billion by 2030. This strategy, banking on 2.75 billion weekly users, directly pits it against Google and Meta and contrasts with Anthropic's ad-free model.
Visa Launches Global AI Agent Shopping Infrastructure
Visa is launching a global infrastructure to enable AI agents to shop and transact autonomously. This move, alongside reports of a 25% conversion uplift from Frasers Group's AI assistant, signals the acceleration of 'agentic commerce'.
Perplexity Revenue Doubled in Q1 2026 After Launching Computer
Perplexity's revenue doubled in the quarter following the launch of its 'Computer' feature. The company now has over 100 million users and growing enterprise adoption.
Home Depot Hires Ford Tech Leader to Scale Agentic AI
Home Depot has recruited a top AI executive from Ford Motor Company to lead the scaling of 'agentic AI' systems. This signals a major strategic push by the retail giant to automate complex, multi-step tasks. The move reflects the intensifying competition for AI talent between retail, automotive, and tech sectors.
Zhipu AI and MiniMax Post 131.9% and 159% Revenue Growth in First Post-IPO Earnings
Zhipu AI and MiniMax, two leading Chinese AI startups, reported their first post-IPO financials, showing 131.9% and 159% year-on-year revenue growth respectively in 2025. This demonstrates initial commercial viability for their model-as-a-service and consumer app strategies, even as net losses continue to expand.
When AI Becomes the Buyer: How Agentic Commerce is Reshaping Retail
The Wall Street Journal examines the emerging trend of 'Agentic Commerce,' where AI agents autonomously research, compare, and purchase products. This represents a fundamental shift in the retail landscape, moving beyond simple chatbots to systems that act as independent buyers, requiring brands to fundamentally rethink digital strategy, pricing, and customer engagement.
Perigold Defies Luxury Slowdown with Physical Expansion and Content Strategy
Wayfair's luxury home brand Perigold is growing via new stores and influencer collaborations, leveraging Wayfair's tech infrastructure while targeting affluent, fashion-adjacent consumers. This contrasts with broader luxury market headwinds.
MDKeyChunker: A New RAG Pipeline for Structure-Aware Document Chunking and Single-Call Enrichment
Researchers propose MDKeyChunker, a three-stage RAG pipeline for Markdown documents that performs structure-aware chunking, enriches chunks with a single LLM call extracting seven metadata fields, and restructures content via semantic keys. It achieves high retrieval accuracy (Recall@5=1.000 with BM25) while reducing LLM calls.
Legal AI Startup Harvey Raises $200M at $11 Billion Valuation, Signaling Enterprise AI Premium
Harvey, an AI platform for law firms, raised $200 million in a new funding round, valuing the company at $11 billion. The deal underscores the high valuation premium for AI startups targeting specialized, high-value enterprise workflows.
New Research Proposes Consensus-Driven Group Recommendation Framework for Sparse Data
A new arXiv paper introduces a hybrid framework combining collaborative filtering with fuzzy aggregation to generate group recommendations from sparse rating data. It aims to improve consensus, fairness, and satisfaction without requiring demographic or social information.
Visual Product Search Benchmark: A Rigorous Evaluation of Embedding Models for Industrial and Retail Applications
A new benchmark evaluates modern visual embedding models for exact product identification from images. It tests models on realistic industrial and retail datasets, providing crucial insights for deploying reliable visual search systems where errors are costly.
Shopify Prepares for AI Agent Takeover of E-commerce
Shopify is preparing its platform for a shift to AI agents, which are autonomous systems that can perform complex e-commerce tasks. This signals a strategic move beyond simple chatbots towards a more automated, agent-driven future for online retail.
Agentic AI Is Reshaping Commerce. Is the Law Ready?
Agentic AI systems that autonomously research, select, and purchase products are moving from the periphery to core e-commerce. The Fashion Law examines the urgent legal and regulatory questions this raises for businesses and consumers.