If you’re new, welcome! If you’re a regular, thanks for being here as we navigate this AI shift in eCommerce. I share what I’m testing and what’s actually moving the needle. Where’s the vault you ask? Every previous edition is saved here.

In this edition (shortcuts):
Claude Found the Gap Between Our Two Best Reports💥
How We Made Sure We Did Not Go Out of Budget on Prime Day
ChatGPT’s New Schedules Feature!
News Worth Reading

Anyone else talk to their computer more than they type into it these days?

I do. Emails, messages, half of my Claude Code prompts. And for a while I was paying for the privilege.

I'd been using WisprFlow, the voice-to-text app that lets you dictate into any app on your Mac. It's a genuinely good product. But two things kept nagging at me every time I hit record. My voice was leaving my Mac, getting processed on someone else's servers, and coming back as text. And I was paying $144 to $180 a year for that round trip, with a weekly word cap waiting for me the moment I dropped to the free tier.

So this month I sat down with Claude Code and started building my own version. No subscription. No cloud. Just my Mac doing the whole job by itself.

And obviously, I had to try handing this problem off to Fable.

On June 9th, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5. Their most capable publicly available model yet.

Three days later, the US government slapped export controls on it. Anthropic had no way to verify who was on the other end of a login in real time, so they did the only thing they could. They pulled it. For everyone.

For eighteen days, the most capable model Anthropic had ever shipped publicly just... wasn't there.

Then on July 1st, it came back. Available again on Claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, all of it.

Skip this if you already know. Otherwise, here's the short version.

Fable 5 is built for the projects you'd normally hand to a person, not a prompt. Anthropic points to software engineering, knowledge work, and vision as its strong suits. Run it inside an agent harness like Claude Code, and it can keep working for days at a stretch instead of stopping after one exchange.

It also comes with hard limits baked in. Ask it something that touches cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, or a handful of other high risk categories, and it declines and falls back to Opus 4.8 instead. Anthropic built the guardrail into the model, not just the policy.

That combination (long runway, real capability, a fence around the dangerous stuff) is why the export control story mattered in the first place. This wasn't a toy getting pulled.

My FlowDictate app is a local Wispr Flow clone for macOS. The functionality is simple. Hold down a key, speak, release: text appears at the cursor in any app. All processing on-device.

The problem I was trying to solve is that many apps do not come with their own voice dictation software. I wanted every surface on my Mac to be voice-dictatable.

Here's the part I find genuinely cool. Every piece of this runs locally, for free, using tools that already exist.

🔶 WhisperKit, running OpenAI's open source Whisper model, handles the actual transcription, on my machine, with no internet required. (NOTE: WhisperKit, different from WisprFlow, is an open-source Swift package maintained by Argmax, MIT licensed that runs OpenAI's Whisper speech-to-text model)
🔶 Apple's on-device Intelligence model (built into every current Mac) cleans up the transcript afterward, stripping filler words and fixing punctuation
🔶 A simple hotkey (hold Ctrl, talk, let go) triggers the whole thing and drops the finished text wherever my cursor is sitting (later I switched the hotkey to Alt to prevent triggering each time a common CTRL+key combo was used)

No API bills. No per-word pricing. No model to babysit.

Cost was the easy argument. Wispr Flow runs $144 to $180 a year per person, and that is before you even think about rolling it out to a team. My version costs $0 a month, forever, with no cap on how much I dictate.

But privacy is the part that tipped me over. Wispr Flow processes every recording through AWS and a third-party AI model before it comes back to you as text. Even their optional "Privacy Mode" still sends the audio out first, it just claims to delete it after. And earlier this year, Wispr had a publicized data exposure through a third-party compliance vendor, which is exactly the kind of thing that happens when your voice has to leave your machine to get turned into words.

Mine never leaves. Nothing to intercept, nothing to leak, because there is no server in the loop at all.

The Quiet Advantage

The part I did not expect to love: I can tune the vocabulary myself. I dropped in a list of terms my transcript kept mangling, ACOS, ASIN, ROAS, and now it spells them correctly every time, because I own the file, not a support ticket queue.

I'm still in the build and test phase, so I won't hand you exact latency numbers yet. But the architecture is done, and it already tells me something bigger. A lot of the tools we pay for monthly are really just a thin wrapper around models and APIs that are sitting right there for anyone willing to build the wrapper themselves.

(PS: I also replaced 2 heavy duty accounting apps (DEXT and Synder) last week with Fable, saving me $2500/year in subscription costs)

What's a tool you're paying for every month that might just be a weekend build away?

Know anyone who wants to work with an agency that has AI and tech in their DNA and are pros at managing advertising and creatives for E-commerce? Forward them this newsletter and let them connect with us at [email protected].

GPT-5.6 (Sol, Terra, Luna) launched July 9th. And Anthropic's "Fable 5 is free" promo, originally set to end July 7th, has been extended twice since. First to July 12th. Then to July 19th.

That's not a coincidence. That's moving the goalposts before anyone notices the free window closing.

🔶 Fable 5, Anthropic's flagship, launched June 9th, briefly pulled by export controls, back since July 1st and included at no extra cost for up to 50% of weekly usage limits on Pro, Max, Team, and select Enterprise plans, for now
🔶 Sol reportedly beats it on general agentic benchmarks. Fable still leads on real coding work, where it counts
🔶 Grok 4.5 is the wild card, trained alongside Cursor, undercutting both on price

The quiet advantage: you're building anything real this month in the middle of a price and access war nobody announced outright. The free window won't last. While it's open, it's the cheapest shot you'll get at testing Anthropic's best model on a real project.

This week Google turned the plain search box into a multimodal AI tool. Click the plus icon next to the search bar and you'll find Upload image, Upload file, a Create Images option, and a straight up Gemini 3 model picker (Fast or Pro), sitting right on the homepage. Not tucked inside a separate AI Mode tab. The front door, not a side door.

Google's own framing for the change: "the biggest upgrade to our Search box in over 25 years," part of the I/O 2026 rollout.

🔶 Upload gets analyzed, not just reverse searched. Drop in a competitor's product photo and ask what's actually working in it
🔶 Files work too. A PDF or spec sheet, no copy pasting text out first
🔶 Create Images runs Nano Banana without leaving Search
🔶 Chrome tabs count as input, per Google's own announcement, alongside text, images, files, and video
🔶 It's free, same as Search always was

It also allows you to search within recent tabs. If you click on that + icon you will now be able to search within that tab.

Like here, I asked it a question about one of my open tabs:

The catches: it can't see behind a login, so Seller Central and anything else authenticated is off limits. It's not built for long multi turn conversations the way a real chat session is. And rollout is still uneven depending on region and account.

I recently sat down with Andrew Bell, host of RetailPlaybook, for a conversation on where AI shoppers and agentic commerce are taking retail next. Podcast rolls out on the 15th and I am honored to be Andrew’s first guest!

If the name is new to you, it shouldn't stay that way for long. Andrew is VP of Research at ReFiBuy and one of the leading independent researchers tracking Amazon's Alexa for Shopping. He published the original Alexa for Shopping Blueprint, writes the LinkedIn newsletter Amazon Science Made Simple, and his frameworks for how shopping agents interpret and recommend products have been picked up by Forbes and referenced across the seller and retail tech world.

In the meantime, here is a sneak peak into a section of our conversation: How Alexa for Shopping is Transforming Product Discovery

🔶 Amazon's new Canvas gives sellers an AI dashboard built on Bedrock and Claude. Free, live now for US and UK sellers, and Amazon says sellers accept its recommendations nearly 90% of the time.

🔶 AI-referred shoppers converted 40% better than search, email, or social during Prime Day 2026. First time that's ever been true, per Adobe's data. The friction that used to sink AI-driven traffic is gone.

🔶 Walmart's Sparky agent is now live inside ChatGPT and Gemini. Baskets built with it run about 35% higher in average order value. Not an Amazon story, but every seller should be watching where else shopping agents are showing up.

🔶 Amazon raised $25 billion in bonds to fund its AI infrastructure buildout. The scale of the bet is a good sign of how permanent this shift is meant to be.

🔶 Guideline can now track verified ad spend on ChatGPT and Perplexity. Roughly $200 billion in annual media investment, now measurable. The AI platforms are becoming real ad channels, not just chat interfaces.

We hope you liked this edition of the AI for E-Commerce Newsletter! Hit reply and let us know what you think! Thank you for being a subscriber! Know anyone who might be interested to receive this newsletter? Share it with them and they will thank you for it! 😃 Ritu