When AI Starts Buying, Building, and Acting for You

AI is done just answering questions. Now it wants to do things for you.

In Episode 61, Jeff Keltner and Annie Delgado dig into the moment AI shifts from assistant to actor — buying things, managing files, shaping infrastructure, and quietly changing who actually controls the customer relationship. 

They start with Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard that lets AI agents handle checkout with Shopify, Walmart, and Visa. Which raises a very agentic question: when an AI buys for you… who owns the button? And who owns you? From there, things get spicy. Apple quietly bets on Google’s Gemini to power Siri. Anthropic cuts off Elon Musk’s xAI from Claude while rolling out Claude Cowork. And suddenly everyone is drawing lines around IP, access, and who gets to plug into what. Zooming out, Jeff and Annie look at the physical reality behind all this “AI magic”: Meta and Microsoft taking very different paths to scaling AI — one brute-forcing power, the other chasing trust, permission, and community buy-in.

Quick hits keep the fun coming: programmable gene insertion, Gemini’s new “personal intelligence” mode, ChatGPT Translate, and a curveball closer — Matthew McConaughey trademarking himself as a new way to think about consent in the age of generative AI. This episode isn’t about hype. It’s about where the power is actually moving — and what happens when AI stops asking and starts acting.

🔍 In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Who really controls commerce when AI agents handle checkout
• Why Apple handing Siri to Gemini is a bigger signal than it sounds
• How Anthropic is enforcing boundaries in the AI arms race
• Why infrastructure, power, and permission are becoming the real moats How consent, likeness, and ownership get weird — fast — in the AI era