TechPulse USA

by TechPulse USA Staff · October 22, 2026 Walmart Just Gave AI Shoppers Their Own Credit Card — With Limits For most of this year, the smartest strategy in retail was pretending AI shopping agents didn't exist. Amazon — the company that still defines online shopping for most Americans — answered the rise of agentic commerce by blocking the agents at the door. On Wednesday, Walmart did the exact opposite: it rolled out the welcome mat, handed every AI assistant something close to its own credit card, and published a rulebook for how the machines must behave. If this is the agentic-commerce war, Bentonville just picked its side. The announcement came from John Furner, Walmart's president and chief executive, speaking at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco — the kind of venue where this sort of thing gets said out loud first. Walmart is launching three tools at once: Agent Profiles, the Walmart Agent Gateway, and a binding set of terms for AI agents. Together, the...

Somewhere in a finance department right now, an AI agent is logging — well, not logging, that's the point — into a supplier portal and paying a real invoice with real money. No human typed the card number. No human ticked a CAPTCHA. No human even clicked "submit". Visa, BILL and Billtrust announced it on October 20, and they are calling it the first live pilot of its kind: AI agents that initiate and complete approved buyer invoice payments end-to-end through supplier portals. Update, Oct. 21: Visa's controls sequel and the context Bloomberg added Visa followed its own announcement within 24 hours. A second Oct. 21 release added Visa Commercial Virtual Authentication — 3-D Secure verification for commercial virtual-card users — and Visa Commercial Payment Controls, letting businesses set transaction-level parameters for spend, merchant category, location and timing, available to eligible issuing financial institutions in supported countries (Business Wire). Both a...

Google Launched Its Universal Cart — Big Retailers Held Back By TechPulse USA San Francisco, October 17, 2026 Google just shipped the shopping cart of the future, and its biggest retail partners showed up with one foot out the door. On Thursday, the company launched Universal Cart — one persistent cart that follows you across Google Search and the Gemini app, no matter which retailer actually sells the thing you're eyeing. The pitch is seductive: save a Steve Madden handbag in AI Mode, a Quince sweater in Gemini, an Ulta lip gloss later, and find all three waiting when you come back. But look at who signed up for what. Walmart, Target and Sephora — three of the six launch partners Google named — are in only for "select checkout options," not the full handoff. The cart is real. The trust isn't. And before you call this a revolution, know that we've seen this film. Google has tried to sit between you and the buy button before. It buried that product in 2023. Wh...

Shopify Lets AI Agents Finish Your Checkout — the Anti-Amazon Bet on Agentic Shopping On Monday, Shopify did the one thing Amazon refuses to do. The Ottawa e-commerce giant announced that browser-based AI agents can now complete full purchases — not just browse and fill carts, but read a checkout page, edit the address and delivery option, and submit the order with the buyer's authorization — on the websites of all its eligible merchants. No screenshots. No page scraping. No HTML archaeology. The agent simply calls a structured toolset, and the sale goes through. Photo: Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, photographed in New York City in 2019. A week before Monday's WebMCP checkout announcement, Lütke personally confirmed Shopify's deep partnership to bring agentic checkout with Shop Pay to Meta's Muse assistant. (Image via Wikimedia Commons) The announcement: new tools, zero scraping The news landed Monday, September 28, 2026, via Gil Greenberg, a staff product manager ...