Good morning. Retail didn’t take the weekend off, and neither did the AI funding machine. Here’s what happened while most of us were catching up on sleep.
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The agentic AI arms race kept accelerating this weekend. Microsoft used the days around the weekend to detail how its agentic AI robots and vision-enabled agents are already changing in-store operations. The centerpiece example is ADAM, a robotic system built with Richtech Robotics and powered by Azure AI. What started as a beverage-serving robot now operates as a conversational, context-aware assistant that adjusts drink recommendations based on time of day, weather, and current promotions, and responds to requests like sweetness or ice level in natural language. Richtech is extending the same vision, voice, and reasoning stack into a broader “Agentic Store” initiative aimed at guiding shoppers to products and flagging empty or misplaced shelf items.
On Saturday, Amazon Ads rolled out new agentic AI tools built for planning and creative work, another sign that the ad side of retail is racing to keep pace with the operations side. Also over the weekend, Microsoft partnered with Richtech on agentic in-store systems more broadly, retailers said they project roughly 70 percent of routine in-store tasks will eventually be automated, and analysts noted that strategics, not financial buyers, drove 71 percent of last year’s ad-tech M&A activity.
Sunday brought a wave of venture funding into the space. The Trade Desk introduced its first AI agents for automated media buying, with Stagwell signed on as the launch client. The IAB Tech Lab released an Agentic Roadmap extending the OpenRTB standard with new protocols for agent-to-agent trading. On the supply chain side, Freehand closed a $75 million round to scale autonomous AI agents that manage supply chain spend, freight audits, and vendor negotiations, while Lyric raised $43.5 million led by Insight Partners for an AI supply chain decision platform that has landed a deployment with Mondelēz International.
Friday’s headline was arguably the biggest of the stretch: Stripe and OpenAI launched an agentic commerce protocol aimed at letting AI assistants complete retail purchases inside conversational interfaces. Stripe also flagged three trends it’s seeing across large retailers: restructuring product catalogs so autonomous agents can reliably search and transact, building both branded agents and integrations with third-party agents at the same time, and pushing for standardized infrastructure so multiple agents can transact against the same merchant systems without one-off integrations. Friday also saw LG Electronics acquire a majority stake in Bear Robotics, a McKinsey survey finding limited AI impact on merchant operations so far, and OneRail raising $42 million to optimize last-mile delivery and inventory.
Saturday’s funding wasn’t limited to media and supply chain. Fay raised $50 million for AI-powered personalized nutrition therapy, and Queue launched autonomous robotic pharmacy kiosks on the back of a $12.6 million seed round, both signs that the agentic wave is spreading well past the core shopping cart and into adjacent health and wellness categories that retailers increasingly compete in.
