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Thanks for reading all these years. And yes, I still do love you.
And now, here is this week's Hot or Not.
Hot: AI-era fraud prevention
The FBI's IC3 reported $21B in fraud losses in 2025, driven by synthetic identities and AI-generated deepfakes.
Fraud attacks powered by large language models can now produce convincing phishing emails, fabricate identity documents, and impersonate voices in real time.
To combat this, a new set of companies is emerging to address the AI-driven fraud threat landscape, creating specialized tools that span:
Real-time fraud detection
Digital identity verification
Infrastructure required to govern AI agents operating as financial actors
McKinsey projects agentic commerce could account for roughly one-third of all US online sales by decade's end.
Big tech is competing to own the consumer journey through AI shopping tools, including Google's cross-platform Universal Cart, Amazon's shopping-enabled Alexa+, and Meta's AI chatbot shopping tests.
The infrastructure race to capture demand is well underway. CB Insights tracked 170+ companies across the agentic commerce stack, from multi-agent orchestration and AI payments rails to GEO content platforms and customer service agents.
Salesforce just agreed to acquire composable content platform Contentful, giving AI agents a native content layer to deliver personalized content across channels without manual publishing steps.
The company also recently deepened its partnership with research tech platform Cint to layer Slack-native AI tooling on top of existing Salesforce infrastructure, with phase one live as of last month.
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