OpenAI does health OpenAI launched a new dedicated health product, which can connect to (US) medical records and personal health data (eg Apple Health) and give explanations and advice. There are plenty of pretty obvious things to say about this (error rates, unbundling…) but the general issue is that OpenAI is trying to work out how to build a product that will give it sustainable defensibility given that the models remain commodities. Meanwhile, recall that Google has spent something over a decade working on health data, and then read the next story. LINK AI as a Gmail feature Google is (finally) adding AI overviews, summaries, and suggestions to Gmail. Incumbents always try to make the new thing a feature, but they're often right - it makes a lot more sense to integrate this into the product than to try to have ChatGPT look at Gmail from the outside and try to make suggestions. More importantly, though, this is a story of distribution: if the models are commodities, how do you compete? OpenAI is trying to invent products, but Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft already have products and surface areas. LINK Grok content problems A small story last week and a big one this week: the 'Grok' chatbot for Elon Musk's xAI will happily make pornographic images and 'deep fake' nudes of real people on request, and some of that is borderline or actual CSAM, which is straightforwardly illegal in many countries. It's not easy to stop this, and perhaps impossible to prevent entirely, but companies have to try. This is what happens if you presume that any content moderation or safety processes are 'censorship', and the fact that half of Elon Musk's own posts on Twitter are now promoting some flavour of white supremacy means he no longer gets the benefit of the doubt, especially when he now claims this is a free speech issue. LINK Meta electricity Power has become the big bottleneck for US AI datacenter deployment, and this week Meta announced $6.6GW of deals with power utilities. LINK Ads and AI Google is adding checkout and ads inside Gemini, together with a new proposed standard (obviously). Meanwhile Walmart is also including ads in its AI shopping assistant, joining Amazon's Rufus. GOOGLE, WALMART, AMAZON Reddit launched its new AI ad platform around CES. LINK And Amazon, which sold about $65bn of ads in 2025, has an extended push for more growth. LINK Amazon's off-site agents Amazon has a new agentic commerce project that scrapes small third-party e-commerce sites (especially those using platforms like Squarespace, Shopify, or WooCommerce) and lists the products for sale on Amazon - if you make a purchase, it looks like a normal Amazon purchase, but Amazon bots go and make the purchase for you. Amusingly, Amazon is suing Perplexity for doing more or less the same thing on Amazon.com itself. LINK Accenture's AI strategies Accenture will buy the UK AI company Faculty, apparently for $1bn. Faculty builds enterprise and government tools, and its founder will become CTO of Accenture. Meanwhile, in its most recent quarter, Accenture reported $2.2bn of new 'Advanced AI' bookings, about 10% of the total, and said that it will stop reporting this number because all of its projects now touch on generative AI. There are a lot of different opinions about what generative AI means for Accenture and its peers. Their business is building and running large, complex IT systems, and AI totally changes how code will be written, while agents will probably change how complex systems are run. But very few big companies will make that change by themselves, and meanwhile, all of this (waves hands) means lots of challenges and opportunities that they'll need help with as well. So do the clients hire Accenture to shrink Accenture TAM? Or is there a new, maybe bigger but quite different TAM? Maybe the Occam's Razor here is that if you boast that you are 'nearing the goal of 80,000 AI & data professionals', but also think you need to buy a startup with 600 'AI native professionals' and make the founder your CTO, you probably haven't worked it out at all. Finally, note that though they are all called 'consulting', this is a very different business to Bain, BCG, and McKinsey, which have their own AI questions entirely. LINK Amazon stores The Information reports that Amazon is planning to open a big-box general retail store, looking something like a Walmart or Target. Amazon physical retail has a long history of experimentation, on the basis that the value of finding a new hybrid model that works is worth all of the failed experiments - expect more of the same. LINK Apple Card moves Noted for the record - after a year or two of discussions, the Apple Card credit card will move its back-end from Goldman Sachs to JPMC. Goldman pushed into consumer a few years ago as a potentially cheap source of capital, discovered it was harder and more expensive than expected, and is now backing out. (Also, the Apple Card does a few things that apparently make it more expensive to run, such as giving everyone their monthly statements on the first of the month, which puts more load on support.) LINK | 
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