TBPN · Nov 3, 2026 · 1h 30m · 81m saved
With Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify · Bridgit Mendler, Co-Founder and CEO of Northwood Space · Dylan Patel, Founder and Chief Analyst of SemiAnalysis · Max Kan, Analyst at SemiAnalysis · Andrew Megalaa, Researcher at SemiAnalysis
Photo via businessinsider.com
Shoppers sent by AI agents convert twice as often when the agent reads Shopify's own product catalog as when it scrapes the web, Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify, told John Coogan and Jordi Hays on TBPN. Most retailers are still guessing how agents will find their goods; Harley says Shopify already sits inside every major assistant.
"If you just compare conversion using Shopify catalog versus general AI search, which is effectively scraping, it's 2x higher." — Harley Finkelstein
Harley runs the commerce platform behind brands that moved onto it this quarter, including MAC Cosmetics, Clinique, Balmain and Lululemon. The same episode had Bridgit Mendler, co-founder and CEO of Northwood Space, on a $375 million raise, and three SemiAnalysis researchers led by founder Dylan Patel on where AI money will go first.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 90 minutes of audio, 9 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
Shopify's catalog converts AI shoppers at 2x the rate of scraped AI search
Shop Pay carries a shopper's purchase history into whichever assistant they use
Shopify charges merchants the same fees on agent sales as on its online store
Northwood Space raised $375 million and is moving into a 185,000-square-foot plant
SemiAnalysis expects the first trillion dollars of AI revenue to come from a few domains, not the whole economy
Chip design, biology, cybersecurity, finance, materials science and software
The cost of a given level of AI capability falls 100x to 1,000x a year, Max says
No AI model can yet do an analyst's full job, on SemiAnalysis's own finance benchmark
1. Grok Bot Costs Too Much
John Coogan and Jordi Hays, who run TBPN's daily live tech show, opened on Apple and Palantir, which both beat earnings and still traded down as analysts weighed squeezed margins. Palantir's US commercial revenue passed its US government revenue for the first time.
Elon Musk said Grok Bot costs more to serve than it earns
"The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue... Computer use is expensive, but AI companies are racing to make it cheaper while giving it away for free." — Elon Musk
John and Jordi read the post, from November 1, as a financing decision. They guessed Grok may run on expensive models underneath, possibly Anthropic's Opus. Their larger point was that Musk needs to sell xAI and SpaceX computing capacity to Anthropic and Google at a markup to pay for the data centers he has promised.
They also discussed Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's comment that Google's AI Mode is cutting the traffic Google sends to Reddit, though "people still want Reddit."
