Briefs

How AI is changing what people make, buy, trust and believe.

Market Commentary

Agentic Commercewho the shopping agent trusts now decides what gets bought

AI agents that browse, compare and check out on a shopper's behalf are moving from pilot to infrastructure fight. As comparison shifts from the shopper to the agent, the contest becomes who the agent trusts and who pays for placement.

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Commerce desk × Folka19 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
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Series

The Agent Economy

6 briefs
1Read
Agentic Commerce
2Read
The Ask Economy
3Read
AI Shopping Agents at the Retailer's Door
4Read
Shopping Agent Permissions
5Coming
The Remote Housekeeper
6Coming
Robotaxis and the Remote Minder

Briefs

Market Commentary25 Oct 2026

AI Shopping Agents at the Retailer's Door: a choice the hotel industry has already made once

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Commerce desk × Folka
Market Commentary25 Oct 2026

Shopping Agent Permissions: where delegating ends and letting go begins

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Commerce desk × Folka
Market Commentary25 Oct 2026

Entry-Level Jobs and AI: who trains the senior people of 2032?

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Work desk × Folka
Market Commentary25 Oct 2026

AI Product Recommendations: what happens to a brand's shelf space when a machine gives only one answer

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Commerce desk × Folka
Market Commentary25 Oct 2026

The Human-Made Label: why a mark of authorship is easier to fake than to prove

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Trust desk × Folka
Market Commentary25 Oct 2026

The Algorithm You Can Talk To: what a typed sentence hands over, and what it doesn't

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Consumer desk × Folka
Market Commentary25 Oct 2026

The Smartphone Floor Is Rising: what access inflation does to the next billion phone buyers

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Technology desk × Folka
Market Commentary18 Aug 2026

AI Companionship: pricing the hours people spend alone, and the rules racing to catch up

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Consumer desk × Folka
Opportunity Brief29 Jul 2026

Ambient, Adaptive Interfaces: what it costs to build software that reads the room before being asked

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Consumer desk × Folka
Market Commentary22 Jul 2026

The Taste Economy: what human judgement is worth when a machine can recommend anything

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Consumer desk × Folka
Market Commentary15 Jul 2026

The Ask Economy: how a generation that never learned to search is repricing attention

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Commerce desk × Folka

Essays

Cultural Essay

AI Griefbotswhat it means when the dead learn to keep answering

Trained on someone's texts, voice notes and photos, a growing wave of apps let the bereaved keep talking to a version of the person who has died. The unsettling part is not that the bot gets the person wrong, but that it may be comforting enough that mourning never has to end.

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Culture desk × Folka19 Sep 2026 · 8 min read
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Series

Old Words for New Machines

6 essays
1Coming
The Chatbot Confessional
2Coming
The AI Interpreter in Every Pocket
3Coming
Is Anyone Inside the Chatbot?
4Coming
What Do We Owe a Chatbot?
5Coming
Live Translation and the End of Babel
6Coming
AI and the Language of the End Times
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What is shifting, and why it matters.

Each morning, the early moves in how AI is reshaping culture and consumer behaviour, with Folka’s analysis of each. Free.