In today’s Digest, we discuss Shopify tapping Meta’s Muse for agentic checkout, Brian O’Kelley’s startup pivoting to AI agents, and a Microsoft patent revealing plans to pause games for ads.

Shopify taps Meta’s Muse for agentic checkout 

Shopify and Meta announced that Muse, Meta's personal AI shopping agent, will be able to complete purchases across all Shopify-powered stores. Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke called it an easy, delightful way to shop and check out with the assistant, while Meta's chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, framed the deal as giving Muse users access to a wider range of stores. 

The integration runs on Shopify's existing infrastructure, meaning merchants stay the seller of record and pay their usual processing rates, with no additional fee layered on top. 

Brian O’Kelley’s Startup makes AI agent pivot 

Scope3 cofounders Brian O'Kelley and Anne Coghlan are rebranding the company as Apostra moving away from its original focus on ad-industry carbon emissions and toward agentic AI advertising instead. The platform's core idea is to let AI agents representing advertisers negotiate directly with agents representing publishers and other media sellers, sparing marketers from having to build separate integrations with what could be thousands of individual media partners.

O'Kelley argues that advertising has long been boxed in by fragmented infrastructure and manual processes, with programmatic buying built around real-time bidding but ill-suited to the most valuable ad placements. Notably, Apostra isn't charging the transaction fees typical of adtech middlemen. It plans to monetise through add-on services like negotiation support and campaign evaluation instead. 

Microsoft patent reveals plan to pause games for ads 

Microsoft may have found a new way to monetise free play. A patent application published on 3rd September and titled "Contextually Aware Management of Interactive Software Application Access" describes a system that would deliver ads to PC and console gamers, but only at natural stopping points rather than random intervals. Players would start with a block of ad-free time, 30 minutes, or enough to finish a level and once that runs low, the system would wait for a suitable break. Watching the resulting ad would earn the player another stretch of uninterrupted playtime, effectively turning ad breaks into a currency that keeps the game going for free.