This week, AI pushed deeper into shopping and food delivery, while major deals and legal developments reshaped the media and ad tech landscape. In today’s MadTech Daily, we cover Citi entering advertising with a new ad business and IAB Europe finding growing momentum for agentic ad buying.

Conversational commerce took another step forward as Foodpanda launched integrations that allow users to discover restaurants and meals directly within ChatGPT and Claude. The integration draws on real-time availability and lets users search by cuisine, budget, dietary requirements and occasion before heading to Foodpanda to complete their order.

Agentic shopping, however, had a more complicated week. Shopify announced that Meta’s Muse shopping agent will be able to complete purchases across Shopify-powered stores, significantly expanding the range of merchants accessible through the AI assistant. Amazon is taking the opposite approach, blocking Muse from its marketplace after raising concerns around unauthorised access, customer credentials, and how the agent identifies itself while browsing. 

Consolidation continued across media and ad tech. Infillion is acquiring Foursquare in its entirety, although the location data company will continue operating independently under its existing brand. Paramount also cleared a major legal obstacle to its USD$81bn (£60.75bn) merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, reaching a settlement with California and other states that had challenged the deal over competition concerns.

Google’s own antitrust battle moved into its next chapter, with the full 106-page remedies decision in the US government’s ad tech case now publicly available and unredacted. 

Meanwhile, OpenAI turned its attention to younger users with the launch of its Australian Youth Safety Blueprint. The six-pillar framework covers areas including AI literacy, age-appropriate safeguards, privacy-conscious age verification, parental controls, and connections to real-world crisis support, as Australia continues debating how AI companies should protect younger users.

Finally, Microsoft is exploring another frontier for advertising: the gaming break. A newly published patent outlines a system that could serve ads to PC and console players at natural stopping points rather than interrupting gameplay at random, potentially opening another route for monetising free gaming experiences.