AI Top 5

Will AI agents do all our shopping, and who pays when they get it wrong? In this episode, we look at why AI's business impact still hasn't fully arrived, why teenagers are calling AI "bland," and how a 10-minute coding session with Cursor saved a family's Harry Potter audiobooks. We also cover Meta's new shopping agent, the new "deep review" agents, pre-trained forecasting models, and why JPMorgan is pushing back on agentic payments.

Would you connect your bank account to ChatGPT? Yves's answer sets the tone for an episode about how fast AI is moving from tool to teammate, and how little most of us have thought through the consequences.

 Chelsea and Yves trace the jump from reactive chatbots to always-on agents that quietly monitor your inbox, your calendar and your spending and the eye-watering token economics driving it. Then the big one: if a bot does your shopping, nobody sees the ads, the bundles, the cross-sells or the $X.99 pricing. The digital shelf, as we know it, starts to disappear.

 Along the way: who actually wins the agent race, whether fifteen years of emails can rebuild the colleague who just retired, what cheaper frontier models mean for anyone locked into one vendor, and a listener asking the question everyone's thinking is my company reading my AI chats, and am I automating away my own job?

Chelsea and Yves are back with a rapid-fire round of Unprompted, then break down this week's top five AI headlines for category management and CPG. Hear how AI is moving inside your analytics workflow, what agent-powered shopping means for the shelf, and how to redesign your work around AI.

We're kicking things off. This is episode one of AI Top 5, a brand-new biweekly podcast from ARC, sponsored by SMITH AI, built for CPG and retail professionals who need to stay sharp on AI without spending hours chasing every headline.

Hosts Chelsea Howard, VP of Data & Analytics at Xerxes Global, and Yves Boussemart, an MIT-trained AI expert who spent years leading AI transformations at McKinsey and now runs his own AI company (XGS.ai), break down the five things happening in AI that actually matter this week. In this first episode, they get into why running an AI agent can sometimes cost more than paying a human, what OpenAI's shrinking market share signals about where the industry is headed, and a landmark ruling in Germany that could reshape how much responsibility Google carries for its AI-generated answers.

No fluff, no jargon overload. Just straight talk on what is happening in AI and what it means for category management, shopper insights, merchandising, and the decisions you are making right now.

New episodes drop biweekly! Tune in, get sharp, and stay ahead.