Technology

Every Company must be a technology and digital business. David shares the issues, technology bytes, thought on tech developments, gadgets and the impact on our lives.

You gave the agent hands. Did you notice it also has your keys?

3 September 2026

Three REST endpoints. Twenty million SKUs. And, if you are not careful, the run of your entire home directory.

The promise being sold for agentic commerce this week is that your shopping bot has a brain and now needs hands. Nobody is putting on the slide what those hands can reach.

The brain-and-hands line comes from CloudStore AI, whose promotion promises to turn any shopping agent into what it calls “a doer”: catalogue, checkout and logistics across 400-plus merchants and 20 million-plus SKUs through three endpoints. It arrives in the same month that Cloudflare launched, on Fortune’s reporting, a permanent identity and wallet for AI agents, with optional guardrails: spending limits and a whitelist of merchants where your agents are allowed to shop. Cloudflare’s own executive told Fortune the first wave will be developers and AI firms buying data, with ordinary consumers a second wave still to come.

Hold those two next to a quieter one. A developer, writing up an afternoon of paranoia, described running a shell tool for his coding agent and only then stopping to ask what “give your AI agent a shell” means at the level of the operating system. His answer, in his own words: the tool “has everything you have because it is you.” SSH keys, cloud credentials, the whole writable home directory, no audit trail. The post is titled, plainly, “AI Agent Has Root”.

Put the three together and you have the real shape of agentic commerce. Not a smarter shopper. A new account holder at the checkout who is not a person.

I have given that instant a name: the Machine Moment of Truth. P&G’s A.G. Lafley gave us the First Moment of Truth at the shelf in 2005. Google’s Jim Lecinski gave us the Zero Moment of Truth at the search results in 2011. Both belonged to the shopper. A hand on the pack, eyes on the ten blue links. The Machine Moment of Truth is the first one that does not. The machine hands the buyer no menu to judge. It returns a verdict, delivered with certainty, and the buyer takes it as the answer. It is the moment the buyer stops choosing and the machine chooses for them.

That is why the hands matter more than the brain. For more than a century the shopper on the other side of your checkout was a human being with a human’s frictions: a moment of hesitation, a second thought at the payment screen, a weakness for a well-placed offer. Retail was built to work on that hesitation. The agent has none of it. It does not linger, it does not take the extended warranty, and it does not forgive a clumsy returns policy. It executes. Every pound spent on persuading a person at the point of sale is aimed at a moment that is quietly moving out of reach.

Now follow the incentives, because that is where the story always lives. Whoever issues the wallet and holds the identity sits between the shopper and every merchant on the whitelist. That is not a payments feature. That is the introduction, owned. Cloudflare is not building a shop. It is building the thing that decides which shops an agent is even permitted to enter. The merchant that is not on the list does not lose the sale. It never gets asked.

The security point is not a footnote. It is the commercial risk. A retailer taking agent traffic is accepting orders from software that, on the developer’s own account, may be running with the full permissions of whoever deployed it. A compromised agent does not abandon a basket. It empties one, at machine speed, across every merchant it can reach, and the fraud desk built for stolen card numbers has never seen that pattern. The limits and the whitelist are not consumer niceties. They are the seatbelts, and they are optional.

Watch who gets to sit in the wallet layer, because that is the new gatekeeper. Watch, too, whether the standards emerging in the West borrow anything from China, where Alipay and WeChat Pay proved long ago that whoever holds identity and settlement holds the ecosystem. The West is about to relearn that lesson through a bot instead of a person.

The Roth Read. Stop asking whether your store is ready for AI shoppers. Ask the colder question: when an agent arrives at your checkout carrying your customer’s credentials and possibly root on its own machine, do you know whether it is friend or foe, and who told you so. The Machine Moment of Truth is already happening, in answers you cannot see, at a speed you cannot interrupt. The hands are here. Decide now whose keys they hold, because the merchant who waves them through blind will not lose a sale. They will lose control of the counter.

Forget the backflips. China is teaching robots to clock in.

6 August 2026

For years the story from China’s robotics labs came with a soundtrack: a whir of servos, a crowd gasping, a humanoid landing a backflip. Impressive. Also beside the point. The signal this week is quieter and far more consequential. In an underground lab in Beijing, and on a training floor in Hefei, China has stopped asking whether its robots can dance. It is asking whether they can work.

A Chinese robotics firm, Gaobot, put the case plainly to camera this week: for decades industrial robots have done one thing, thousands of times, on a fixed program. Bolt here. Weld there. Repeat. What China now wants is a machine that can handle the mess of a real factory, the odd angle, the dropped part, the job nobody bothered to write a routine for. On 6 August, at a pre-training ground for embodied intelligence in Hefei, 83 robots from different companies were put through more than thirty replicated real-world scenes: the home, the shop floor, the warehouse. Not a demo. A rehearsal for employment.

The numbers behind this are not modest. IDC expects China’s spending on embodied intelligence to climb from 1.4 billion US dollars to 77 billion over five years, a compound growth rate near 94 per cent. Embodied AI has, for the first time, been written into the national government work report. Unitree, which shipped 5,500 humanoids last year, more than anyone on earth, has filed to go public. The language coming out of the sector is telling: 2026 is being called the year of mass-production commercialisation, the year the work leaves the lab.

Here is why a retailer should read this over their coffee, not skim past it. The West has spent this year debating the humanoid as spectacle and as threat: will it take my job, can it fold my laundry, is it safe. China has quietly reframed the question as a supply-chain one. A machine that follows a fixed program is a tool. A machine that learns a new task from watching, that adapts to a scene it has not seen, is closer to labour. And labour, unlike tooling, scales into every corner of an economy: the stockroom, the loading bay, the shop floor at closing time.

Notice, too, where these robots are being sold. Unitree and AgiBot are not just filing IPOs; they are opening shops. A flagship store in Beijing. An Agibot deployment inside a JD MALL in Shanghai, fitted out as a retail complex, around five million yuan of investment in a single store. The West imagines robots arriving through the factory door. China is building the retail entrance first, letting the public meet the machine over the counter, where familiarity, and demand, are made. Dobot has gone further still, launching a humanoid pitched at the young family and the home.

The mechanism matters, and it is not magic. China’s edge is structural: the batteries, the motors, the rare earths, the assembly lines sit inside the same borders as the labs. When the New Yorker’s Kai-Fu Lee says the two countries are now “two different universes,” this is the concrete meaning of it. One universe is arguing about what the robot might mean. The other is collecting the training data, thirty scenes at a time, and pricing the shelf space.

What to watch. Watch the training grounds, not the trade shows. WAIC gives you the polished demo; the Hefei data-collection floor gives you the roadmap. When a single site is running 83 robots across warehouse, shop and home scenes, the next headline is not a better backflip. It is a purchase order.

The Roth Read. Stop watching Chinese robots for the trick and start watching them for the task. If your competitor’s stockroom is being rehearsed on a training floor in Hefei this year, you do not have a technology question, you have a cost-base question, and it is already being answered without you. The West is grading these machines on whether they can amaze us. China is grading them on whether they can be hired.

China did not spend last week building video tools. It was building eyes.

5 August 2026

Every retailer who watched three Chinese labs ship video models in seven days filed the news under marketing. Cheaper ads, faster content, a problem for the agency. Wrong drawer. What landed last week was the perception layer for the machines that will one day walk your shop floor, and it landed open, and it landed cheap.

The launches came within days of each other. ByteDance’s Seedance 2.5 now generates thirty seconds of video with sound in a single pass, holding characters, scenes and camera logic together across a whole narrative rather than one lucky shot. MiniMax’s H3 does fifteen seconds with stereo audio generated jointly rather than bolted on, and on 3 August MiniMax put the weights on Hugging Face for anyone to download. Alibaba closed the week with Qwen3.8-Max, 2.4 trillion parameters, which now sits second in the world on the public leaderboard for reading images and visual material.

So run the telescope the other way. A model that keeps thirty seconds coherent, objects that persist behind an obstacle, weight that falls the way weight falls, a cup that is still on the table after the camera moves, has not learned to draw. It has learned how the world behaves. Generation is only the exam. The syllabus is physics, permanence and consequence. And the same weights that let a machine imagine a scene let it read one.

Reading a scene, fast, in bad light, with a person moving through it, is the entire job of a robot’s eyes.

That is the triangulation, and it is why this is a retail story rather than a media one. China already holds the other two legs. By industry counts it ships the overwhelming majority of the world’s humanoid robots, and TrendForce expects Chinese output to nearly double this year, with Unitree and AgiBot taking around eighty per cent of shipments. It holds the motors, the batteries, the rare earths, and the appetite to put machines in public before the ethics committee has finished its report. What it lacked was sight worth putting behind the visor. It is now building that in the open and giving it away.

Price finishes the argument. DeepSeek’s V4-Flash update, the least photogenic of the week’s launches and probably the most consequential, costs roughly three cents to run the full Artificial Analysis intelligence battery, against $3.15 for the Western frontier. A robot has a battery, not a data centre. Perception has to be almost free before it can live inside a body on a shop floor, and last week it became almost free.

A caution worth keeping. None of this means the machine understands anything. Video models still get physics wrong in ways that are amusing in a clip and unacceptable in a machine holding a bottle near a customer’s child. A convincing picture of a grasp is not a grasp, and that distance is where the next two years of the argument will be fought.

The direction, though, is not ambiguous. The robot that eventually watches your shelves, greets your customer and judges whether that customer is confused or annoyed will not be running perception you bought from a vendor you can name. It will be running weights someone downloaded, most likely trained in China, tuned by a supplier three tiers below the name above your door. And it will still be your brand doing the looking.

What to watch. Not the next video demo, and not the next leaderboard. Watch for the moment a Chinese maker ships a robot whose perception layer is one of these video models, and says so. When those two industries start sharing a checkpoint, the cost of machine sight collapses the way the cost of machine text already has, and every question retailers assumed they had until 2030 arrives early.

The Roth Read. Stop treating AI video as a marketing line item and start asking who supplies your machines’ eyes, because you are about to buy vision the way you buy electricity: from someone else, invisibly, with no say in how it was made. Put that question on your risk register this quarter. The machine watching your customer speaks for you, whoever trained it.

The engineer said ‘beyond my lifetime.’ Now he says five years. That gap is the whole story.

4 August 2026

A Google engineer sat down this week to introduce Gemini Robotics 2 and let slip something more revealing than any demo. Asked when robots would enter daily life, he gave three answers from three moments in his own career. Three years ago: beyond my lifetime. Two years ago: maybe ten years. Now: five to ten. The technology is not the headline. The collapsing of that estimate is.

Gemini Robotics 2, launched by Google DeepMind, brings what the company calls whole-body intelligence to machines: the ability to reason about a task, plan across the whole body, and fold that reasoning into physical action. In the launch film an engineer asks a robot to make a t-shirt, and everyone in the room agrees, cheerfully, that robotics is incredibly hard. What has changed is not that it got easy. It is that the curve of getting less hard has bent sharply upward, and the people building it can feel the bend under their own feet.

Hold that engineer’s three answers in your hand, because they are the argument. A serious person, close to the work, revised his forecast of a civilisational shift from never to within a decade in the span of a normal contract. That is not a prediction about robots. It is a warning about how badly humans forecast their own displacement. We assume the future arrives on a schedule we can plan around. It arrives, instead, the way this engineer’s own estimate did: quietly, then all at once.

So let us have the honest conversation about work, and let us not have the lazy one. The lazy one says robots take jobs and society collapses. The comfortable rebuttal, doing the rounds this week under the banner “when robots create jobs,” says every wave of automation has minted more work than it destroyed, so relax. Both are too neat. The loom created jobs, in aggregate, over decades. It did not create them for the weaver, in that town, in that lifetime. Aggregate comfort is cold comfort to the person standing in the gap. The question worth asking is not whether robots create jobs. It is who is in the room when they do, and who is shown the door before the new room is built.

There is a prediction circulating that work itself could become optional within ten to twenty years. Set aside who said it. The claim deserves scrutiny on its own terms, and it fails the test, because it mistakes the disappearance of tasks for the disappearance of need. A society does not become leisured because machines can fold laundry. Someone owns the machines. Someone sets the price of the labour they replace. “Optional” is a word for people who already own the robot, not for the people the robot was bought to replace.

The China lens sharpens all of this. While Western commentary debates whether work is ending, Chinese firms are answering a narrower and more useful question: what, precisely, can a machine do reliably enough to deploy in public tomorrow. Unitree drills its G1 through brutal training. Automated robot kiosks are already trading across Chinese high streets, quietly reshaping small-scale retail service. The difference is not vision. It is that one hemisphere is philosophising about a decade away, and the other is booking the shelf space now.

What to watch. Watch the forecasts of the people who build these systems, not the pundits who sell books about them. When engineers inside the labs keep shortening their own timelines, quarter after quarter, that is the signal. A pundit’s prediction costs nothing. A builder’s revised estimate is a confession that the thing is closer than they last admitted, including to themselves.

The Roth Read. Stop planning for the timeline you were given, because the people building this keep tearing theirs up. The right question for your business is not “will robots take these jobs” but “when the task goes, is my person still in the room, or already out of it.” Whoever owns that answer owns the workforce of the next decade. Make sure it is you, and make sure your people know it is you.

The Age Of Innovation

1 April 2019

The BrandZ Most Valuable German Brands 2019 was launched recently. I never shared on my blogs some of the key insight short films I narrated for the 2018 brand rankings. So before I share some of the 2019 insights, over the next few days, I will post these videos as the core insights within them are as sharp and as relevant for today …This one is about the Age of Innovation.

In Conversation with Kim Snow-Creative Director at Google

8 March 2019

 

 

 

At STREAM Commerce in Miami I interviewed a number of the key speakers and participants as part of my “In Conversation with…” series. I am very grateful to everyone who graciously participated in the recordings and were were so generous in sharing their insights.

Todays “In conversation… is with Kim Snow, Creative Director at Google. Have a good weekend when you get there…

 

In Conversation with Danielle Bailey Gartner. L2

7 March 2019

At STREAM Commerce in Miami I interviewed a number of the key speakers and participants as part of my “In Conversation with…” series. I am very grateful to everyone who graciously participated in the recordings and were were so generous in sharing their insights.

Todays “In conversation… is with Danielle Bailey Managing Vice President, Gartner L2

 

Picture Of The Week

6 March 2019

Each week I will be posting my picture of the week. An eclectic selection from my pictures taken from around the world.

Here is this weeks….from Peru.

 

Showfields

5 March 2019

THE MOST INTERESTING STORE IN THE WORLD… At least that’s what Showfields founder and CEO Tal Nathanel is confident he is creating. 

In a world where many retailers are closing physical space, this plucky entrepreneur has gutted an iconic building in New York’s trendy NoHo area and is creating a new four story brick-and-mortar retail concept intended to bringing digitally native and direct to consumer brands to a physical life. Its proposition for brands centres on configuring their space online via a six-step process, which will then be fitted out and staffed by Showfields. It costs a flat fee per month (no turnover related element to it.). All the tech comes as standard – including mobile POS, data sensors and visitor analytics.

It’s currently in its “soft launch” stage. Just one of its four floors are open but that has not stopped a number of digital brands opening their space already including “Quip” electronic toothbrushes which started life as a Kickstarter project. Their space at Showfields actively encourages you to try out the brushes for yourself. Difficult to do that on a web site.

Or “Gravity Blanket” the weighted blanket for sleep, stress and anxiety. Which I have to say I had heard a lot about but never really understood or seen the value in until Tal persuaded me to try it out for myself at Showfields. It really was good and worth the premium!

Quod Erat Demonstrandum (QED).

Sometimes you really do need that physical experience…And that is what Tal is banking on.

As he took me on a behind the scenes tour of the yet to be opened floors Showfields strengths become more apparent. Its official opening will serendipitously be on the same day that Gordon Selfridge opened his Iconic Selfridges department store in London’s Oxford Street, back in 1909. That redefined retailing in Europe. And Tal’s betting on doing the same around the globe.And serendipity is what underpins the customer promise. He discusses this with me and other topics in this video interview you can see here. http://bit.ly/2TbglGx 

Go see Showfields for yourself. It’s on corner of Bond and Lafayette Streets in NoHo, New York.

The world’s most interesting store…It could well be…It deserves to be successful.

Download this to take a look inside Showfields

In Conversation with Brian Moroz

4 March 2019

At STREAM Commerce in Miami I interviewed a number of the key speakers and participants as part of my “In Conversation with…” series. I am very grateful to everyone who graciously participated in the recordings and were were so generous in sharing their insights. Over the next few days I will publish here the individual interviews as well as the consolidate live broadcast that we took pace each day.

Todays “In conversation… is with Brian Moroz, Creative Strategist, Google