The story behind the cartoon
On Amazon's third-quarter earnings call on Thursday evening, chief executive Andy Jassy was asked the question investors have been circling for months: are outside AI shopping agents — the kind Meta's Muse and others are building — eating into Amazon's advertising business? His answer was blunt. "The answer is no," Jassy said, adding that "few" customers shop this way yet because the experience "is still not great, nor more convenient than coming to a retailer directly" to research or place a one-click order.
The context is a turf war over who sells you things. Amazon has blocked Meta's Muse agent from its platform while building its own shopping assistants — Jassy said interactions with its Alexa for Shopping tool were up 570% year over year, and that the company's own assistant, Rufus, is meant to be the best shopping assistant anywhere because it holds the product data, the purchase history, and the shipping details that outside agents lack. Amazon's ads business still grew 12% in the quarter, to $19.6 billion, though that was slower than earlier in the year, a deceleration Jassy attributed largely to Prime Day shifting quarters.
Jassy did concede the direction of travel, with a "yet" doing heavy lifting: outside agents get pricing and product information wrong today, he said, and lack personalization data — but the company is in conversations with the agent builders to improve the experience. The dismissal, in other words, is a snapshot of a bad first version, not a verdict that the middlemen go away. Amazon spent the same call defending a $220 billion 2026 capital plan and a $42.4 billion quarterly free-cash outflow, so the stakes of keeping shoppers coming direct are not abstract.
The joke in Zimbo's cartoon is the gap between the pitch and the delivery: a beaming robot in an AI SHOPPING AGENT cap proudly hauls a cart overflowing with everything nobody ordered — a flamingo float, a unicycle wheel, a disco ball, a rubber chicken — while the human shopper breezes past with one small bag and a phone, one click and done. The agent did the shopping. The shopping is the problem.
THE METER IS NOT THE WORK
AI MADE SEVEN COMPANIES RICH. THE OTHER 493 GOT THE BILL.
THE WELCOME MAT
SCORED FOR SOLIDARITY.