Google rolls out AI shopping features 🛍️

Google’s plan for the holiday season? AI shopping features 😆. 

Forward thinkers, welcome to another issue (#133) of the Neural Frontier! 

This week, we’re unpacking AI shopping updates from Google, LinkedIn’s new AI-powered search, and Anthropic’s data center partnership.

Ready or not, let’s go!

In a rush? Here's your quick byte: 

🛍️ Google rolls out AI shopping features! 

🤖 LinkedIn launches AI-powered people search.

🤝 Anthropic announces a $50 billion data center partnership!

🎭 AI Reimagines: Stones, stones, and more stones!

🎯 Everything else you missed this week.  

⚡ The Neural Frontier’s weekly spotlight: 3 AI tools making the rounds this week.

🛍️ Google rolls out AI shopping features!

Just in time for the holidays, Google is rolling out a massive wave of AI shopping upgrades — blending Gemini’s conversational smarts, autonomous agents, and real-world data into one seamless experience.

The goal? To make online shopping feel less like a chore and more like chatting with a helpful assistant who does the legwork for you.

💬 Conversational Shopping in Search

You can now talk to Google Search like a shopping buddy.

• Ask for “cozy sweaters in autumn colors” or “gray options that go with dresses.”

• Get tailored results — from image cards to comparison tables — all pulled from Google’s 50B+ product listings, updated every hour.

• AI Mode uses Shopping Graph data to ensure stock and price info are accurate and up-to-date.

And yes, sponsored listings are included — though they’re still limited to Search for now (not Gemini).

🧠 Gemini Shopping Gets Smarter: Inside the Gemini app, shopping queries now return richer, visual responses instead of plain text. You’ll see curated ideas, suggestions, and product insights — all built around your natural-language prompts. Currently rolling out for U.S. users only.

💸 Agentic Checkout: Meet your new bargain hunter. Agentic checkout lets Google:

• Track an item’s price and alert you when it drops into your budget.

• Autonomously complete the purchase using Google Pay, after you confirm the details.

• Support purchases from Wayfair, Chewy, Quince, and select Shopify stores.

It’s powered by Google’s Shopping Graph + G Pay, meaning your data and payments stay secure.

“It brings back the customer who might otherwise move on,” said Lilian Rincon, VP of Google Shopping.

☎️ “Let Google Call”

Google’s new agentic calling feature can literally call local shops on your behalf.

• It checks if a product is in stock, what it costs, and whether any discounts apply.

• Afterward, you get a summary via text or email.

• Built on Duplex tech, Shopping Graph, and Google Pay infrastructure.

Rolling out in the U.S. for toys, beauty, and electronics first. Merchants can opt out, but if they take the call, Google discloses upfront: “This is an AI calling on behalf of a customer.”

You can search, compare, call, and even buy — all inside Google. It’s a convenience win for shoppers… but a looming disruption for influencers, review sites, and marketplaces that currently drive product discovery.

🤖 LinkedIn launches AI-powered people search.

The world’s biggest professional network is finally upgrading one of its core features — search — with generative AI.

Now, instead of guessing job titles or stabbing at filters, you can just describe the kind of person you’re looking for, and LinkedIn’s new AI will surface the best matches.

🧠 Natural-Language Search for Humans

LinkedIn’s new AI lets you type queries like:

• “Investors in the healthcare sector with FDA experience.”

• “People who co-founded a productivity startup in NYC.”=

• “Who in my network can help me understand wireless networks?”

Instead of relying on exact titles, keywords, or 15 different filters, the AI interprets your description and pulls relevant people ranked by:

 ✔️ connection strength
✔️ professional relevance
✔️ shared networks
✔️ contextual match

It’s designed to uncover people you never would have found manually.

🔄 Fixing LinkedIn’s Most Frustrating Feature

LinkedIn openly admits its old search was too rigid. With lexical search, you had to know the exact title or filter combinations. Miss a keyword? You miss the person.

Rohan Rajiv, senior director of product management, puts it plainly:

“This is the worst the search has ever been.”

The new AI-powered search is built to be the fastest path to the person who can help you the most.

🎯 Early Use Cases

In LinkedIn’s internal tests, users are already using the new search to:

• find potential co-founders

• identify industry-specific mentors

• locate investors who match their niche

• get help preparing for a job move

• expand their business opportunities

With generative AI, LinkedIn becomes less of a directory and more of a professional advisor.

⚠️ It’s Not Perfect (Yet)

LinkedIn admits the system still has quirks:

• Searching “people who co-founded a YC startup” returns different results than “Y Combinator.”

• Searching “voice AI startup founders” can surface people with “LinkedIn Top Voice” badges because of the keyword “voice.”

But for a feature this early, the recall is already far better than traditional LinkedIn search.

🌍 Rollout Begins

The new AI people search is:

• Available now for Premium users in the U.S.

• Rolling out globally over the next few months

• Marked by a new search bar prompt: “I’m looking for…”

This comes after LinkedIn launched an AI-powered job search earlier this year — part of Microsoft’s wider push to turn LinkedIn into the professional layer of the AI ecosystem.

🤝Anthropic announces a $50 billion data center partnership!

 Claude’s future just got a lot more hardware.

Anthropic is officially going big on infrastructure — committing $50 billion to custom-built data centers across the U.S. in partnership with UK neocloud provider Fluidstack. 

It’s the company’s first major push into owning its own AI compute stack, and it signals one thing: frontier models need frontier infrastructure.

🇺🇸 Two Massive Sites, Custom-Built for Claude

Anthropic and Fluidstack are building next-gen data centers in:

• Texas

• New York

The facilities — optimized specifically for Anthropic’s high-compute workloads — will come online throughout 2026, with more sites planned.

These centers plug directly into the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, which aims to cement U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence.

⚡ Why Anthropic Needs Its Own Compute: Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, puts it plainly:

“We’re getting closer to AI that can accelerate scientific discovery… but that requires infrastructure that supports development at the frontier.”

Claude’s capabilities are ballooning — and so are its compute demands. Anthropic has major cloud partnerships with Amazon and Google, but those aren’t enough anymore.

This is Anthropic’s first move toward a dedicated, vertically integrated compute stack, tuned specifically for:

• high-compute RL and training

• interpretability workflows

• multi-agent experimentation

• next-generation Claude models

📈 The Economics Behind the Move

Anthropic’s internal projections (per Forbes reports) are wild:

• $70B revenue by 2028

• $17B positive cash flow

The $50B spend is huge — but compared to competitors?

• Meta: $600B in data-center buildouts

• Stargate (OpenAI + SoftBank + Oracle): $500B.

 Anthropic’s move is big, but still modest relative to the AI race.

🧬 The Bigger Picture: Anthropic Wants Frontier Independence

Anthropic frames this project as essential for:

• scaling Claude reliably

• powering demand from 300,000+ business customers

• supporting a 7× increase in large enterprise accounts

In short: Claude needs compute headroom to keep pushing into higher-order reasoning, scientific discovery, and agentic tasks — and Anthropic wants to own the runway.

🎭 AI Reimagines: Stones, stones, and more stones!

We’ll say it: this one’s pretty on the nose 😆. But, hey, if you’re a lover of gems, or as we call them, pretty cool stones, you’d love this showcase. 

Up for it? Dive in 😄! 

🎯 Everything else you missed this week.

⏪ Spotify launches new recap feature for audiobooks.

💸 SoftBank’s sale of NVIDIA holdings rattles the stock market.

🤖 Mozilla rolls out an AI window for Firefox.

📸 Google’s “Help me edit” feature lets iPhone users edit photos by describing changes.

 📺 Samsung brings Gen AI to its TVs.

⚡ The Neural Frontier’s weekly spotlight: 3 AI tools making the rounds this week. 

1. 🔍 Semrush One is a unified SEO and AI search platform that tracks brand visibility across Google and AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity, connecting search performance to revenue metrics.

2. 🤖 PMI Infinity is an AI assistant grounded in PMI's global project management standards that provides secure, project-specific guidance with specialized agents for charters, risk plans, and stakeholder management.

3. 🎥 Sendr is an AI-powered sales outreach platform that creates personalized videos and landing pages at scale using lip-sync technology, turning one recording into thousands of customized messages.

If there’s one thing to take away…

It’s that holiday shopping is about to get way easier 😆. But seriously, we can’t wait to test out these features.

What’s on the agenda for next week? Only one way to find out: hit that Subscribe button if you haven’t, and…

We’ll catch you next week on the Neural Frontier ✨.