Your phone buzzes at 6 a.m. It’s ChatGPT: “I see you’re traveling to New York this week. Based on your preferences, I’ve found three restaurants near your hotel. Would you like me to make a reservation?”
You didn’t ask for this. The AI simply knew your plans from scanning your calendar and email and decided to help. Later, you mention to the chatbot needing flowers for your wife’s birthday. Within seconds, beautiful arrangements appear in the chat. You tap one: “Buy now.” Done. The flowers are ordered.
This isn’t science fiction. On Sept. 29, 2025, OpenAI and payment processor Stripe launched the Agentic Commerce Protocol. This technology lets you buy things instantly from Etsy within ChatGPT conversations. ChatGPT users are scheduled to gain access to over 1 million other Shopify merchants, from major household brand names to small shops as well.
For three decades, the internet has worked the same way: You want something, you Google it, you compare options, you decide, you buy. You’re in control.
That era is ending.
AI shopping assistants are evolving through three phases. First came “on-demand AI.” You ask ChatGPT a question, it answers. That’s where most people are today.
Now we’re entering “ambient AI,” where AI suggests things before you ask. ChatGPT monitors your calendar, reads your emails and offers recommendations without being asked.
Soon comes “autopilot AI,” where AI makes purchases for you with minimal input from you. “Order flowers for my anniversary next week.” ChatGPT checks your calendar, remembers preferences, processes payment and confirms delivery.
Each phase adds convenience but gives you less control.
The manipulation problem
AI’s responses create what researchers call an “advice illusion.” When ChatGPT suggests three hotels, you don’t see them as ads. They feel like recommendations from a knowledgeable friend. But you don’t know whether those hotels paid for placement or whether better options exist that ChatGPT didn’t show you.
Traditional advertising is something most people have learned to recognize and dismiss. But AI recommendations feel objective even when they’re not. With one-tap purchasing, the entire process happens so smoothly that you might not pause to compare options.
OpenAI isn’t alone in this race. In the same month, Google announced its competing protocol, AP2. Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are building similar systems. Whoever wins will be in position to control how billions of people buy things, potentially capturing a percentage of trillions of dollars in annual transactions.
What we’re giving up
This convenience comes with costs most people haven’t thought about.
Privacy: For AI to suggest restaurants, it needs to read your calendar and emails. For it to buy flowers, it needs your purchase history. People will be trading total surveillance for convenience.
Choice: Right now, you see multiple options when you search. With AI as the middleman, you might see only three options ChatGPT chooses. Entire businesses could become invisible if AI chooses to ignore them.
Power of comparing: When ChatGPT suggests products with one-tap checkout, the friction that made you pause and compare disappears.
It’s happening faster than you think
ChatGPT reached 800 million weekly users by September 2025, growing four times faster than social media platforms did. Major retailers began using OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol within days of its launch.
History shows people consistently underestimate how quickly they adapt to convenient technologies. Not long ago most people wouldn’t think of getting in a stranger’s car. Uber now has 150 million users.
Convenience always wins. The question isn’t whether AI shopping will become mainstream. It’s whether people will keep any real control over what they buy and why.
What you can do
The open internet gave people a world of information and choice at their fingertips. The AI revolution could take that away. Not by forcing people, but by making it so easy to let the algorithm decide that they forget what it’s like to truly choose for themselves. Buying things is becoming as thoughtless as sending a text.
In addition, a single company could become the gatekeeper for all digital shopping, with the potential for monopolization beyond even Amazon’s current dominance in e-commerce. We believe that it’s important to at least have a vigorous public conversation about whether this is the future people actually want.
Here are some steps you can take to resist the lure of convenience:
Question AI suggestions. When ChatGPT suggests products, recognize you’re seeing hand-picked choices, not all your options. Before one-tap purchases, pause and ask: Would I buy this if I had to visit five websites and compare prices?
Review your privacy settings carefully. Understand what you’re trading for convenience.
Talk about this with friends and family. The shift to AI shopping is happening without public awareness. The time to have conversations about acceptable limits is now, before one-tap purchasing becomes so normal that questioning it seems strange.
The invisible price tag
AI will learn what you want, maybe even before you want it. Every time you tap “Buy now,” you’re training it—teaching it your patterns, your weaknesses, what time of day you impulse buy.
Our warning isn’t about rejecting technology. It’s about recognizing the trade-offs. Every convenience has a cost. Every tap is data. The companies building these systems are betting you won’t notice, and in most cases they’re probably right.
Citation:
OpenAI has slipped shopping into ChatGPT users’ chats—here’s why that matters (2025, October 20)
retrieved 20 October 2025
from https://techxplore.com/news/2025-10-openai-chatgpt-users-chats.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
DevOps adoption has been going on for a decade and shows no signs of slowing. In Forrester’s 2024 developer experience survey, 87% of developers indicated that their organisation had already adopted DevOps practices or planned to do so in the coming year.
But for many organisations, scaling their DevOps practice has been complicated, expensive and, in the end, insufficient in delivering the value leaders had expected. These organisations start with a grassroots approach to DevOps adoption, with each team self-selecting its toolchain, creating its best practices and infusing its institutional knowledge.
Forrester clients tell us this team-based approach breaks down at scale. It creates as many problems as it solves and does not deliver the results the C-suite was expecting.
For instance, bespoke toolchains create headaches. Organisations that took this approach are now saddled with too many unique toolchains, each requiring nurturing by the same developers who are supposed to be building customer-focused products. These toolchains also require unique automation, create trapped institutional knowledge, contribute to tool sprawl and limit any chance for volume DevOps tool pricing.
All these factors create headaches for IT leaders trying to reduce overheads while improving productivity and efficiency.
Many organisations now understand that improving the developer experience increases efficiency by removing impediments to the development process. High among those impediments is unnecessary context switching, which breaks the concentration of developers and decreases flow.
Disconnected automation tools, multiple systems of record and multiple platforms slow developers down by forcing them to play hopscotch with numerous tools. Without a common platform as the backbone, when developers change projects, they may go through entirely new onboarding procedures to get access to repositories and commit their first pull request.
The lack of standardised practices causes governance issues as well. Without a standard approach to software delivery, you end up with ad hoc governance implemented differently depending on the toolchain. This creates trust barriers between developers and enterprise governance teams, can add manual oversight and red tape that slows processes down, and works against efforts to improve productivity and efficiency at scale.
Another issue software developers face is that the traditional IT service catalogue is a heavyweight solution. Many organisations have had service portals for years, grounded in IT and enterprise service management practices and based on products such as ServiceNow, Atlassian’s Jira Service Management or BMC Helix.
These tools remain because they often serve non-technical users and may be leveraged by traditional infrastructure organisations for ticketed offerings. However, developers find ticket ops to be too slow and unresponsive, which is why a market emerged for dedicated internal developer platforms (IDPs).
A scaled platform for services
IDPs provide a framework for creating an IT platform where services can be defined, automated and exposed across the enterprise.
Examples of IT services that can be incorporated into an IDP include allocating a new piece of infrastructure, such as a new virtual machine, instantiating an automated continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to build and deliver code, or creating the scaffolding for a new microservice project using organisational best practices.
Internal developer platforms provide a framework for creating an IT platform where services can be defined, automated and exposed across the enterprise Forrester
IDPs facilitate management and access to service automations by providing a framework to manage and expose automation at scale.
IDPs can provide visibility into tools and frameworks. One feature of IDPs is scorecards, which provide information about both the technical and business performance of technologies. This helps developers make the right choice when faced with multiple frameworks, and also gives leaders insight into adoption.
New tool adoption becomes apparent to leadership, as does abandonment of older technologies, enabling leaders to deprecate and remove older components when it makes sense for the business.
At a high level, IDPs can serve a similar role to traditional platform as a service (PaaS) by providing an abstraction layer to IT infrastructure services. However, whereas many PaaS implementations have opaque abstraction layers, IDPs offer a transparent layer via service definition files that enable developers and infrastructure engineers to view, reuse and improve upon the underlying abstraction mechanisms.
Platform builders need to understand these differences to determine which abstraction model will serve their needs best.
There are several reasons for its adoption. Spotify has a reputation for transformational engineering processes. Many organisations have adopted the now-famous Spotify model, featuring squads, tribes and guilds. Having Backstage reside in the CNCF ensures governance and a healthy community of contributors and adopters. A growing number of commercial DevOps tool suppliers support Backstage plug-ins. And most importantly, because it’s open source, Backstage is free for developers to download and try, further accelerating interest in platforms in general.
Before committing to an IDP, IT leaders should build a compelling business case outlining which benefits the IDP will bring to the organisation and how it will measure these Forrester
Many teams had assumed, or hoped, that Backstage was a ready-to-use platform, but soon became overwhelmed by its complexity. This has created an opportunity for commercial software providers to differentiate their offerings from Backstage. These commercial tools providers claim their products are easier to get started with, have a lower learning curve and offer technological advantages to Backstage, such as providing a service orchestration layer.
Spotify also offers Backstage as a paid commercial subscription that includes product support, additional plugins and no-code capabilities to help companies get started faster with greater confidence. Users see these commercial add-ons, such as Soundcheck (a plug-in that helps teams visualise quality, security and reliability checks on services), as value-adds.
Before committing to an IDP, Forrester recommends IT leaders build a compelling business case outlining which benefits the IDP will bring to the organisation and how it will measure these. Developing a comprehensive business plan will ensure alignment between the stakeholders funding the platform initiative and those responsible for its creation.
Forrester has found that nearly every IDP company and end user who has successfully built an IDP started small by building a proof of concept (PoC). The first implementation can take several weeks to months.
Forrester recommends that IT leaders first identify a team that is collaborative and sees the benefit of an IDP approach. Then, build the PoC around a few of members’ crucial needs while engaging with them for additional suggestions and even their own contributions to improve the IDP. This approach can be built upon and used as a springboard for other teams to continue to grow the IDP in a sustainable way.
Before anything else, you’ll have to decide between ink and laser. I’ll get into the details when it comes to each model, but the most important consideration is paper type, because it’s a limitation rather than a benefit. Laser printers use heat in the bonding process, which means if you regularly print on windowed envelopes or photo paper, you’ll need to either use an ink printer or change to a thermally safe alternative, which can be cost prohibitive if you print a lot.
Inkjets are the most common flavor of home printer, and they work like you might expect, by boiling ink until it splatters through a series of tiny holes. You didn’t expect that? Me neither! Pretty exciting stuff.
Inkjet printers come in two flavors, with either prefilled cartridges or built-in tanks. The latter is quickly becoming more popular thanks to better pricing, more convenience, and a massive reduction in wasted plastic. If you’re buying a new printer in 2025 you should opt for an ink tank, if not a laser printer. They’re a little more work to setup and maintain, since you have to keep the tanks topped off, and they should remain in one place on a flat surface to avoid leaks. I can’t imagine many situations where a printer would be constantly moving and tilting, but it’s a consideration.
You thought InkJets were cool? Laser printers work by blasting a tube full of dried plastic particles, then fusing them to the paper with heat. They tend to cost more upfront, but the cost per page is overall much lower. Where a $20 ink cartridge might print 200 pages, a $60 toner cartridge could print 2000. They tend to be a lot faster than inkjet printers, and you don’t have to worry about them drying out. Plus, the pages come out of the printer nice and warm, and you can’t really put a price on that.
There are also thermal printers, which are commonly used for receipts or shipping labels. Instead of filling the printer with ink and depositing it onto a surface, they apply heat in precise patterns to special paper, allowing you to print text and images in low resolution, and typically in one color. If you print shipping labels or simple stickers at home, these can save you a lot of time and ink cost, but they have more limitations.
Laser printers are my preferred type, as long as your paper type and budget can support them, but most home users will be happy with an ink tank printer.
“In general, we are noticing many of these shoes have more of a road running influence than they do trail,” says Bodin. “So, there will be a mix of foams, midsole geometries, less attention to fit, and a more subtle outsole pattern compared to trail shoes.”
What Are the Benefits of Gravel Shoes?
In a word: versatility. You can lace up a gravel shoe at home with confidence that they’ll handle whatever lies ahead, provided you’re not hitting a really technical trail or ankle-deep mud.
“Many of the shoes in this category can run well on roads, gravel paths, and light trails,” says Bodin. “That’s not something that very many strictly road shoes or dedicated trail shoes can do.”
The more rockered midsoles aim to smooth your heel-to-toe transitions, cutting the calf muscle fatigue over uneven ground and on longer runs. They’re also often lighter than technical trail shoes, thanks to the smaller lugs, less pronounced rock plates, and lower levels of upper reinforcement. That serves up more agility than heftier trail shoes, so you can move faster and lighter over runnable ground.
Do Gravel Shoes Feel Different From “Regular” Trail Shoes?
“Yes and no,” says Bodin. A lot depends on the brand. Some companies, like Craft, have many gravel-specific options. Others, like Salomon and Hoka, use their redesigned road running shoes for their gravel category.
Gravel shoes also have limits, warns Bodin. “In my experience, most gravel shoes will be limited when they reach a moderately technical trail-running scenario. Again, because the bulk of the gravel shoe experience is focused on the overall ride on smoother terrain, performance declines when there are more turns or more challenging terrain with rocks and roots.”
Do You Really Need a Gravel Shoe?
Photograph: Kieran Alger
Like everything in running shoe world, that depends. There are trail shoes out there with the chops to conquer everything from technical to more runnable terrain, like the Hoka Speedgoat 6 ($125). Some of the pricier trail shoes like the North Face Vectiv Pro 3 ($250) pair modified versions of their springy road-shoe foams with carbon plates to deliver bouncier rides that don’t feel out of place on the road. I’ve tested loads of these shoes, and some top-tier trail shoes run better on the road than cheaper road shoes.
However, if you regularly tackle firmer, less technical mixed terrain on your runs, generally in drier conditions—and rarely venture onto more technical trails—there’s a good case for investing in a gravel shoe. It’ll carry you happily from road to trail and back again, and even cover your road runs on the way to the trail.
Likewise, if you’re a newcomer to trail running, a gravel shoe could be a good halfway house as you transition from the asphalt to the single track, thanks to a ride which retains some road-shoe familiarity. They’re also an excellent suitcase shoe—if you’re traveling and you can only fit one shoe in your luggage, the versatility of a gravel shoe makes it a great choice.
Tech1 week ago
Sports1 week ago
Entertainment1 week ago
Fashion1 week ago
Politics1 week ago
Tech1 week ago
Sports1 week ago
Entertainment1 week ago