Hello, and welcome to a special edition of Offcuts.

Something significant happened yesterday and I wanted to get it in front of you before the regular schedule, because if you are running a consumer brand, the implications are confusing but worth understanding now.

Let’s get into it.

What happened

On Tuesday 24 March, OpenAI shut down Sora, its AI video app launched just six months ago. Disney's $1 billion investment deal, which was built around the Sora partnership, is now kaput. At the same time, OpenAI confirmed it is stepping back from native checkout inside ChatGPT, refocusing instead on product discovery and search. And Shopify announced that every one of its millions of merchants is now discoverable inside ChatGPT by default, with no integration required. These three moves share a single through line, and together they represent a meaningful shift in how (external) AI commerce is going to work.

For context, we think about external AI across three layers: AI search and discovery (your products being found inside LLM interfaces), onsite AI personalisation (the storefront experience becoming conversational), and agentic shopping (fully outsourced purchasing, where a consumer hands off their intent to an agent entirely). What happened yesterday sits primarily in the first and third of those layers, and it reshapes who controls the infrastructure underneath both of them.

What this actually means in practice

This is the part that is confusing a lot of people (including a reluctant AI maximalist like myself), so it is worth explaining simply.

Before this week, if you asked ChatGPT to recommend a product, it would suggest options and send you to a website to buy them, opening a new browser tab and breaking the experience. Shopify has now changed that. A consumer can ask ChatGPT a shopping question, see real product results from Shopify merchants with live pricing and availability, click through to the brand’s storefront inside an in-app browser within ChatGPT, and complete the purchase there. The brand’s own checkout, payment methods and customer relationship all remain intact. ChatGPT never touches the transaction. It just becomes the shop window.

OpenAI provides the interface where consumers ask questions. Shopify provides the product catalogue layer that feeds live, structured data into those answers. The merchant owns the checkout and the customer.

The wider market picture

OpenAI is heading toward an IPO with a $730 billion valuation to justify, and Sora was resource-intensive, legally complicated and had not sustained its initial excitement. More importantly, Anthropic has been beating OpenAI commercially by doing less, focusing entirely on text, code and reasoning rather than spreading across consumer products. Side note, we’re on the cusp of becoming a Claude mid market partner. More on this soon.

The lesson from Anthropic is that focused infrastructure beats broad consumer bets, and OpenAI appears to be learning it.

The commerce pullback follows the same logic. Running a reliable transaction layer means real-time inventory sync across millions of SKUs, tax compliance across every jurisdiction, fraud prevention at scale and full merchant operational infrastructure. OpenAI had not built any of that, and the integration turned out to be far more complex than the announcements suggested. The path of least resistance was to hand the transaction layer back to the people who have spent decades building it and focus on being the best discovery and intelligence layer instead.

Shopify, meanwhile, had already built for this moment. Their Agentic Storefronts, announced in December, are now live for all merchants by default. And their new Agentic Plan goes further still, offering catalog infrastructure to brands that are not Shopify merchants at all, so that any brand on any platform can pay to syndicate their product data across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot. Shopify is inserting itself as the commerce layer underneath every AI interface, regardless of what platform a brand is actually built on.

TLDR: OpenAI is becoming the interface and letting others be the infrastructure.

What we do not yet know

The honest answer is that this is moving faster than anyone can fully map. The implications for brands on non-Shopify platforms are not yet clear. The Agentic Plan offers a potential route to AI visibility without a platform migration, but what it costs, how complex the integration is in practice, and how well it handles different tech stacks are all still emerging. Anyone claiming certainty here is probably a clickbait grifter aiming to sell an online AI get rich quick course.

What is clear is that the rules of external AI visibility are being written right now, and understanding where your brand sits in that landscape is increasingly a commercial priority rather than a future consideration. Our AI Readiness Assessment is designed to give you exactly that picture: a clear view of where you are across both internal and external AI, and a prioritised view of what to do first.

We will keep tracking this conversation through Offcuts and through our consulting work with consumer brands, and we will share our thinking as the picture becomes clearer.

If you want to talk through what any of this means for your business specifically, hit me up here

About Me

Hi, I’m Tim. I’m the CEO of ROIROI, a commerce agency built for the AI era. We deliver profitable growth for consumer brands by connecting design, development, marketing, data and AI. I also host Offcuts, a weekly podcast and newsletter exploring the same themes. Outside of work, I’m usually cycling, swimming, running or in a sauna-cold-plunge trying to recover from all three.