AI advances spur e‑commerce growth, cyber threats and privacy debates

AI‑driven shopping searches have surged 200 % in the past year, making agentic AI the top priority for commerce leaders, according to Salesforce’s State of Commerce report. Retailers are adapting to consumers who now start purchases with AI assistants before turning to traditional platforms such as Google, TikTok or Amazon.

At the same time, cybersecurity experts warn that AI is both a weapon and a massive attack surface. CrowdStrike’s 2026 Threat Hunting Report notes a rise in “LLM‑jacking” attacks and a flood of AI‑generated vulnerability reports that outpace human triage, creating a “tidal wave” of bugs for security teams to manage.

Privacy concerns are also intensifying as major chatbot providers – ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Claude – store conversation histories by default and use them to train models. Users must manually adjust settings to protect sensitive data.

Legal scrutiny has emerged after a Florida man sued OpenAI, claiming ChatGPT’s medical advice led him to a near‑fatal condition. Separately, a former Google employee disclosed that Google had an internal chatbot, LMChat, a year before ChatGPT’s public launch but withheld it over fears it would cannibalize search.

Finally, real‑estate platform Rechat announced an integration that lets AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude execute real workflows within its system, extending AI’s role from advisory to operational tasks.