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Fair play to all the parents working through the school holidays. Not only do you get to do your day job as well as all your extra AI jobs, but you also get to cut fruit, clean spills and break up fights. If these two weeks don't break you, you'll have a level of resilience no robot can take from you.

On that note, I'm going to take next week off to stare deep into the ocean. I'll see you in a fortnight.

CHEERS, BUSHY

01

Every week without fail, there's a significant new development in the AI rollout. It's like your favourite TV soap opera. Full of sordid partnerships, cunning plans and drought-flamed galahs.

This week, Amazon blocked Meta's Muse after Meta ignored a request to pull Amazon from it. Amazon says it breaches its Conditions of Use. Days later, Meta stepped on stage at Connect and announced its shopping partners on Muse. Walmart, Best Buy and Sephora are in, along with Gap and Wayfair. Shopify and Stripe are plugged in underneath and Instacart is coming soon. Muse hit number one on the US App Store within a week of launch. It's the centrepiece of Zuck's new quest to build the “World’s First Personal AI Agent Built for Everyone”. It's slightly better than being stuck in the Metaverse, I guess.

Then Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, which aims to get rid of all the Claudeisms in its writing. On cue, about 90 minutes later, OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and Luna. Their focus is price. Both are 50% cheaper than the models they replace.

Meanwhile, Amazon went off with Anthropic and let its sellers connect their data to Claude to analyse and manage their storefronts. It's in beta for US sellers for now. Amazon joined Google's Universal Commerce Protocol back in April. But it seems to be much more guarded about letting other AI platforms in.

Tune back in a fortnight to see who's icing out who, who's sleeping with who, and whether a raging bushfire burns the whole town down.

02

A couple of weeks ago we covered the implications of Australia's quest to opt out of social media algorithms. YouTube made a move this week that fits right in. It announced Custom Feeds. It's essentially an AI prompt where you describe the type of feed you want. YouTube saves that curated feed as its own tab on your homepage so you can come back to it any time.

For example, you might create a feed for “Daily surf reports” or “Calm wilderness videos to study with” or “Only show me ecommerce podcasts from Australia that start with A and end with T”. It's rolling out in the US first.

Curated feeds are not a new idea. Everyone from Spotify to Instagram to X has trialled them in different ways. I expect them to become more common if legislation gets passed and Australia sets the scene. From an advertising view, it gives a pretty clear intent signal straight up on what interest or mood a person is in. So ads can match it.

03

Mailchimp analysed 44 billion emails and 83 million text messages from peak season 2025 to give you some hints for this year. Surprise! Email and SMS work. But there were some useful findings.

The top 10% of senders over last year's BFCM had a 10% average click rate, against 1.2% for everyone else. And they sent 56 times fewer emails than the rest. Engagement still matters. New customers had a 21% higher average order value via email than repeat customers. In Australia, first-time buyers made up nearly 69% of email orders. Email is not just a retention mechanism. Order rates were twice as high on weekends as on weekdays. Don't work during office hours.

But the biggest takeaway was local. During peak 2025, Australian emails that used generative AI recorded 19% higher order rates and 21% higher conversion rates than those sent without it. I'm not sure whether that's because the generative AI was ultra-inspiring or just a sign that these retailers are a little more advanced than others.

04

This one is going under the radar and matters for anyone with a .com.au domain. auDA, the authority that manages .au domains, ran an external review to see whether its current policies are still relevant. The auDA Board has now approved the recommendations in principle. That includes tightening the connection between the .com.au you register and your actual business.

Currently you can get a domain that matches your company name, business name or trademark. Or you can claim one if it's connected to your goods, services, events, activities or premises. It's pretty loose. They are proposing to take away that looser connection and only allow domains that match a registered business, company or trademark. I fear for my nakedecom.com.au domain now. But it will mean many businesses could lose domains they built their businesses on or acquired over the years if they're related to what's registered, just not an exact match. Draft rules still need to go out for public consultation. There's a petition here if you're that kind of person.

While we're talking about stupid rules, Meta has started rolling out its Meta One subscription for businesses. Some business owners are saying they can't post more than two links per month without it. Meta One Advanced costs US$49.99 a month and gets you links in four Instagram posts and four Reels every month. So social of them.

05

We started with AI. We're closing with AI. Alibaba.com just released a public AI testing toolkit on GitHub called Commerce Agent Bench. It includes 107 commerce tasks for different AI models to complete and ranks them by pass rate, average steps, time and tokens. The tasks include updating a wholesale price list in Google Docs, escalating returns in Gmail and doing a storefront brand refresh in Shopify.

The results show Claude Opus 5 leading with a 61.7% pass rate. GPT is in the middle. Gemini lags at the bottom, with Gemini 3 Flash passing just 29%. The GitHub is worth exploring for the 107 use cases alone, especially if you want to borrow some of those instructions.

Meanwhile, I don't always agree with what he says, but I love what Tobi from Shopify came out with last week. He described slop grenades. One of the biggest risks with AI is that we create more slop with machines. Then the machines have to decipher and clean it up with AI to make it usable. I'm getting a lot of grenades thrown at me with bad sales pitches right now. I'll need a Slop Shield soon. Better register that domain.

ATC PLAYBOOK #666

If you're smart and brave enough to make your own product, someone is going to copy it. Where will you spend your energy when they do?

The branding, the packaging and even the exact colourway can be reverse-engineered by someone with good factory connections and no regard for IP. Legal only protects the exact thing that got copied. It's whack-a-mole. What can't be copied is why your customers chose you in the first place.

In today's Playbook, we pull together four operators from the ATC archive who've all been copied and decided the lawyers weren't the main answer. We cover three things. What you're actually defending, because it usually isn't the product. Why being wanted beats being first. And how to build the parts of your brand a copy can't fake. You'll also get a simple test to run on your brand this week.

Examples from this Playbook

🛩️ Elysia from Meke Baby dropped the legal fight and put the money into a campaign that was ridiculous for a baby brand. It was unmistakably her.

💎 Kelly from Klipsta still spends on patents and design registrations. But the real defence is quality. The cheap copy gets the cheap customer who they never wanted anyway.

🥾 Danielle from Merry People stopped sending legal letters when competitors copied her. She doubled down on her unique claims.

🥑 Davie from The Oodie only chases literal counterfeits. Trademarked characters do the heavy lifting, because a fake avocado Oodie is obviously not a real Oodie.