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Microsoft’s Copilot Checkout has gone live in the United States, turning conversational AI into a direct checkout lane and doing so with a clear “merchant consent” argument as its public differentiator. The rollout ties Copilot to payment and commerce infrastructure from PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe and ships with Shopify merchants automatically enrolled after an opt‑out window — a move that instantly scales Microsoft’s reach into millions of storefronts while attempting to avoid the consent...

PayPal’s technology is now a built‑in payment lane inside Microsoft’s Copilot: shoppers can discover, decide and complete purchases without leaving the Copilot experience, as PayPal announced it will power inventory surfacing, branded and guest checkout, and card acceptance for Copilot Checkout starting on Copilot.com. Background Copilot Checkout represents a strategic shift from “search-and-click” to what the industry calls agentic commerce—AI agents that do more than recommend products and...

Microsoft’s Copilot has moved from assistant to checkout lane: Copilot Checkout lets users discover products and complete purchases inside Copilot conversations without being redirected to merchant websites, and the initial U.S. rollout arrives with major commerce partners—Shopify, PayPal, and Stripe—plus prebuilt retail templates (Brand Agents, catalog enrichment, store‑ops agents) that aim to make “agentic commerce” practical for retailers and IT teams. Background / Overview Microsoft...

Microsoft has begun testing a native in-chat shopping and checkout experience called Copilot Checkout, letting U.S. users search for products and complete purchases without leaving the Copilot conversation — a move that stitches discovery, comparison, and payment into Microsoft’s conversational surface across Copilot.com, Bing, MSN, and Microsoft Edge. Background Microsoft’s step into in-chat commerce is part of a larger industry trend toward agentic commerce — where conversational AIs act...

The Linux Foundation has launched the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a vendor‑neutral home for three rapidly adopted open standards for autonomous, multi‑tool AI agents—Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block’s goose framework, and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md—backed at launch by Anthropic, OpenAI and Block as co‑founders and a membership roster that includes Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Bloomberg and Cloudflare. Background Agentic AI describes systems that move beyond single‑turn...

Picture this: your Security Operations Center lights up at 03:00 because an AI-driven campaign has sent 10,000 bespoke phishing messages aimed at your executives, each message tuned from public LinkedIn content and corporate signals. The immediate threat isn't a novel zero‑day — it’s volume, fidelity, and speed. Microsoft‑centric organizations must treat this as a structural shift: defenders who rely on slow, manual playbooks will lose. The new calculus is identity, automation, and governed...

TomTom’s latest announcement confirms a deepening of its multi‑year collaboration with Microsoft: the company is integrating its TomTom Automotive Navigation Application and TomTom AI Agent with Azure OpenAI in Microsoft Foundry Models, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to deliver production‑grade, brandable in‑car navigation and voice capabilities for automakers. This is being pitched as a pre‑integrated, scalable stack that shortens time‑to‑market and enables OEMs to ship...

Thurrott readers are reporting a familiar — and increasingly visible — set of problems with the site’s commenting layer after Thurrott integrated the OpenWeb commenting platform: slow or missing comment loads, inconsistent notifications, apparent moderation opacity, and sporadic UI breakage that together undermine the value of site conversation and reader engagement. Background OpenWeb is a commercial commenting and community-engagement platform that sells moderation, analytics, and audience...

Headline: Dell’s XPS comeback at CES 2026 — what it means for Windows 11, buyers, and the PC market Lead paragraph Dell has quietly — and quickly — reversed course on a controversial 2025 rebrand by bringing the XPS premium laptop family back into its lineup at CES 2026. The relaunch (anchored by new XPS 14 and XPS 16 models) is already rolling into select markets and ships with Windows 11 on the new hardware, a development that strengthens Microsoft’s ecosystem at the premium end of the PC...

Raycast has landed a properly modern replacement for the old Win+R prompt — a keyboard-first, discoverable Run command added to Raycast for Windows in v0.41 that aims to behave like the classic Run dialog while offering the features and polish users expect from a modern app launcher. The update, published on January 8, 2026, positions Raycast as a full-featured Windows alternative to the decades-old Run box and sits alongside other modern launchers — including Microsoft’s own evolving Run...

Windows Weekly 965 distilled a chaotic week in PC tech into a sharp, pragmatic briefing: Paul Thurrott and his cohosts threaded CES highlights, Microsoft’s high‑stakes engineering pivot toward Rust, stealth platform changes like hardware‑accelerated BitLocker, fresh Windows Insider previews and Copilot updates, and a sweeping set of gaming and hardware notes that together sketch where Windows users and IT teams should focus in 2026. Background Windows Weekly has long been the pulse check for...

Microsoft has begun shifting BitLocker’s heavy lifting out of general-purpose CPU cores and into dedicated silicon, introducing a hardware‑accelerated BitLocker mode in Windows 11 that promises both measurable performance gains and tighter key protection on supported new devices. Background / Overview BitLocker has been a foundational Windows feature for disk‑at‑rest protection since the Vista era, relying historically on the host CPU (with AES‑NI where available) to perform AES‑based sector...

Lenovo’s decision to ship the Legion Go 2 in two flavors — one running Windows 11, the other preinstalled with Valve’s SteamOS — turns a single hardware platform into a deliberate buyer choice: do you want a console‑like, pick‑up‑and‑play handheld optimized for battery and sustained framerates, or a full Windows pocket PC that runs everything natively and doubles as a productivity machine? The two SKUs share identical bill‑of‑materials, but the real differences are software‑defined and...

Microsoft’s latest retail play pushes a decisive shift: treat AI not as a sidebar helper but as an operational layer that can discover, decide, and execute commerce workflows end-to-end—anchored by Dynamics 365, Copilot, and a new Model Context Protocol (MCP) surface that promises to make agentic commerce practical at scale. Background / Overview Retail has always been an information‑flow problem: products, prices, inventory, promotions, and customer intent must be aligned continuously...

Microsoft has begun turning its Copilot AI from an assistant into a point-of-sale, launching Copilot Checkout — a native checkout experience inside Copilot conversations — alongside Brand Agents, an out-of-the-box, brand‑voiced shopping agent for merchants. The rollout, which initially targets U.S. users on Copilot.com and ties into major commerce and payments partners, promises frictionless, in-chat purchases without redirecting shoppers off the Copilot surface. Microsoft positions this...

Guess’s pilot of an AI-driven catalog enrichment workflow is the kind of quietly consequential move that marks the difference between a marketing experiment and a foundation for long-term digital commerce transformation, and the company’s decision to run the pilot with Microsoft’s Copilot Studio signals a clear play for machine-readable product metadata, faster product onboarding, and agentic commerce readiness across its global channels. Background Apparel and accessories brands have long...

Event teams and agencies are increasingly using generative AI to turn a client brief into compelling, presentation‑ready visuals within minutes — but the jump from idea to finished pitch demands new workflows, governance, and practical guardrails if teams want speed without legal or brand risk. Background Generative AI has moved from novelty to core toolkit for many creative teams, with in‑app assistants and image models now able to produce mood boards, hero images, color systems, typography...

The Wii U’s unusual gamepad—an oversized controller with an embedded touchscreen that mirrors the console’s output—has long been one of Nintendo’s most interesting hardware experiments and one of its worst maintenance decisions: when the gamepad dies, the console often becomes effectively unusable. A recent community breakthrough changes that calculus. Developer MattKC and collaborators have reverse‑engineered the link between Wii U and GamePad and published a working software clone called...

January's first big Xbox event is now official: Microsoft will host the Xbox Developer_Direct 2026 livestream on Thursday, January 22 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific / 1:00 p.m. Eastern (6:00 p.m. GMT), and the broadcast will deliver extended gameplay and developer-led deep dives for several of the platform's most anticipated 2026 releases. Background / Overview Xbox Developer_Direct is Microsoft’s compact, developer-focused alternative to larger seasonal showcases. Unlike sprawling summer showcases...

Microsoft’s latest retail push folds conversational commerce, catalog automation, and store‑operations intelligence into a single, agentic stack designed to let assistants not only advise shoppers but complete purchases and act on behalf of retailers, starting with a U.S. rollout of Copilot Checkout and a set of Copilot Studio templates for Brand Agents, catalog enrichment, and store‑ops automation. Background / Overview Microsoft has been assembling a layered enterprise AI stack—Copilot...