AI Shopping Sends Higher-Intent Leads to Ulta and Etsy

Google and Unity announced a strategic partnership to build a new, integrated gaming platform coming later this year, combining Google AI, Google's billion-user products, and Unity's game-building engine technology. As an essential part of the partnership, Google's experimental Playground platform is available today, allowing users 18 and older to generate and customize playable games using natural language prompts with no coding required. Later this year, the two companies will introduce Unity Spark, a brand new product built from the ground up for a new generation of creators that maintains an accessible interface while unlocking professional-level mechanics, high-fidelity 3D capabilities, and the flexibility of the Unity runtime. The platform will offer multi-platform distribution across Google's consumer ecosystem, with creators able to log in using their Google Play Games profile for built-in leaderboards, multiplayer matchmaking, and community features from day one. Creators can test Playground at playground.google.com and learn more about Unity Spark at unity.com/spark.

ThinkingAI, which builds autonomous growth software for consumer and gaming companies, has opened its analytics, engagement and agent stack to game studios that buy software with a card instead of a procurement cycle, offering four self-serve plans priced from $0 to $999 a month. The Free tier costs $0 and includes 2 million events a month, 1 project, 1 seat, 12 months of data retention and $10 in Agent Credits for the first month, with no credit card required. Starter costs $199 a month for 5 million events, 2 projects, 5 seats, 24 months of retention and $25 a month in Agent Credits, while Pro costs $399 a month for 10 million events, 2 projects, 10 seats, 48 months of retention and $50 a month in Agent Credits. Team costs $999 a month for 30 million events, 3 projects, 15 seats, 60 months of retention and $100 a month in Agent Credits, and an Enterprise tier is sold by agreement with sales for larger studios with compliance or data residency requirements. Annual billing saves 20%, paid plans are billed through Stripe and can be cancelled at any time, and a studio that outgrows its event allowance moves up a plan inside the product with no re-instrumentation and no migration. The plans follow ThinkingAI's Sept. 16 launch of the Agentic Engine and draw on 10 years of behavioral data across more than 1,500 enterprises and 8,000 applications, including Sega, Krafton, Habby, Century Games, Xiaomi, Yostar, TCL and FunPlus, and are being announced at the ThinkingAI Agentic Game Growth Summit in Istanbul, co-hosted with Mobidictum.

Jim Cramer said on the September 30 episode of Mad Money that Microsoft's massive artificial intelligence investment is entering a new phase as the company begins turning its data-center buildout into higher revenue. Cramer noted Copilot now has 30 million users and growing, Azure is accelerating rather than contracting, and Microsoft is beginning to recoup its monster data center investment, which he compared to the payback period Nvidia's Jensen Huang once described for his semiconductors. In its fiscal fourth quarter, Microsoft Cloud revenue increased 27% to $59.3 billion, while Azure and other cloud services revenue grew 43%, and commercial remaining performance obligations rose 84% to $678 billion, including a 25% increase excluding OpenAI. CFO Amy Hood said on September 9 that Microsoft had reduced dock-to-live times for infrastructure by more than 50% over the year, even as capital expenditures reached $41 billion in the June quarter and first-quarter fiscal 2027 spending is expected to exceed $50 billion. Microsoft Cloud's gross margin fell to 65% in the June quarter, and the company generated $19.6 billion of free cash flow while paying $35.8 billion for property and equipment, leaving margins and cash flow worth watching as spending continues to rise.

Atlassian Corporation announced the launch of its Forward Deployed Engineering program, which embeds senior applied AI engineers directly into customer environments to deploy production-ready AI solutions. The program targets a gap between AI adoption and business impact: while 85% of knowledge workers use AI, only 6% of executives can point to clear, organization-wide ROI, according to Atlassian's report Leading with Context: Lessons from Atlassian's AI Journey. Avani Prabhakar, Chief People and AI Enablement Officer at Atlassian, said the company is seeing 50% higher AI adoption in engaged accounts as a result of embedding engineers with customers. In Atlassian testing, grounding AI agents in the Teamwork Graph produced answers that were 44% higher quality while using 48% fewer tokens. Expedia used the program to archive 600,000 pages across Confluence and save approximately 3,200 hours annually, with engineering teams now running 10,000+ agent invocations each month across 50 live projects, while Reddit is partnering with the engineers to accelerate its enterprise AI transformation. Engagements typically run 12 weeks, and Atlassian is also releasing The Atlassian Forward Deployed Engineering Playbook.

eDreams ODIGEO announced a strategic collaboration with Alexa+, Amazon's next-generation AI assistant, to power travel discovery and booking. The integration uses eDreams ODIGEO's proprietary Model Context Protocol technology to connect its travel platform and operational voice to Alexa+, letting customers find and book flights, hotels, and car rentals through natural-language conversation. The company said the deal opens a new acquisition channel as its travel subscription model expands toward a goal of 13 million subscribers by March 2030. eDreams ODIGEO Chief Technology Officer Carsten Bernhard said conversational artificial intelligence is the latest major technological wave and a powerful accelerator for the business. The collaboration follows the Alexa Plus Partner summit held in Seattle last July, where eDreams ODIGEO was featured in the CTO Innovation Series hosted by Amazon Alexa.