Global Digital Marketing & Retail by Alex 132
Goodmorning everyone! Another edition of my newsletter on everything I find interesting. Mostly on Global Marketing & Retail. Go check out this edition.
🫨 First your attention for this: the interface stops being the product
I wrote about this before and more and more I see articles on this topic including -now- real life examples.
In many cases (not all) the interface can stop being the product due to MCP.
How to deal with it?
I think one should consider:
Go API-first (and MCP-native). Sounds a contradiction but I think in many cases it’s inevitable, so better be one of the early adaptors and figure it out.
Stop building features, start shipping capabilities or outcomes. Especially important (I wrote also on this many times before) to think beyond features. Redefine the roadmap around “what can an agent compose here?” instead of “what new screen or feature, do we ship? I wrote about that already in a few newsletters among this one.
Think about a hybrid approach: UI where it still wins, agents elsewhere. Also think about the fact that some extensions even let MCP servers push lightweight interactive UIs inside the agent chat.
Monetize and differentiate the new way, maybe premium “agent-ready” tiers with richer context or higher limits?
Experiment aggressively and stay agile. Run internal pilots like Revolut did. Encourage teams to connect Claude to your own APIs via MCP. you’ll discover product gaps in days, not quarters. Stay curious: new agent-to-agent protocols and extensions are coming. All fun to play with I think.
Details:
https://x.com/linasbeliunas/status/2029165197466976665
And in Lina’s newsletter:
Earlier related posts from me:
🇺🇸 Amazon introduces Amazon Seller Canvas
This feature just rolled out a few days ago, free for all US and UK sellers via Amazon Seller Central. Basically it’s an evolution of the existing seller assistant AI tool, but now it’s enhanced. You can now ask things like “what if, I run a discount”.
I think pretty very cool! It will set a standard for seller support, I think.
Early reactions from sellers and industry folks (mostly from news coverage and X chatter):
It’s being called a “game-changer” for turning raw data into quick, actionable visuals, especially helpful for performance analysis right now, with marketing optimization, inventory planning, and product launch tools coming soon.
People like how it cuts down manual digging (hours → seconds) and supports “what-if” scenario testing without guesswork.
Some compare it favorably to agentic AI trends, noting Amazon’s push to help sellers scale faster (e.g., reducing inventory costs or fixing account issues proactively).
No major negative user complaints yet, it’s too fresh, and coverage is positive/optimistic, focusing on the real-time personalization and how it levels up support compared to traditional Seller Central reports.
I think smart move and it will help both sellers and consumers.
🇸🇬 Singapore free AI training and access for it’s citizens
I often wish, we in the Netherlands, had a little more of Singapore’s economic vision (and execution).
It’s all about productivity. One factor to be more productive is tech.
Singapore now offers it’s citizens free courses and AI access:
The Government will offer free six-month premium AI tool subscriptions for selected SkillsFuture AI courses from the second half of 2026.
This initiative aims to provide hands-on AI experience and build fluency for Singaporeans aged 25 and above, regardless of income.
Subscriptions from providers like Google and Microsoft will align with course content, ensuring practical application for participants.
With these type of measures, Singapore ensures it remains one of the major global tech area’s in the world. Well done!
Dubai has something similar, I wrote about this earlier in this post.
🇦🇹 Booking a hotel in Austrias so many opportunities for a better guest experience
As I am not flying to Asia due to the situation in the Middle East, and I do want to take a bit of holiday, I now go skiing in Austria. It’s been a few years since I was in Austria for the last time but in terms of hotel booking frustration, nothing really changed. They haven’t improved that experience at all.
Not a lot of hotels are bookable via booking.com or an other large platform. While I understand that, they haven’t invested at all in a good booking platform for all ski-resorts. Every ski resort has it’s own booking engine and they fail dramatically in user experience. I am already busy for 2 days trying to book a hotel and I still didn’t succeed.
Most hotels that you can book through some kind of a portal are week basis, but it’s now outside season and I want not on a weekly basis but different. Impossible to get a good deal via the portal. I know, also from experience, that it is possible to get a good deal but you always need to do too much effort for that by manually asking and that’s very time consuming.
This manual asking can go via a request form. Basically a quotation that is send to a pool of hoteliers and you get invididual offers back from each hotel.
These offers come in emails that are very hard to read (tiny tiny font), not uniform and some do not have any details on how to book, so you have to “email” them first, and via that you never get a fast reply so you end up negotiating with many different hotels and pensions via e-mail.
When I do find a hotel via this pool, often I need to go to a “geocities’ like webpage of that hotel (external not in the platform) to get more details or pictures. I also need to find the official hotel page via Google as it is not linked in the e-mail with the quotation.
Now, I can speak and write German, but if you cannot, there is no easy language switch, which is very easy to create nowadays (Hi Clonable).
If you do get e-mails with offers, they the template is not mobile friendly. Hard to read, way too much content and if you need additional support or if you have additional questions, you need to copy paste an e-mail adress from the footer of the e-mail.
In this case I am trying to book a hotel or pension in Serfaus ski resort but it’s the same at most ski resorts in Austria (maybe with one or two exceptions).
OMG, so many opportunities to improve the guest experience and to get more people to the resorts in Austria, really. This is already the case for years!
Update: after 3 days of haggling I finally found a nice pension. Took me lots of time.
🇳🇴 Norway: A Day in the Life of an Enshittificator
This is fun!
The “Enshitificator” campaign comes from the Norwegian consumer council, a government-funded organization that advocates for consumer rights in Norway.
In late February 2026, they launched a campaign centered on the concept of enshittification (a term popularized by Cory Doctorow describing how digital platforms and products start good to attract users, then degrade over time to extract more profit once users are locked in.
Fun to watch! So do so! And think about it when you develop products!
Thanks Niels, nice one!
Details: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree
🇮🇩 Meanwhile in Indonesia QRIS keeps expanding
Indonesia is expanding its QRIS payment method across the region and so will cross border e-commerce profit in that region. Important to follow for us crossborder e-commerce fans as the ASEAN frameworks expaning rapidly.
The planned expansion across APEC markets builds on existing interoperability arrangements within ASEAN and selected partner economies, including Japan. The initiative is expected to: accept interoperable digital payment, support local currency settlement mechanisms, reduced reliance on global card networks, and lower transaction and remittance costs.
“Indonesia’s payment digitalization has already reached South Korea, Japan, and parts of the Middle East. We will continue to promote it to other APEC countries,” Airlangga said after attending the APEC Business Council Meeting at the Shangri-La Hotel in Jakarta on Saturday, February 7, 2026.
Details: https://research.hktdc.com/en/article/MjI2NDg2NDgxNA
https://en.tempo.co/read/2085808/indonesia-targets-qris-payment-expansion-across-apec-countries
🇨🇳 China/Shenzhen and open claw: one person companies
One of the nice things in China (especially on tech) is that the Chinese people are very open to new tech but also governments really support it. Here another example from Shenzhen, I city I have been to many, many times. If you haven’t been there it’s very difficult to understand what is happening there.
Shenzhen has just released policy measures to support OpenClaw / OPC.
The main measure is: zero-cost startup as its central highlight, the initiative extends an invitation to intelligent agent developers worldwide and entrepreneurs building OPCs (One Person Companies), aiming to make Longgang the top global destination for launching intelligent-agent startups.
Now compare this to most of Europe and especially the EU where I am 100% sure 99.99% of the policy makers never tried OPC themselves or anything that looks like it.
So look East for ideas especially those one person companies with Open Claw.
Thank you for reading! This week a shorter newsletter then normal. Normally I would have been on holiday and that messed up my agenda a bit. I simply had less time to write. Hope you enjoyed reading it though and I hope to see you in the next edition again.
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