00:12:35 · Zubin Vandrevala, Aman Narain
[00:12:35] S1: And down the coast in Fuzhou is Chenbo. 27, also a composite at the other end of an order like hers. An algorithm decides what sits on the front racks. He grabs a bagged order in about ninety seconds, and he's at the door in about twenty three minutes. [00:12:53] S0: And building it costs a fortune. [00:12:55] S1: In 2025, Meituan, Alibaba, and JD fought a subsidy battle worth around 100,000,000,000 yuan. So that's approximately $14,000,000,000. Right? Just to put things in perspective, Alibaba alone pledged about 50,000,000,000 yuan. JD even pitched social insurance for its riders. [00:13:18] S0: Meituan's delivery engine, Core Local Commerce, made an operating profit about 52,400,000,000 yuan in 2024. By Caixin's account in 2025, it lost 6,900,000,000 on revenue that still grew, a swing of nearly 60,000,000,000 yuan in a year. So it brought its own customers back at full price. [00:13:43] S1: Yeah. And and kept them. Right? Coverage of its 2025 results puts its food delivery share at about 60%. And then, of course, we've talked about this. The regulators, say, MR called time. So they stopped buying customers and started buying warehouses. In February, Meituan agreed to buy Dingdong Maicai thousand front warehouses with spoilage of one to 2%. And all three went after Poo Poo, the fazale chain with more than 70% penetration. [00:14:16] S0: I swear I didn't put that in the script for you, but I hope you enjoyed that. Look, subsidies rent habits, and warehouses own.
00:14:16 · Aman Narain, Zubin Vandrevala
[00:14:16] S0: I swear I didn't put that in the script for you, but I hope you enjoyed that. Look, subsidies rent habits, and warehouses own. [00:14:28] S1: Right. And and you just live inside the same closed loop. Right? At Lunar New Year on the back of what? $400,000,000 voucher campaign. Alibaba's Qwen app handled, what, 10,000,000 milky orders in nine hours, and I think we covered this last year as well. And now testing an emergent agent, Qwen Work, which, Tech Times reports Alibaba wants every Taobao and Tmall seller on by the end of twenty twenty seven. [00:14:54] S0: I swear, I think I have bought 9,000,000 milk teas for my children. I don't know if your kids are in a bubble tea, but it's a huge crazy audience. [00:15:01] S1: It's an ancient thing. It's an ancient thing. [00:15:03] S0: It is? Okay. So one ecosystem runs the chat, the shop, and the wallet. No protocol debate. One building. India next. And let's take Imran and Lexis, dual income couple in Hyderabad. Another composite Coffee runs out mid meeting, and it's at the door in about eleven minutes. [00:15:25] S1: Aman, you talked about your experience in a previous episode. It's in one of 5,000 plus dark stores run by Blinkit, Swiggy, Instamart, Zepto, and up from barely about 3,000 a year earlier, which is crazy. [00:15:39] S0: So the corner shop now, essentially, Zubin, lives in a warehouse. [00:15:44] S1: Yeah. And it it isn't a niche. Right? Bain and Flipkart put quick commerce at two third of India's online grocery orders and a tenth of all e retail.
00:15:44 · Zubin Vandrevala, Aman Narain
[00:15:44] S1: Yeah. And it it isn't a niche. Right? Bain and Flipkart put quick commerce at two third of India's online grocery orders and a tenth of all e retail. [00:15:54] S0: And the money side matters. Top ups go on UPI. But when Lakshmi buys a 28,000 rupee hair tool, as she does, she taps a pre approved credit line on UPI at the checkout. Move and borrow are fused inside a delivery app. [00:16:13] S1: Meanwhile, Getir and Gorillas tried it in the West. Gorillas was sold to Getir's at, what, a steep discount in 2022. And by 2024, Getir had left The UK, The US, and most of Europe. [00:16:26] S0: It occurs to me, Zubin, that as we dabble with shopping, the one difference between shopping and and finance is that the names are much more creative. Let me put it that way. So so essentially, it's Hyderabad, not Hackney. [00:16:40] S1: Exactly. Poor conditions. Right? Density so a rider can batch two to three drops a trip, wages, because Korea makes or breaks it. Right? Direct procurements, so spoilage stays low. And then categories beyond groceries, things like chargers, the example you gave in the past episode, beauty, medicine. It's a labor and density trade, not to technology. [00:17:02] S0: Which is why the robots in act three matter more to London than to Mumbai. Now let's go to the West, and let's go back to Tamika again in the present. In September, she asks Meta's new agent, Muse, to buy a rain cover for a push chair on Amazon. [00:17:21] S1: Amazon said no. Muse gets an error. Continued access by an authorized agent violates Amazon's t's and c's.
00:17:21 · Zubin Vandrevala, Aman Narain
[00:17:21] S1: Amazon said no. Muse gets an error. Continued access by an authorized agent violates Amazon's t's and c's. [00:17:30] S0: So Muse takes her to Walmart, one of its launch partners, and she approves a one time card. Then on the October 21, Walmart opens a proper door in beta, the agent gateway built on the open model context protocol. Approved agents can buy directly and see her usuals without seeing her whole purchase history. That's kind of big. [00:17:57] S1: Yeah. And, Aman, I'm gonna do a slight plug. This... Early this morning, I actually did a webinar with MRC on agent payments. And one of the key concepts I talked about in my webinar is this notion of front door versus side door. What new instincts are all doing is coming through the front door. And for merchants, they can't tell the difference between bad bots and these agents. And I think what Walmart and what the open protocols that are out there tend to do is create a true legitimate side door. And so as the industry thinks about what's the proper door to open, to our analogy, it's creating those side doors and creating real legitimacy for these transactions is what's going to make the difference. [00:18:37] S0: I wonder, to some extent, the need is greater in the West given the cost of labor. [00:18:42] S1: And exactly, think that's the point you're making.
00:18:42 · Zubin Vandrevala, Aman Narain
[00:18:42] S1: And exactly, think that's the point you're making. [00:18:44] S0: Yeah. But the orientation is stronger in the East. And I mean this well, let me go here for a second. Like, people are used to having helpers in the home. People are used to having a service elevator as opposed to a main elevator physically in a building you've grown up in, in places that have that. There's an entire subculture around that side door you refer to as opposed to the main door. I wonder whether need versus orientation will play a role, but, you know, back [00:19:16] S1: That's to a good point. But coming back to the point we're just making, it's really a combination of need, in this case, where human power, labor power sort of density sort of makes up for it. In the Western world, agents are required to sort of address that. Right. So... And and coming back to the point we were just trying to make around agent profiles. Right? Like, due within a month, work like adding authorized cardholders. These are the mandates that the industry is driving towards, approves every order or sets a limit, whether it's $50,100 dollars, $200. The agent never sees the card, and all they really see is that mandate. [00:19:52] S0: Yeah. And Tamika plans to set a 100. And Walmart made a promise, I would freight. We price products, not people. So the prices that an AI agent sees are the same prices a customer sees. [00:20:07] S1: So I guess the question is, why does one giant lock the door and the other open it up?
00:20:07 · Zubin Vandrevala, Aman Narain
[00:20:07] S1: So I guess the question is, why does one giant lock the door and the other open it up? [00:20:13] S0: Well, it's simple. Follow the ads. Forbes puts Amazon's advertising business, it's something that nobody talks about, at around $68,000,000,000 a year. And today's shopping agents skip the sponsored tiles. They read prices, stocks, and reviews, and they hide the browsing data, and the ad machine runs off. [00:20:36] S1: Yeah. So the agent isn't attacking Amazon's checkout. It's really just attacking Amazon's billboard. [00:20:43] S0: Exactly. And people think always about Google when it comes to advertising, but Amazon's massive. And retail's real profit pool is attention. So agents threaten that ad model more than the tilt. The incumbent with the biggest ad business walls in. The one chasing shares opens up, even with ads of its own. Walmart's open, Amazon blocks. And I've seen this film from the bank side. Banks fought the aggregators, scraping their customer logins, and they continue now to try and do that with agents. But in 2018, Britain's competition regulator made the biggest banks open APIs. Similar things happened in India. Similar has happened in Singapore with consent screens, of course. Amazon is essentially the bank in this story.