Rick Watson is out. Nick Kaplan is in — and he's not giving the mic back.

In this special Kaplan Wednesday episode, Nick takes the research prompts Watson built for his agentic commerce analysis and turns them on the very stories they were designed to interrogate.

On the docket: Adyen's white paper claiming infrastructure is the constraint on agentic commerce (it isn't — and their own 95% AML false positive rate says why). Shopify's one-toggle Agentic Storefront promise and the data ownership problem it quietly creates. Klaviyo and Reebok Europe's Locale Aware Catalogs announcement — and the 149,999 merchants who aren't Reebok. The EU AI Act, which starts enforcement in five months and would like a word with every agentic protocol on the market. And the number that breaks every GMV projection: only 14% of shoppers trust AI recommendations enough to transact.

The Kaplan Weekly is sponsored by Avalara. — automated tax compliance built for Shopify merchants, from calculation to returns. For more details: https://avalara.watsonweekly.com/

The constraint isn't infrastructure. It's trust. Build that first.

Happy April Fools. Rick will be back next week.

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