In today’s Digest, we look at John Lewis betting on a YouTube chat show to get noticed by AI, The Trade Desk exiting the S&P 500 on the same day mass layoffs take effect, and Chinese AI developers turning to Tmall to sell subscriptions alongside smartphones and skincare.

John Lewis is launching a new online chatshow and social media studio designed to make itself and its products more visible to AI chatbots and prominent in AI-generated search results. The retailer's Gift List "vodcast," hosted by TV presenter Angela Scanlon, will debut on YouTube with clips spreading across other social platforms, following a similar approach that worked well for sister brand Waitrose's Dish podcast. 

The show centers on guests swapping stories about memorable good and bad gifts, with broadcaster Louis Theroux appearing in the first episode; six episodes are planned before Christmas. Outgoing managing director Peter Ruis highlighted the shift, with AI-driven product searches rising from 0.3% to 2.5% of customer activity in a year as shoppers increasingly turn to ChatGPT and Gemini for third-party recommendations. 

The Trade Desk was dropped from the S&P 500 on 4th September, 2026, the same day roughly 575 laid-off employees officially left the company. There's no disclosed link between the two events. S&P Dow Jones Indices doesn't factor workforce decisions into its index criteria, and The Trade Desk's internal communications about the layoffs made no mention of its index status. 

As is standard practice, S&P Dow Jones Indices didn't offer company-specific reasoning for The Trade Desk's removal beyond stating that the changes keep each index aligned with appropriate market capitalisation bands, a determination made by an index committee rather than explained on a per-company basis. 

China’s leading AI developers are turning Alibaba’s Tmall into a new battleground for AI subscriptions, selling plans alongside smartphones and luxury goods. According to people familiar with the matter, Moonshot AI and MiniMax are in talks to open official flagship stores on the platform, as AI companies search for new ways to convert their rapidly growing user bases into steady revenue. Z.ai, also known as Zhipu AI, kicked off the trend last week by launching an online storefront selling subscriptions to its GLM Coding Plan, prompting Tmall to introduce an "AI Space Station" the following day.

Early results suggest strong consumer appetite: a Tmall spokesperson told the SCMP that transactions involving AI tokens and subscription products across Taobao and Tmall jumped more than 160% within 48 hours of Z.ai's storefront launch.