Who in Big Tech Is Ready for Agentic AI?

In this podcast, Motley Fool contributors Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Rachel Warren discuss:
- Amazon goes after Perplexity's agents.
- Meta's scattered AI strategy.
- Oracle's earnings.
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Travis Hoium: It's Wednesday, so there must be big AI news in the market. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. Welcome to Motley Fool Money with the Hidden Gems team. I'm Travis Hoium joined today by Lou Whiteman and Rachel Warren. Every tech company that we know is building an AI story. That's been something that's been happening for quite a while now. But this week, Amazon actually won a court ruling against Perplexity saying that they can't scrape their website. The interesting thing here is that you could make an argument that Google and Meta just want to connect companies, consumers with retailers who are trying to sell them products, but Amazon is a little bit different. I thought it was worthwhile to dig into how there's such a different player in the AI space today. Rachel, they want people to go to amazon.com. They have been the one company that's really been resistant to all these AI companies the way that they would look at it is scraping their data and getting into their system for free. The big thing is, they generate a ton of money. I think it's over $40 billion now from advertising revenue. Guess what? AI chatbots, don't look at ads. Is this a threat to Amazon? Is this just Amazon trying to play its cards as well as it can? What's going on with Amazon shoving Perplexity to the side?
Rachel Warren: I think if you look at this court victory, it's obviously a win for the business in the short term, but I do think it highlights a deeper risk for the business, and I say this is an Amazon, long-term shareholder. But I think you should think about it this way. Amazon's entire flywheel is built on a very specific competitive advantage. They own the entire commerce journey from that very first search that a shopper might make all the way to the package being delivered to your door. They don't just want a sale. As you noted, they want the advertising revenue from the sponsored products that you scroll past as a shopper and the data from every click. By blocking Perplexity from scraping their site, Amazon is essentially trying to protect that storefront experience that makes their ecosystem so profitable. I think the threat here is that AI agents, which we are seeing become smarter and faster and launched left and right. These are Ilas shoppers, so to speak. They're not going to be distracted by the deals that a human shopper would be. They're not going to go and browse through pages and pages of sponsored results, which are actions, by the way, that fuel Amazon's advertising machine. If we live in a world where third party AI becomes the primary shopping interface, there is this concern that that really extensive advertising mode for Amazon could start to dry up. I think that's the extreme bear case. I don't think we're there, but I do think it's clear that Amazon is really fighting to ensure that in a world that could be transitioning to more AI-driven shopping, that shoppers are using their own AI assistant like Rufus, rather than a neutral third party that might suggest a competitor. I think this court win buys them some time as they are trying to find out where they fit into a potential AI-powered shopping future. But I do think that the battle for who owns the customer's intent and where those AI agents fit in, I think that's just getting started.
Travis Hoium: Lou, is that right? Is this a threat we need to watch with Amazon's retail business?
Lou Whiteman: Stepping out broader, I think instant and complete comparison shopping could be the killer app for consumers.
Travis Hoium: What you mean by that is instead of going to 15 different websites.
Lou Whiteman: Or even Google Shopping tried this with search, and it wasn't as good. But if you could just tell your little imaginary friend. I want to buy this, go find me the best price. That's a real killer app. I can see why retailers would see this as a threat. I think what Rachel said is right. At best, Amazon wants to be proactive and retain as much control for as long as they can. It's funny. Looking at it from the AI perspective, there's a weird chicken or the egg thing. The AI models want consumers to pay for them. They need killer as. But until the AI models are big enough to force the issue, why would retailers like Amazon give in to Perplexity here? Without the killer app, how do you get the volumes that you need to then get the killer app? I don't know. It's funny to think, who ends up paying here long term? Say the future happens. Is Amazon getting money from Perplexity for access to its site? Is Amazon paying the bots as advertising fee or somewhere in between? I think for now.
Travis Hoium: The question that I would have is does a different ecosystem with different incentives pop up? Think of a platform like Shopify, where Shopify does have an incentive. If you're a small merchant, you're not getting into a Walmart store, for example, you may not want to go through the costs that are involved in Amazon. That's become a very costly platform to be on, and part of that is the advertising revenue. But what if a chatbot can just find you in your little store that you built on Shopify, because the incentive now is to find that perfect product at the perfect price? Lou, is that the risk here, is that these other companies are playing offense, like a Shopify, for example, whereas Amazon looks like they're playing defense?
Lou Whiteman: Yeah. Put it simply because who knows? That's a scenario, but the status quo benefits Amazon.
Travis Hoium: Yeah.
Lou Whiteman: It makes sense for Amazon to preserve the status quo as long as it can to your point. We don't know what the future looks like. But as these things work, when a shift happens, the incumbent usually isn't the beneficiary, even if they end up being OK with it. It's in the incumbent's best interest almost always to preserve the status quo.
Travis Hoium: We're going to stay on this AI topic for a moment, and when we come back, Lou is going to explain what a molt book is. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.
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Travis Hoium: Welcome back to Motley Fool Money with the Hidden Gems team. The meandering of Meta platforms continued this week. They acquired at least the staff of Moltbook. Lou, what is a Moltbook? Why does it make sense under Meta?
Lou Whiteman: Come on, Travis. Everybody knows what Moltbook is. I mean, who doesn't know Moltbook? Who hasn't heard of it. Just in case, for those one or two out there who aren't Moltbookers every day, Moltbook is a "social network for AI agents." It's where AI agents can become friends with each other. It seems like it's a natural extension. One headline I saw described Moltbook as going viral based on the amount of fake news on it, which let's just skip Meta joke bear because that's too easy. I don't know. Can there be dating apps coming off of this? Could we have, like match.com for AI agents. But look, kidding aside here, there is a something here. Moltbook under the surface, really what it is, is just allowing people and bots to communicate with AI agents in natural language through chat apps. You can see where there is a commercial used for that other than, an AI agent dating site. Look, I don't know what the future is for Meta. We can get into what they're doing with AI, but Acqui-hire is happening and they're good. Right now, Meta has all the cash in the world. They are using that cash to assemble the brightest minds they can. The throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks isn't a bad strategy at this point in time when everything is developing. I don't know if Moltbook is the next big thing. I don't know if it's that third leg, along with Instagram and Facebook, their third big social network, but I do think that you can put the cynical had aside and say, there's probably a reason for this.
Travis Hoium: Rachel, Lou's overlooking WhatsApp, because he's obviously a US investor.
Lou Whiteman: No, that's a messaging app not a social platform.
Travis Hoium: A lot of value there.
Rachel Warren: It's app choice for a lot of us.
Travis Hoium: But Rachel, so what do you think about Moltbook here? Is there some value? Is this just another talent grab? There's got to be some reason that they keep making these moves.
Rachel Warren: Yeah, I do think there's some value here. I actually think it's more of an admission that the AI strategy is pivoting toward autonomous agents. I think Meta sees that and is trying to ensure that they're capitalizing on those growth tail wins.
Travis Hoium: You're saying they've lost the chat bot battles.
Rachel Warren: I think that they are struggling to develop what they need in house and have clearly found that the strategy of acquiring and bringing in really quality outside talent is going to be the best move for them. I think that's what we're seeing. Moltbook, Lou explained that very well, but it's essentially the social network where only AI bots post and talk to each other while humans watch from the sidelines, which is an interesting idea. It's been compared to a Reddit like Internet forum. It was only launched, I believe, a few months ago.
Travis Hoium: In January.
Rachel Warren: Yeah, and essentially acts as this, sandbox for AI to communicate, trade knowledge, debate existence, to form autonomous AI social structures. What are the long-term applications for that? I think that remains to be seen. But this is all going to be folded into the broader Meta super intelligence labs. That's run by former Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang. I think Zuckerberg is really signaling that Meta's next act. It isn't just smarter chatbots. It's really a whole infrastructure for AI agents to interact and transact. I think maybe they see value for that, particularly with the ad machine that they have powering their key platform. That's my takeaway.
Travis Hoium: Lou, as we think about Meta, because it seems to me that they're a natural company to benefit from artificial intelligence. We've seen some efficiency improvements with their advertising and things like that. But they're hiring talent that would indicate that they want to be a consumer AI company. Is this just going to be like an agent AI company? Or is this just that spaghetti at the wall phase for Meta that you talked about?
Lou Whiteman: I push back a bit on the idea that them buying stuff implies that the strategy isn't working out. Alphabet has spent, what, $40 billion on AI related acquisitions. Everybody is in an arms race right now. It's just where we are in the cycle. The thing about Meta though, that gets you is, is that I don't know if they have the natural audience for what they're building other than in-house, but they're not spending the money they're spending to make ads a little better. How do they get customers that are going to pay for what they're building? I think there's a natural extension for Microsoft. There's a natural extension for Alphabet to get their tools in the hands of consumers. I'll be honest, as a Meta user, I'm not on the agent social network right now, but I am on other products. There desperate attempts to get me to use their AI are pretty pathetic. Right now, it's some story about a basketball game, and it's tell me how the coach thought of plays in the second half, and if you click on it, it'll just say, I don't know. That is right now. I think the Acqui-hires, the acquisitions right now. This is noise. That doesn't say much about whether or not they're succeeding or not. I do think, though, the open question. It's the question with OpenAI, too, Perplexity back to our earlier story of just how are you going to get what you develop into the hands of consumers and win what looks like in a race to the bottom in commoditization. That is the bigger problem, not the acquisitions.
Travis Hoium: All of this AI development is leading to a lot of demand for Oracle. We're going to talk about their recent results next. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money with the Hidden Gems team. Oracle announced results for their most recent fiscal quarter after the market closed yesterday. Rachel, what did we learn about this AI giant in the making question mark?
Rachel Warren: Yeah. This was their Q3 earnings. A few interesting takeaways here. Oracle is seeing its highest growth in 15 years, which is impressive, but it is coming at a staggering cost. The headline grabbing number was their $553 billion backlog in contracted future revenue. That's a number that was up about 325% over year. Basically, customers are beating down Oracle's door for AI infrastructure. Oracle's growing its Cloud business at an 84% clip to meet that. To build the data centers required to actually fulfill those orders, though, Oracle spending has gone nuclear. They had negative free cash flow of about 25 billion just in this quarter. They are essentially an AI construction company right now racing to plug in chips faster than the competition. Oracle is debt funding