Welcome to P3 Media’s AI Commerce Brief, your daily update on the AI and commerce stories shaping how companies build, sell, and grow. It’s Friday, July 31, 2026. Let’s get into it.
The top story today is model economics.
OpenAI says it has lowered API pricing for GPT-5.6 Terra and Luna. Starting July 30, Terra is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $12 per million output tokens. Luna is priced at 20 cents per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens. OpenAI also says Fast mode for GPT-5.6 Sol replaces Priority Processing in the API.
The strategic point is simple. AI agents are still constrained by cost. Every price drop changes what is practical for software teams, agencies, commerce operators, and internal automation groups. Cheaper models make it easier to run more evaluations, automate more support, generate more content variations, and test more agent workflows without blowing up the budget.
Next, Microsoft gave investors a clean read on enterprise AI demand. For the quarter ending June 30, Microsoft reported $90 billion in revenue, up 18 percent. Microsoft Cloud revenue was $59.3 billion, up 27 percent. Azure and other cloud services revenue grew 43 percent. The company also said Microsoft 365 Copilot has more than 30 million paid seats.
Amazon delivered a similarly important signal, with a stronger commerce angle. Amazon reported second-quarter net sales of $200.6 billion, up 20 percent. AWS sales rose 37 percent to $42.2 billion. Amazon said advertising grew 26 percent. The company also said free cash flow was an outflow over the trailing 12 months, driven primarily by higher property and equipment spending that reflects AI investment.
That is the new Amazon story: AI infrastructure, retail media, and shopping experience are all connected. Amazon also said it brought Rufus and Alexa Plus together into Alexa for Shopping, an agentic shopping assistant for recommendations, comparisons, price history, and automated shopping features. For brands, the direction is clear: the shopping surface is becoming more conversational, more automated, and more tightly linked to Amazon’s ad and fulfillment system.
Meta’s quarter shows the other side of the same tradeoff. Meta reported revenue of $60.8 billion, up 28 percent. Ad impressions across its Family of Apps rose 14 percent, and average price per ad rose 12 percent. Advertising revenue rose 27 percent. But costs and expenses rose sharply, capital expenditures were $31.08 billion, and free cash flow fell to $784 million.
Meta’s message is that AI is helping the core ads business and opening new enterprise opportunities. The market question is how much spending it takes to get there, and how quickly those investments turn into durable revenue beyond ads.
In global model watch, Google DeepMind introduced Gemini Robotics 2, Gemini Robotics ER 2, and Gemini Robotics On-Device 2. Google says the system is designed for whole-body robot control, embodied reasoning, multi-step tasks, and multi-robot collaboration. ER 2 is available in Google AI Studio, while the action and on-device models are limited to early-access partners.
For commerce leaders, this is not a warehouse deployment story yet. It is a signal about where physical AI is going: robots that can reason, coordinate, and adapt across messy real-world environments.
What to watch next: whether AI price cuts show up in more agent products, whether Microsoft and Amazon can keep converting AI demand into cloud growth, and whether Meta can prove its AI infrastructure spending produces returns beyond better ad performance.
That’s your AI Commerce Brief for today. Thanks for listening.
