AI's Small Business Problem (and Shopify's Bigger One)

AI is quietly eating ecommerce, and Shopify's running out of moat. We get into Anthropic's new Cloud for Business, why 96% of AI deployments still fail, and how Stripe just made it possible for an agent to spin up a whole stack from a single command. In this episode: What Cloud for Business actually is (and whether it solves anything) Why forward deployed engineers became tech's hottest role The case for ditching Shopify and wipe-coding your storefront with Claude Code Stripe Projects and the rise of agent-native infrastructure Why MCP servers are about to be unavoidable Timestamps 00:00 Claude for Business: what Anthropic just launched 04:25 Forward deployed engineers and the 96% failure rate 09:01 Is Shopify in real trouble? 12:46 What's left of Shopify's moat 15:41 Stripe Projects and agent-native infrastructure 19:25 Why MCP servers are about to be table stakes