Ben Parr

📣 ANNOUNCEMENT: Today at Octane AI, we're launching Agentic Commerce Quizzes, powered by CORE-1, our new commerce reasoning model!

Most ecommerce “personalization” is just fancy if/else logic pretending to be smart. Instead of static quiz results, CORE-1 actually reasons about each shopper — blending quiz answers, behavior, your catalog and other signals to rank products, build bundles, and explain why it chose them in real time.

And this launch isn’t just one feature — it’s SIX new agentic products built on CORE-1:

- Smart Quiz Builder – Turn a single prompt into a fully built quiz—questions, logic, and results—trained on your store.
- Shopping Assistant – Put that quiz experience anywhere (widget, popup, embed) so every visitor gets guided, 1:1 help.
- Smart Products – Convert answers into ranked products, bundles, outfits, and routines that stay in sync with inventory.
- Smart Copy – Auto-generate on-brand explanations, routines, and headlines tailored to each shopper’s answers.
- Smart Properties – Turn quiz answers into reusable customer data that powers the rest of your stack.
- Visual AI – Let shoppers upload a photo and get AI-analyzed matches (shade, routine, fit) tied directly into the quiz.

Over 250 brands have been testing CORE-1 over the past few months, with incredible results. I just want to thank all of our early beta testers and agencies who have made their quizzes Agentic!

The engineering lift for Agentic Quizzes and CORE-1 was massive -- I just want to recognize the work of our entire engineering team to make this possible, not to mention the many hours my co-founder Matt Schlicht and our product and customer teams put into perfecting our AI products.

If you’re an ecommerce brand and want your funnel to behave more like your best salesperson than a static form, read my co-founder's announcement post:

https://octaneai.com/agentic-commerce-quizzes

Huge congrats to the whole Octane AI team — you are the most amazing software team in ecommerce, and it's a joy to work alongside you each and every day! 🚀

This little one has changed our lives so much. and I couldn't be luckier with our smart, opinionated, curious baby.

Not to say becoming a parent hasn't been hard as hell --having her start her 3-month sleep regression a month early was especially brutal. But it's all worth it to see her smile at us and watch her change and grow soooo quickly!

♥️ You Ella!

Too cool for school.

Ella is a goofball, just like her dadd!

Baby Ella’s first influencer deal!

A few weeks before Ella joined our family, the good people at sent us their smart changing table. Ella’s loved it — it’s packed with amazing features like a heater (so she’s never cold), a white noise machine, a multi-color night light, a scale (super useful to track her progress), and diaper and feeding tracking!

Thank you Woddle for the awesome centerpiece to our nursery!

Had a whirlwind week in Vegas speaking at HumanX — the largest AI summit of its kind! I caught up with old friends, met great AI founders building cutting edge products, and spoke about the future of content, jobs and regulation in an AI-first world.

Was also fascinating to hear form AI leaders like CPO , congressman and former VP . Everyone is trying to figure out what AI regulation should look like.

Will post video next week! Thank you and team for inviting me to speak; & Fathom for inviting me to speak at their round table; and to all the amazing people who hosted incredible dinners and parties throughout the week.

Gingerbread-zilla!

It’s already Christmas in California 🎄

and I are beyond thrilled to meet the newest (and tiniest) member of Team Parr in April! 👶

Starting an AI company in 2016 felt like jumping into the unknown. Eight years later, Octane AI has grown from chatbots for celebrities to Shopify's #1 storefront app, powering guided shopping for nearly 4,000 brands.

Building a profitable AI business hasn’t been easy—navigating crises, pivots, and the rapid evolution of AI. But along the way, we’ve learned lessons about product, pricing, integrations, and resilience that are worth sharing.

If you’re building an AI company or considering it, here are 8 lessons from our journey:

8 Years of Octane AI: 8 Lessons on Building a Profitable AI Company Reflections on eight years of growth, pivots, and lessons learned while building a sustainable AI business.