Welcome back to The Catalog. Here’s what’s worth learning, exploring, or watching this week, so you can start with a shortlist instead of sifting through noise.

CONTENTS

• New Arrivals (AI in the Post-Season, Paramount and Warner Bros Merge, WebMCP, X-Files w/o Mulder and Scully, Rolling Up Websites)

• The Feature (The Customer’s Agent Never Gives Up)

• Observations (AI Songs with Listening Bots, Show Your Work)

NEW ARRIVALS

01 · AI on the Field in MLB Playoffs

The Dodgers unfortunately knocked my Atlanta Braves out of the playoffs last week, and their third baseman Max Muncy says AI is “becoming way more and more prevalent” in baseball. Teams can feed pitch data into AI systems that notice tiny differences in the angle of a catcher’s glove or a pitcher’s hand, arming the batting team with tells that give away what pitch is coming next. First and third base coaches have started spotting and relaying those glove and hand tells to hitters.

In the NLDS, Padres closer Mason Miller blew a save after fans online accused him of tipping his slider. Miller denied it: “I’ve pitched with guys at second base all year.”

A runner reading a pitcher from second base has always been fair game. A camera in center field got the Astros fined $5 million. MLB blocked AI help on dugout iPads in July. AI that studies hours of video before the game hasn’t been ruled on yet.

02 · Paramount and Warner Bros Merged

Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery closed their roughly $110 billion merger on October 6, and the combined company is now called Skydance. This massive media and entertainment company now owns CBS, CNN, HBO, two of Hollywood’s five biggest studios, and more than 200 million streaming subscribers.

It’s run by David Ellison (son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison) and Ynon Kreiz (former Mattel CEO). Ellison has started pitching Skydance as a tech company. Its first big project is merging Paramount+ and HBO Max into a single streaming app.

03 · WebMCP in Shopify Checkout

eCommerce leader Shopify now lets AI agents work directly inside checkout. Through WebMCP, a proposed web standard building momentum across platforms, a store can list the actions an agent may take, like changing shipping or applying a discount, so the browser-based agent stops scrolling and analyzing visual buttons or pixels.

Your AI agent will still need to show you the order with total cost and get confirmation before it buys anything. In Shopify’s own test, the WebMCP route was 2.7 times faster and 58% cheaper than browser automation, and it successfully completed all 60 test orders. Do you think our AI agents will do some of our shopping this holiday season?

04 · The X-Files Without Mulder and Scully

Hulu just greenlit a reboot of The X-Files. Actors Danielle Deadwyler and Himesh Patel will play two FBI agents assigned to a long-shuttered federal unit that handles unexplained cases, and the announcement says plainly that they aren’t playing Mulder and Scully. This will be the franchise’s third run, after the original nine seasons on Fox and a two-season revival that ended in 2018.

05 · Rolling Up Your Website

This one’s just fun: Try playing Weball, a simple game where you’re a ball rolling around a web page, collecting everything you touch. It’s based on Katamari Damacy, one of my favorite video games of all time. Basically, you roll around as a sticky ball until you’re big enough to swallow everything in sight.

After you clear the first Wikipedia level, you can paste in any URL and snowball through its words, headlines, images, and buttons.

THE FEATURE

Queue the Agents

I’ve worked on experience strategy projects with major brands to increase click-to-call, and with other brands to decrease it.

Law firms, accountants, and car dealerships carefully track web-attributed calls as a conversion because they want you on the phone since a call is a lead. Direct-to-consumer brands and product support lines, on the other hand, aim to decrease calls to the call center. They’d rather serve you the right FAQ than pay someone to answer.