The AI shopping race is shifting quickly. In less than six months, AI companies have mostly stopped trying to make agents that browse and shop directly on retail sites and have focused instead on putting checkout features inside AI chatbots. That’s elevated the importance of the engineers who have been building these shopping features as well as the executives working on commercial partnerships related to them. With that in mind, we’ve updated a list of 17 people crucial to AI shopping development across the major companies, which we first published last May . Among the new people on the list are Riley Strong, an engineering leader at OpenAI, and Amit Handa, a director of engineering at Google.