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AI Resurrects the Dead
& TikTok Becomes a Travel Agent
The Super-App Race — From Discovery to Checkout
TikTok recently launched "TikTok GO," a new feature that lets US users discover and book hotels, attractions, and experiences directly inside the app through partnerships with Booking.com, Expedia, Viator, GetYourGuide, Tiqets, and Trip.com. The move builds directly on TikTok Shop, launched in 2023, and together they convert TikTok's roughly 170 million US users from passive viewers into a closed-loop transaction layer that bypasses third-party websites entirely.
The pattern isn't unique to TikTok: Uber added Booking.com hotel reservations inside its app, social commerce globally surpassed $1.2 trillion in 2025, and Snapchat just rolled out AI-powered conversational ads to keep users transacting in the Chat tab. Each of these moves follows the WeChat blueprint — keep the user inside the app from discovery through purchase, and turn vendors into inventory providers rather than destinations in their own right.
For Booking.com and Expedia the implication is uncomfortable — they are essentially renting access to TikTok's audience while losing the customer relationship they spent decades building. The bigger structural shift is that Google's twin moats, Search for discovery and Maps for local intent, are being chipped away by platforms where users already spend hours a day, with TikTok alone capturing roughly 90 minutes of daily session time per US user.
The Dead Are Becoming a Recurring Revenue Stream
The digital legacy market — the broader category covering AI-resurrected likenesses, voices, and posthumous content — hit $22.46 billion in 2024 and is projected to roughly triple by 2034. Estate deals for AI voice and likeness rights are now paying between five and seven figures, with Val Kilmer's AI likeness alone reportedly appearing in more than an hour of the upcoming film "As Deep as the Grave."
James Earl Jones signed his AI voice rights to Disney in 2022, two years before his death, and his cloned voice has continued to perform as Darth Vader inside Fortnite since May 2025. ElevenLabs' ElevenReader, launched in 2024, charges $11 a month for cloned voices of Judy Garland, Burt Reynolds, John Wayne, and Albert Einstein, and Matthew McConaughey — still alive — has already licensed his voice for restricted commercial use.
For Hollywood estates, this turns identity into a perpetual IP asset — effectively a back catalog that never stops releasing, monetized indefinitely after the artist is gone. Legacy management firms like CMG Worldwide and Xavie Agency are quietly becoming the new record labels of the post-mortem economy, even as 51% of Americans say replicating a dead celebrity's voice is "not acceptable" compared to just 35% who support it.
West Asia Ink Crisis
Japanese snack giant Calbee will switch 14 of its best-known products — including crisps and prawn crackers — to black-and-white packaging starting May 25, after naphtha prices in Asia roughly doubled and supply chains for ink and plastic destabilized. The cause is the Strait of Hormuz closure, which cut off roughly 40% of Japan's pre-war naphtha imports overnight after Iran retaliated against US and Israeli strikes.
Calbee is not alone: Japanese foodmaker Mizkan suspended sales of fermented soybean snacks on May 1 due to a polystyrene container shortage, Toyota and Hyundai both flagged profit hits from higher material costs, and UK-based Next raised prices by up to 8% outside Europe. Airlines worldwide paused flights and grounded planes as jet fuel surged, given that the Strait of Hormuz historically carries roughly 20% of global oil trade.
The visible product-level concessions — different packaging, smaller pack sizes, sudden price hikes — mark the formal end of just-in-time inventory as the default global playbook, with companies actively rebuilding strategic stockpiles and multi-sourcing critical inputs. Geopolitical risk has moved from a procurement footnote to a CFO-level line item, and the era of single-source efficiency that defined the 2010s is being replaced by the slower, more expensive, but more resilient era of redundancy.