• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, Yesterday

Email teams, despite their excellent creative and targeting, are hemmed in by technology. Systems don’t often speak to one another, and this problem is compounded by the need to put guardrails around a brand. 

But the movement toward hassle-free email marketing has taken another step, to hear Validity tell it. The company has enhanced its Engage platform, adding a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector that it says can protect brands while expanding marketing and competitive intelligence. 

"Enterprise marketers are already sitting on the data they need. It's just trapped across too many tools to allow them to act on it quickly," said Matt Gore, chief technology officer of Validity.

Gore adds that marketers can use this system to “ask one question and get an answer that used to take an analyst days to compile."

According to Validity, Engage has also been improved with these AI-driven capabilities:

-- Pre-send intelligence that checks every email before it is sent. This alerts senders to layout breaks, missing images, and clipped buttons across inboxes that a human reviewer might miss. And it maintains compliance rules. 

-- Market & competitive intelligence that provides visibility into what competitors are sending.

Of course, many email vendors are attempting to resolve workflow issues with AI. Research by Validity found that two out of three organizations increased the number of marketing decisions that they delegate to autonomous AI agents in the past year.

Update: Nike Subject Line Case Must Proceeds In Washington

The email subject line wars are continuing in the state of Washington. A federal judge has ruled that Nike must face a potential class action for allegedly misleading shoppers with emails that created a false sense of urgency, Law Commentary reports. 

Nike had claimed that the US CAN-SPAM Act prevented the consumer plaintiff from pursuing this suit, but a federal judge disagreed earlier this year. 

The Washington legislature had softened some of the provisions in the state’s Consumer Electronic Mail Act (CEMA), but these changes were to affect emails sent after June 2026, whereas the suit against Nike was filed in 2025.