xAI announced that it has exceeded its initial targeted round size, securing $20 billion in an effort to launch new consumer and enterprise products, build data centers and advance Grok 5, its newest
AI model.
It may have started with vision and sizzle, but the year evolved into a sophisticated, methodological framework for rearchitecting advertising and media on the road to 2030.
Omnicom Media's new "Future of Brand Influence" study implies a new "multi-microphone" stage of consumer influence omprised of AI and people, as well as "influencers," whether they be man or machine.
The question: What share of your ad budget will be spent targeting bots, not humans, in 2030? The responses ranged from 0% to 100%, but as the year progressed, the higher number seems more likely.
The human eye has a resolution limit - there are only so many pixels the eye can see.
Anthropic, Block, OpenAI and other AI-tech companies recently launched the Agentic AI Foundation to ensure that agentic AI tools for advertisers and marketers develop as an open, collaborative
ecosystem.
A BrightEdge analysis of informational, consideration and transactional queries revealed patterns showing where the biggest competitive battles are - and it's not where most marketers might expect.
The proposed framework from the IAB Tech Lab is expected to change real-time bidding performance and agentic interoperability across programmatic media buys.
Google's Gemini AI models will now power two agentic agents to help advertisers gain insights and drive improved campaign performance.
AI models from Anthropic are learning to reason, reflect and express how they think - but only about 20% of the time.
The BlockRank ranking model, designed to improve content retrieval, hints at how Google's AI-based ranking may change.
Or at least for Gen Z. The Harris Poll found that 21% of Gen Z would outsource the purchase of common household goods shopping to a personalized AI agent if they could.
Almost half of all AI answers had at least one significant issue, according to new research from the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC.
Three separate reports from PayPal, Deloitte and Measure Protocol show how AI has increasingly become the influencer when consumers are ready to make decisions on how much, where and when they will
spend their dollars.
Nano Banana came to Google Search and NotebookLM this week, with Photos the next step. One analyst believes Google's AI image-editing model spread virally based on word of mouth, with no involvement
from Google. Here's why.
The future of media and marketing research will be an increasingly synthetic one, combining AI and human experiences in ways that are better than either could be on their own.
OpenAI is testing political bias in ChatGPT and its models' ability to remain objective by mirroring real-world uses. About 500 prompts spanning 100 topics and various political slants were used to
determine whether bias exists, under what conditions it emerges and what it looks like.
The search engine will automatically recognize the type of query the person asks, and provide a response without switching modes to the Ask Brave feature, pulling answers from videos, web pages, and a
variety of products.
Jason Downie, global CRO of Making Science's RAISING division, described generative AI and agentic AI with the analogy of a baseball game. The industry isn't even in the first inning - it has not
entered the stadium yet.
"Our goal is to build multimodel general intelligence," Luma AI CEO Amit Jain said, explaining that the company wants to build what comes after text-based large language models to further creativity.
A click in Creative Studio enables a conversational chat that provides access to the AI-powered tool. The agent will ask for product webpages, Amazon product detail pages, relevant audiences, brand
guidelines, and previous brand ads or images.
BrightEdge's data gives the industry a reality check. Here's why AI search owns the research phase of the purchase process, and why traditional search still owns the conversions.
WPP Media's updated Advertising in 2030 report highlights trends as well as the future of media, technology and commerce as viewed by industry experts. Much of it revolves around biometrics and GAI.
Recent data compares the cosmic Big Bang to events in advertising such as the AI chatbot explosion that is reshaping the ways humans interact with technology.
The more data SparkToro founder Rand Fishkin gathers, the more he believes the " 'AI vs. Search' narrative is largely made up by media and influencers seeking attention, rather than an accurate
reflection of reality."
Four out of five consumers say AI now shapes how they "perceive reality," according to new research from PMG and Snap, which also reveals both positive and negative lifts from brands using it.
Advertisers concerned about using too much energy or harming the environment through searches or media buys may want to consider another way to connect with potential and existing customers.
When a user asks about the best CRM for startups, a brand page typically responds with "Schedule a demo," while Reddit has a thread comparing options. This is why Reddit gets cited in ChatGPT. Here
are more examples.
Data, analysis, and analytics are a major part of safeguards. A research paper describes multistep reasoning and how Claude thinks before it gives a response.
Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI, among others, want to own AI search, agents, commerce and related markets - igniting all-out competition to attract ad experts, while throwing millions and even
billions behind projects to acquire engineering talent.