WWWhat's New
Major platform vendors and specialist apps now offer features that read text, describe images, detect doors and add live captions in Spanish with important caveats: some advanced image‑questioning and expressive subtitling remain English‑only, device requirements vary and manufacturers warn these tools are not reliable in high‑risk situations.
ADWEEK
Live polling at IAB Europe’s Retail Media Impact Summit showed 88% of respondents say their businesses use AI for data analysis or report writing, yet only 16% use it to choose product or ad rankings; the session in Amsterdam was led by Particular Audience CEO James Taylor and attracted 89 participants.
Particular Audience’s live polling and research highlight a gap between widespread AI use for analysis and reluctance to deploy AI for decisions that directly affect advertising performance: a grocery search test by the company found its Adaptive Transformer Search surfaced 80% of relevant catalogue matches within the first 120 results from over 700 customer queries, versus 48.5% with traditional keyword search.
ADWEEK
At Brandweek 2026, Doug Zarkin argued that marketers’ preference for acquisition is masking a costlier problem — weak retention — and said retention deserves equal energy, budget and attention; he also suggested some churn reflects operational failures rather than marketing alone.
Speaking live on the Marketing Vanguard stage, CMO and author Doug Zarkin argued that brands prioritise acquisition while understating retention’s cost, urged that retention receive the same resources as acquisition, and said customer churn can signal operations problems rather than purely marketing failures.
Unite.AI
Discovery is shifting from traditional search to AI systems that synthesize answers before users reach websites, prompting the rise of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and a need for organizational redesign to manage AI visibility across marketing, data, technology, content and communications.
Discovery is shifting from traditional search to AI systems that synthesize answers before users reach websites, prompting the rise of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and a need for organizational redesign to manage AI visibility across marketing, data, technology, content and communications. Industry data show rapid effects: an IAB update reports 44% of U.S. ad buyers named adapting to changing consumer behavior as a top challenge and 76% are increasing focus on AI-optimized content; publishers and analytics firms report large declines in traditional traffic and surging AI-referred visits (46% decline in Google traffic for Reach; 693.4% AI referral growth for U.S. retail in 2025’s holiday season). GEO requires technical accessibility, consistent authoritative content, structured data and third‑party signals — and a single accountable leader coordinating cross‑team responses and measurement because AI answers are fluid and influenced by many sources.
The Conversation
A poster for the National Gallery of Victoria’s triennial reproduces an image from Ayoung Kim’s multi-channel video Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse (2024), a work created using generative AI alongside CGI, game engines and live action; Reddit commenters disparaged the poster for using AI without distinguishing artists who use AI from AI replacing artists.
A poster for the National Gallery of Victoria’s triennial reproduces an image from Ayoung Kim’s multi-channel video Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse (2024), a work created using generative AI alongside CGI, game engines and live action; Reddit commenters disparaged the poster for using AI without distinguishing artists who use AI from AI replacing artists. The Conversation’s author Sara Oscar frames a broader paradox: generative AI both saturates visual culture with what she calls “AI slop” and offers an experimental site where artists can reveal the technology’s limits and impacts on labour and seeing.
IEEE Spectrum
Ellia Lebleu, a founding member of the WikiProject AI Cleanup, says volunteers launched the effort in 2023 after noticing AI-written articles; by 2025 AI text patterns had grown subtler and volunteers are combining human review with detection tools and source-verification AIs to remove problematic machine-generated content.
Ellia Lebleu, a founding member of the WikiProject AI Cleanup, says volunteers launched the effort in 2023 after noticing AI-written articles; by 2025 AI text patterns had grown subtler and volunteers are combining human review with detection tools and source-verification AIs to remove problematic machine-generated content. Lebleu says she worked with detection firm Pangram, which flagged about 20 percent of new articles and drafts as AI-generated in late 2025 and about 15 to 16 percent in early 2026; she characterizes those figures as a conservative lower bound.
Laboratorio de Periodismo Luca de Tena
J·Index, compiled by journalist Katya Gorchinskaya, documents more than 3,000 publicly reported uses of artificial intelligence in news organizations and finds that 60% of those implementations take place within newsrooms, while about one third correspond to small, local or hyperlocal media.
J·Index, compiled by journalist Katya Gorchinskaya, documents more than 3,000 publicly reported uses of artificial intelligence in news organizations and finds that 60% of those implementations take place within newsrooms, while about one third correspond to small, local or hyperlocal media. The database shows patterns in assistant architectures, differing strategies by organization size and public broadcasters' greater tendency to train proprietary models and apply AI to accessibility and minority-language work; it also notes scarce measurement of outcomes and that almost nine out of ten identifiable synthetic presenters are women.
INMA: International News Media Association
A recent INMA webinar discussed research showing Americans spend nearly as much time on e-mail as on social media and warned that AI features in Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft inboxes are beginning to filter and summarise messages, forcing newsletters to earn attention through depth, personality, clear purpose and personalization.
A recent INMA webinar discussed research showing Americans spend nearly as much time on e-mail as on social media and warned that AI features in Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft inboxes are beginning to filter and summarise messages, forcing newsletters to earn attention through depth, personality, clear purpose and personalization.
INMA: International News Media Association
At a three‑day INMA Newsroom and AI Master Class (20 October 2026), speakers described a shift in which newsrooms treat AI not only as a tool but as a means to redesign production, prioritise higher‑value journalism, and develop new revenue and audience strategies.
At a three‑day INMA Newsroom and AI Master Class (20 October 2026), speakers described a shift in which newsrooms treat AI not only as a tool but as a means to redesign production, prioritise higher‑value journalism, and develop new revenue and audience strategies.
INMA: International News Media Association
At a 20 October 2026 INMA study tour stop at Salesforce Tower, Salesforce executives framed AI as a force for organisational coordination, outlined a four-layer agentic operating model, warned about costs of replacing CRM with general models, and demonstrated an agent-to-agent ad-sales pilot involving Nine and Dentsu that remains in pilot.
At a 20 October 2026 INMA study tour stop at Salesforce Tower, Salesforce executives framed AI as a force for organisational coordination, outlined a four-layer agentic operating model, warned about costs of replacing CRM with general models, and demonstrated an agent-to-agent ad-sales pilot involving Nine and Dentsu that remains in pilot.
INMA: International News Media Association
Facing abundant AI-generated content, major news organisations are emphasising human-crafted processes, visible journalists and editorial signals to persuade readers to subscribe.
Facing abundant AI-generated content, major news organisations are emphasising human-crafted processes, visible journalists and editorial signals to persuade readers to subscribe. Evidence includes new products and campaigns — The New York Times' Backstory, the Financial Times' “For The Why,” the Economist’s audio/video tier after 183 years without bylines, and the Irish Independent reserving 15 of 25 homepage slots for 'signature journalism' — plus survey and experiment data about trust.
Digiday
Digiday reports that media agencies are navigating a more complex advertising environment driven by economic uncertainty, fragmented media consumption and rapid technological advances, while advertisers are reassessing strategies and AI search plus creator marketing add new changes and questions for agencies.
Digiday reports that media agencies are navigating a more complex advertising environment driven by economic uncertainty, fragmented media consumption and rapid technological advances, while advertisers are reassessing strategies and AI search plus creator marketing add new changes and questions for agencies.
Virtualis
A qualitative study published on revistavirtualis.mx reports that generative artificial intelligence (IAG) adds automated recombination of styles, hyperrealistic image generation and real‑time personalization to meme creation. The research documents an interview with Eduardo Salvatori of the Instituto Nacional de Bellos Memes and states that Salvatori combines AI outputs with prior human editing and later curation, shifting between levels of IAG autonomy.
The article—based on a qualitative, critical approach and an interview with Eduardo Salvatori—finds that IAG increases iteration and automates processes of resignification in memes, while enabling creators to externalize aesthetic processes; Salvatori reportedly operates at IAG autonomy levels 3, 4 and 5 and emphasizes human editing before and curatorial handling after AI use.
XPLR: MEDIA
A German trade article reports that the Bavarian audio industry has moved beyond experiments and now uses AI in everyday editorial work, including a feasibility study with Antenne Bayern that produced a chatbot using live transcripts via a RAG architecture and multi-tiered safety filters.
XPLR Magazine reports four deployed AI examples from the Bavarian audio sector; among them, a KI.M–Antenne Bayern feasibility study created a chatbot that integrates live program transcripts with a Retrieval-Augmented Generation architecture to answer up-to-date listener queries, and the project included editorial filtering mechanisms intended to block polarizing or out-of-context requests.
XPLR: MEDIA
Karsten Wellert describes a deliberate strategy of using AI for testing, virtual listener personas and chatbot support while keeping on-air voices and editorial decisions human and transparent.
In an interview, Antenne Bayern’s CDO Karsten Wellert says the station uses AI as a backstage tool: teams experiment and deploy only after benefits are clear, AI personas — trained on market-research data — give fast, virtual listener feedback, multiple models are combined by agents, and the live on-air program remains entirely human; chatbots identify themselves and offer opt‑outs.
Digiday
A Digiday+ Research survey in the first quarter of 2026 of more than 100 marketing professionals found that 49% report using AI in social media campaigns and 42% report using AI in retail media; Digiday+ Research says adoption varies by channel and often depends on trust.
A Digiday+ Research survey in the first quarter of 2026 of more than 100 marketing professionals found that 49% report using AI in social media campaigns and 42% report using AI in retail media; Digiday+ Research says adoption varies by channel and often depends on trust.
Digiday
A Digiday+ Research report based on a survey of 142 brand and agency professionals and interviews finds marketers’ adoption of AI rose from 44% in 2022 to 86% in 2025, while the report states that employee training has not kept pace with that adoption.
A Digiday+ Research report based on a survey of 142 brand and agency professionals and interviews finds marketers’ adoption of AI rose from 44% in 2022 to 86% in 2025, while the report states that employee training has not kept pace with that adoption.
Digiday
A Digiday+ Research report based on a survey of 142 brand and agency professionals and interviews with marketing and technology executives finds AI tools have become embedded in marketing workflows by early 2026. The same research says concerns about trust and the complexity of agentic AI remain barriers to broader deployment.
Digiday's research, drawing on a 142-respondent survey and executive interviews, reports that AI tools once considered cutting-edge are now integrated into brands' and agencies' marketing workflows, while adoption is still held back by trust issues and the operational complexity of agentic AI.
Digiday
A Digiday+ Research survey of 62 agency professionals conducted in the fourth quarter of 2025 found that agencies cite reduced client spending and the effects of AI as equal leading concerns for 2026, each selected by 38% of respondents.
In a late‑2025 Digiday+ Research poll of 62 agency professionals, 38% of respondents identified reduced client budgets as the industry’s biggest challenge for 2026 and an identical 38% pointed to the effects of AI; the survey continues a trend of spending pessimism from 2025, when 47% named reduced client budgets the top concern.
Digiday
A Digiday+ Research report based on a survey of 40 publisher professionals and interviews with publisher executives says publishers have found generative AI a better fit for journalism workflows than predictive AI; the article excerpt is member‑exclusive.
The Digiday+ Research report, compiled from a survey of 40 publisher professionals and individual interviews with publisher AI leads, concludes that generative AI aligns more closely with publishers' editorial workflows than predictive AI; the full article is available as a member‑exclusive piece on Digiday.