Accenture announced it will roll out ChatGPT Enterprise to tens of thousands of employees for internal workflows and client-facing products, per Reuters. The move follows Deloitte adopting a similar expansion—deploying Anthropic’s Claude to more than 470,000 employees across 150 countries. With big consultancies adopting the same AI agent playbook, the risk of AI-driven sameness grows. Companies seeking stricter compliance and tighter risk management might benefit from Accenture’s and Deloitte’s agentic offerings, even as a starting point toward longer-term, more independent agentic adoption.
Consumers are turning toward social media and AI tools to guide their holiday shopping journeys, pulling influence away from traditional search and retail sites. Fifty-seven percent of US consumers plan to use social media for holiday shopping research and 39% plan to use AI for that task. Discovery is happening before consumers know what they want—inside social feeds and AI chats. To capture social shoppers, brands should diversify spend away from saturated platforms like Instagram and experiment with others, and invest in content partnerships that are visible in platform algorithms and increase user trust.
AI is playing a notable role in holiday shopping this year as consumers express comfort with AI-supported gifting and receiving. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of US adults would consider using genAI for holiday shopping this year, up from 11% last year, per HUMAN Security’s SantaGPT report. With AI becoming a trusted partner for stressful gift-buying moments like the holidays, marketers have the opportunity to frame AI features—including smart gift finders or on-site AI-powered shopping guides—as stress-reducing tools to streamline the shopping journey.
The US public and AI experts have diverging perspectives on how AI will reshape the job market over the next 20 years. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of US adults expect fewer jobs, and just 5% forecast more jobs, per Pew Research. However, only 39% of AI experts predict fewer jobs, and 19% expect the number of jobs to grow. Despite those projections, jobs may not simply disappear. Instead, a new class of workers will emerge. As businesses across sectors accelerate enterprise AI adoption, the goal should be focused on streamlining workflows around collaboration.
Black Friday 2025 sales outperformed expectations as consumers, motivated by steep discounts, drove 4.1% retail growth and a 10.4% jump in ecommerce despite ongoing inflation pressures. Shoppers responded strongly to major deals across toys, electronics, apparel, and TVs, even as overall enthusiasm for the day slipped and higher prices weighed on order volumes. Mobile dominated online activity, BNPL usage grew, and genAI-powered shopping surged, boosting conversion rates for retailers using the technology. The results suggest consumers are cautious yet still willing to spend selectively, signaling a steadier holiday season than anticipated.
OpenAI has refuted legal claims that ChatGPT is at fault for a teenager’s recent suicide. Scrutiny of AI tools being used for emotional and therapeutic support will only intensify. Both general-purpose platforms and specialized healthcare AI tools should proactively take action to impose age restrictions, automatically end sessions at the first sign of emotional distress, and clearly direct users to mental health resources when appropriate.
Two-thirds (65%) of pharma marketers are wary of AI use for creating regulatory filings, according to a new Klick Health and Momentum Events survey. While AI-assisted review is likely to become a standard part of regulatory workflows for both industry submissions and agency evaluations, human oversight will remain important.
Brands and retailers are struggling to keep up with changes to the shopper experience as consumers adopt genAI-powered “click-less journeys.”
Consumers increasingly have a negative perception of generative AI (genAI) in the creator economy while fewer see it positively, per a Billion Dollar Boy Study. AI is becoming a necessity across marketing strategies. Negative consumer attitudes toward AI in the creator economy suggest that it’s not whether advertisers and creators use AI, but how they use it that will determine if they see success or face backlash.
Baidu posted its sharpest revenue decline on record, with ad revenues falling 18% as AI-generated answers replace traditional search clicks. Ernie Bot now powers responses on most Baidu queries, improving user experience but suppressing monetizable activity—a trend management says will weigh on results into Q4. Competitors like Tencent, ByteDance, and PDD are still growing 20% to 30% YoY, suggesting Baidu’s weakness is structural. While the US market is more diversified, Baidu offers a stress test: AI can reshape search faster than monetization evolves. For advertisers, it’s a reminder that even Google and Microsoft must balance innovation with economic stability.
OpenAI introduced a shopping research feature for ChatGPT that builds personalized buying guides based on user queries and past conversations. The feature is available to all ChatGPT users, including those on free plans; OpenAI is offering “nearly unlimited usage” throughout the holiday season. Making the feature widely available at no cost suggests that OpenAI is looking to get users to rely on ChatGPT for purchase decisions, which could eventually result in greater buy-in for its agentic checkout features. However, it faces stiff competition: Perplexity, Google, and Amazon have all rolled out advanced AI functions to help holiday shoppers.
A new report from ANA and Harris Poll indicates that future marketing success will require delivering offline experiences. Brands will need to recalibrate budgets to accommodate this hybrid landscape of high-touch engagement blended with AI-driven discovery. Brands should use AI to handle low-touch decisions, then reinvest the time and trust gained into high-touch offline experiences and brand activations like pop-up shops or store takeovers. Those events create meaning that will help brands stay visible and valued.
45% of B2B marketers worldwide are prioritizing investment in AI-powered marketing tools for 2026, according to an August 2025 report from Content Marketing Institute.
As AI increasingly powers everything from holiday ads to product recommendations, retailers face a critical balancing act between efficiency and authenticity. "The question isn't if retailers will use AI, it's how they'll keep using it and maintain the human touch along the way," said host Suzy Davidkhanian on a recent episode of “Behind the Numbers.”
Consumer concerns over AI scams are rising, as three-quarters of UK adults believe AI advancements have made online scams more difficult to identify, per Barclays. Just 36% of UK consumers are confident they could spot an AI scam. As consumers wade through scams to find legitimate retail sites, ecommerce marketers should review brand search results, monitor social mentions, earn trust through About and FAQ pages, and advertise with caution on social media sites.
New Apple research points to the iPhone company pairing large language models (LLMs) with traditional sensors to build a more precise understanding of what a user is doing in real time. It’s likely to show up in sensor-enabled smartphones, computers, and smart home hubs hinged on ambient intelligence. Brands should explore how to design for moments, not messages. Build content and promotions that surface organically depending on a user’s activity, be it cooking, commuting, or exercising—so brands show up when it matters most.
Google has officially begun showing ads in its AI Mode search engine after announcing a rollout earlier this year. Google’s early testing of ads in AI Mode suggests that AI-driven search placements are beginning to take shape and may ultimately unlock new revenue potential. But with performance still unproven, advertisers should track developments closely while resisting the urge to invest heavily before the format demonstrates clear value.
OpenAI faces rising pressure from Google’s Gemini 3 because of its improved performance and multimodal functionality in text, sound, vision, video, and coding tasks. Meanwhile, new data shows that ChatGPT drives far less traffic to publishers than expected. Gemini 3’s leap forward and ChatGPT’s diminishing user clicks force brands to rethink how they show up in a world where answers live inside the model, not on the open web. Optimizing for generative engines now and focusing on answer-ready content will drive traffic, monetization, and attribution later as more engagement happens inside AI rather than after clicks.