Digital health tech funding continues to rebound in 2025, bolstered by AI deals. Funding reached $3.9 billion in Q3, already surpassing last year’s total, per PitchBook. AI is driving a new wave of digital health investment, and both healthcare systems and providers will feel pressure to adopt AI-assisted tool, not just experiment with them.
On today’s podcast episode, we discuss the three big questions surrounding Amazon in Q3 and beyond: What Amazon's corporate layoffs tell us about how AI is actually affecting the broader job market. Is Amazon’s new “Help Me Decide” feature a significant stepping stone toward agentic AI? And could Amazon’s AI smart glasses for delivery workers be a Trojan horse for broader smart-glasses adoption? Join Senior Director of Podcasts and host Marcus Johnson, along with Analyst Rachel Wolff. Listen everywhere, and watch on YouTube and Spotify.
OpenAI is rolling out a group chat option for ChatGPT to all logged-in Free, Go, Plus, and Pro users globally. The company said in a blog post that the feature is intended to help users collaborate with one another in the same conversation—such as working with friends, family, or coworkers on plans, decisions, and brainstorming. To capitalize on this new engagement tool, marketing leaders should start experimenting with group-based AI workflows and prepare for new discovery channels.
28% of B2B buyers worldwide have AI review boards or steering committees review AI products during evaluation, making it the least common internal review method, according to a July 2025 Responsive survey.
CVS Health’s Aetna is adding conversational generative AI (genAI) to its insurance website and mobile app. Aetna’s move highlights how insurers can use genAI to become more attractive to employer benefit packages.
The European Commission (EC) plans to propose scaled-back digital regulations to make it easier for companies to access users’ personal data and allow AI companies to legally use personal information for model training. The changes include simplifying cookie consent and letting users accept with a single click and save preferences centrally. Access to richer data sets could improve consumer segmentation, predictive modeling, and personalization offerings. Brands that clearly communicate how they use data, what protections exist, and the benefits of personalization will be more likely to maintain loyalty.
On today’s podcast episode, we discuss whether Coca-Cola’s AI holiday ad is a bold move forward or a soulless shortcut—and, when everything can be generated, whether authenticity becomes the new premium. Listen to the discussion with Vice President of Content and host Suzy Davidkhanian, Principal Analyst Sky Canaves, and Analyst Arielle Feger.
In earnings calls from retail leaders, one of the biggest shared signals is that AI shopping assistants are becoming the new front door of the customer journey. Whether the retailer is in grocery, fashion, or general merchandise, conversational search is now the organizing principle for discovery.
A federal judge handed Meta one of its biggest legal wins in years, ruling that its Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions do not violate US antitrust law. The decision leaned heavily on how TikTok and YouTube now compete for the same user attention Meta once dominated—proof, the court said, that the company cannot be considered a monopoly. The ruling arrives just as Reels accelerates across Instagram and platforms converge on short-form video and AI-driven discovery. For marketers, the outcome underscores a simple reality: user attention sits across the big three video platforms, and planning must follow that distribution.
Intuit signed a multiyear strategic partnership with OpenAI with over US $100 million per year to embed OpenAI’s models into Intuit’s software. The models will enable AI agents for Turbotax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp. Intuit’s OpenAI deal foreshadows a seismic transformation in how users experience applications— where generative interactions become the norm, AI agents handle tasks on users’ behalf, and copilots integrate seamlessly into daily workflows. In financial services, it introduces the capacity to quickly interact with complex data and take action.
Three major AI releases—Microsoft’s Agent 365, Google’s Gemini 3 Pro, and xAI’s Grok 4.1—could point the way to how businesses will deploy and govern AI. Following OpenA’s GPT 5.1, each new product update approaches intelligence from a different angle: Microsoft is offering operational control, Gemini is touting multimodal reasoning and search, and xAI is demonstrating emotional fluency. The brands that map these tools to specific workflows—governance with Microsoft, discovery and search with Google, and engagement with xAI—could see faster execution, sharper insights, more resilient customer experiences, and tangible ROI.
Perplexity is relaunching its agentic shopping product for all users next week, just in time for Black Friday, with PayPal as its key partner. The upgraded tool improves shopping intent detection and personalization using users’ past search data, while PayPal merchants will handle transactions and customer service directly. The move intensifies competition with OpenAI, Amazon, and Google, all racing to dominate AI-powered shopping ahead of the holidays. While sales from these tools are expected to remain modest, they offer brands a valuable testing ground for future ecommerce growth driven by generative AI.
Nearly 70% of large organizations are using genAI tools in marketing, but only 7% of global marketing leaders strongly agree that genAI use has improved the effectiveness of their campaigns, per a new study from Capgemini. The challenge may lie in budget control: More than half of AI initiatives are funded by IT. For AI to become the engine of growth that leaders envision, marketing needs to assume ownership, budget, and strategic influence to bridge the gap between its potential and its realized value.
Luma AI has secured a $900 million funding round led by Humain, pushing its valuation above $4 billion and marking one of the largest investments to date in AI-generated video. As agencies, studios, and brands increasingly adopt AI for editing, narration, testing, and full video generation, Luma’s raise signals a shift: AI video is becoming the creative backbone for modern advertising, powering faster iteration, scalable personalization, and multi-format production across every screen.
Amazon is going all-in on AI-powered advertising solutions for small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). SMBs can now create high-quality campaigns without requiring costly resources, giving SMBs access to creative capabilities that were once out of reach.
Adobe is acquiring software platform Semrush for $1.9 billion. The deal, which is expected to close in the first half of next year, will help Adobe expand beyond creative tools into a full-service marketing and analytics suite that can compete with Google and Meta. Whether or not marketers use Adobe today, the deal presents an opportunity to check tech stacks and evaluate search, design, and analytics tools. The acquisition could also help marketers trim martech spending by streamlining the tools they need to create content and stay on top of brand visibility and performance.
TikTok is letting users control how much AI content appears in their feeds with a slider to dial genAI content up or down depending on preference. The feed-filtering option is only as good as TikTok’s ability to detect genAI content, so the platform is also testing invisible watermarking that adds labeling only TikTok can see. Marketers should monitor how users adjust their AI content preferences and tailor creative accordingly to prioritize transparency and authenticity where AI skepticism is high. Pressure-test TikTok media plans to ensure campaigns consistently appear alongside content that reinforces trust.
33% of US genAI users have experienced inaccurate or misleading output when using the technology, according to a September 2025 report from Deloitte.
At Web Summit, design leaders Joseph Lebus and Max Ottignon argued that sameness—not disruption—is the real threat facing brands in the AI era. As production accelerates, they warned, imitation becomes easier and distinctiveness becomes harder. With nearly 40% of digital video ads expected to be AI-generated next year, differentiation demands intentional judgment rather than automated output. Many marketers already rely on AI for creative tasks, but efficiency alone risks flattening brand expression. The future of creative advantage lies in context, immersion, and originality—areas where taste, curiosity, and human perspective still outperform machines.