Meta plans dedicated chatbot app: The move aims to compete with AI leaders ChatGPT and Gemini, but its success remains uncertain.

B2B ecommerce growth is outpacing B2B product and electronic sales growth. And ecommerce site sales are taking an increasing share of the market. Macroeconomic conditions, buyers’ preferences, and AI use are fueling increased digital transactions, particularly through third-party marketplaces.

Meta AI updates hint at future advertising: The company’s chatbot will store “memories” and pull from user data to personalize answers.

GenAI is taking the search market by storm, but market dynamics will stay largely the same this year.

Customer data collection, the dawn of retail media, and AI-assisted shopping has upended a retail industry already in the midst of a big-box transformation at the tail end of the 20th century. And then there is one of the biggest elephants in the room: Amazon. Here are some of the most impactful changes that marketing leaders have seen over the last 25 years.

86% of US adults have used self-checkout, and 70% have used mobile apps for shopping, per a September 2024 study from Morning Consult.

Organizations will prioritize governance in 2025 as they ramp up genAI investments in pursuit of business transformation.

AI darlings split the spotlight: Anthropic’s $30 billion valuation underscores its safety focus and enterprise ties, while Perplexity, worth $9 billion, battles legal woes and bets on ads to stay competitive.

AI fueled election confusion: Social platforms struggled to remove deepfakes and AI-driven misinformation during a contentious election year, but investment in moderation may dwindle now

The year of AI: Artificial intelligence invaded all aspects of life in 2024, from work to play and generation to generation. New genAI players appeared to take on megaliths like Google and Meta. It would be a copout to say that 2025 will bring more of the same, but we expect startups to begin taking more market share from Big Tech and challenging the status quo.

Google, Apple, and Samsung integrated genAI into their flagship devices, but delays and tepid consumer interest signal challenges ahead.

2024 saw a pivot to specialized AI agents and personalized search tools, with on-device AI driving adoption despite skepticism about added costs for smartphones.

Our eighth annual study reveals which of the 10 largest US banks lead in mobile app innovation, based on an exclusive survey of which features mobile banking users value most.

Docs struggle to use ChatGPT for diagnosing illnesses: Chatbots have greater diagnostic accuracy by themselves than physicians using AI. We examine how doctors can get more comfortable using AI for medical diagnostics.

The chatbot’s surging usage signals a shift toward AI tools as real-time search and conversational responses redefine how users access information.

Reports of unauthorized AI personas, including those of deceased individuals, raise concerns about the platform’s oversight and the broader issue of consent in genAI