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We Tested the Best Website Builders for Businesses. Here’s How Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, and More Compare

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BY NATASHA ETZEL

If you need a website but you don’t know where to start, read this guide.

Every small business needs a website, but many owners don’t know where to start. Website builders offer an approachable way to create one even for people without the strongest technical skills.

Many platforms also include e-commerce tools, allowing you to sell physical products, services, and digital downloads online.

A polished website instantly builds credibility with potential customers. To help you get there, we’ve narrowed down the best stress-free website builders for small businesses to help you find the right fit.

Our Top Picks

  1. Squarespace
  2. Hostinger
  3. Shopify
  4. Wix
  5. Format

Comparing the Best Small Business Website Builders

Not all website builders are created equal, but many share core features. We’ve outlined the top capabilities of each, so you can find the best fit for your business.

To evaluate each option first-hand, we contacted each company to request a free trial, then explored each platform’s capabilities.

Here’s how the best business website builders compare:

Best Overall: Squarespace

Squarespace is a drag-and-drop website builder with 200 professional website templates. The platform itself is grid-based, so page elements snap into place within a set structure. The visual drag-and-drop editor makes customization easy.

You can build from a template or use the Blueprint AI Builder. With the latter, you’ll be asked to choose a brand personality to shape your site’s tone and voice, pick which pages to include, and select font pairings and a colour palette. From there, you can keep building by following the provided checklist or by prompting Squarespace’s Beacon AI chatbox.

Photo: Created with Squarespace

We found that customizing the look, feel, and functionality of a website was straightforward. All Squarespace websites are responsive, automatically adjusting to screen size. You can fine-tune desktop and mobile views separately by toggling between them. Built-in SEO tools are included.

Squarespace is a solid choice for solopreneurs and service-based businesses needing built-in e-commerce capabilities. You can use its platform to sell products, services, online courses, memberships, and subscriptions. You can also invoice clients and manage proposals within the platform.

Plans range from $19 to $99 per month, billed annually. A 14-day free trial is available.

All plans provide access to Squarespace’s AI Visibility feature to help monitor and improve how your site appears in AI search. However, that requires AI credits; each Squarespace plan includes a set number of AI credits.

Best for E-Commerce Businesses: Shopify

Shopify is ideal for businesses that primarily sell products and services online. The platform is built for e-commerce, making it easy to create and manage an online store. To begin, select from over 1,200 free and paid themes, or prompt Sidekick, Shopify’s AI-powered assistant, to create a custom AI-generated theme.

You can customize elements, including text, images, and menu styles. You can add and manage website pages, process and fulfil customer orders, and manage inventory, all within the platform. Sidekick can help you customize your storefront, create content, generate analytics, and manage orders and inventory.

In our testing, Shopify had a steeper learning curve than other website builders, due to its extensive e-commerce capabilities and settings, though it gets easier to use with time.

Shopify stores are mobile responsive by default. You can use built-in SEO tools to optimize your online store for search engines. It supports thousands of third-party integrations. You can connect email and SMS marketing tools, loyalty program apps, invoicing software, and more.

It’s easy to accept payments with Shopify’s built-in payment gateway, Shopify Payments. Payment processing fees apply and vary by plan. You can also accept payments through a third-party payment provider, though in addition to payment processing fees charged by the provider, Shopify charges an additional transaction fee.

Checkout customization is limited on standard plans. Adding custom fields, upsells, or advanced shipping rules is reserved for Shopify Plus. On a standard plan, you can customize your checkout using paid apps, though that’s an additional cost.

Businesses with brick-and-mortar locations can add Shopify’s advanced point-of-sale (POS) features for a unified online and in-store setup. Shopify offers a 3-day free trial, and you can extend it for $1 per month for up to 3 months if you need extra time to build your store.

Plans range from $29 to $299 per month, billed annually. Shopify also offers an enterprise-tier plan, Shopify Plus, for high-volume sellers starting at $2,300 per month. All plans include unlimited hosting and a free SSL certificate.

Best for Affordability: Hostinger

Hostinger’s drag-and-drop Website Builder is a solid choice for small-business owners seeking an affordable, user-friendly platform. The no-code editor combines visual drag-and-drop capabilities with built-in AI tools. You can start from a pre-made mobile-responsive template, an AI-generated template, or by chatting with Kodee, Hostinger’s AI assistant.

However you begin, customizing your site is straightforward. You can adjust text styles, fonts, colours, images, buttons, contact forms, and more. Hostinger provides AI tools, including a content generator, an image background remover, and a heat map tool that predicts where visitors will look and click on your pages.

Business plan subscribers can add an online store to sell products or services. Payment processing fees vary depending on the payment gateway chosen. All plans include built-in SEO tools, and Business plans add an AI SEO assistant that helps optimize content for AI Search and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

Website Builder plans cost $3.99 to $4.99 per month, with a 12-month commitment and upfront payment. A 14-day free trial is available. Hostinger is cheaper than most competitors, but its affordability comes with some drawbacks. The built-in blog tool lacks a native comment system, so to add comment capabilities, you’ll need to embed an external widget. Third-party integrations are also limited. Hostinger natively supports a small selection of integrations, while competitors like Wix have app marketplaces with hundreds of app options.

Hostinger Horizons is another website-building solution. The vibe-coding platform uses AI-generated code to build functional web applications from prompts. Plans range from $6.99 to $39.99 a month with a 12-month commitment billed upfront. AI prompts are credit-based, with credit limitations that vary by plan.

Best for Beginners: Wix

Wix is another popular choice for website builders for small businesses. The Wix Editor drag-and-drop website builder features over 2,000 fully customizable templates. The platform makes it easy to adjust text, images, buttons, menus, forms, and more.

Some website builders with a grid system have structured blocks that elements must snap into. But the Wix Editor is unstructured, so you can drag and drop elements anywhere on the page for greater design flexibility. The platform is intuitive, making it a great fit for beginners.

Wix automatically creates a mobile-friendly version of your site and integrates with popular third-party apps, including email marketing tools, social platforms, and invoicing software. Built-in SEO and GEO tools can help you optimize for search engines and generative engines.

Photo: Created with Wix

Some AI features require credits, including Wix’s AI Marketing Agent for SEO and its AI Custom Agent, a business management tool that automatically creates and runs tasks. Credit limits vary by plan.

Plans range from $17 to $159 per month, billed annually. You can start building a Wix website for free.

For small-business owners who prefer an AI-driven builder, Wix also offers Wix Harmony, an AI-powered website-building tool. The tool generates a website based on the prompts. The more detailed your prompts, the better the results. Wix Harmony is available at no extra cost with all plans.

Best for Portfolio Websites: Format

Format is a portfolio website builder made for creatives. It’s ideal for designers, photographers, and visual artists who want to launch a professional portfolio-based website quickly. All websites created with Format are mobile responsive.

The platform is easy to use—it only takes a few minutes to create a polished website. Format offers nearly 100 customizable themes with drag-and-drop editing, so you can adjust typography, colours, and branding without needing technical skills. ​

When adding pages, you can start with a blank canvas or choose from over 60 customizable page templates. You can also add a blog. SEO tools are built into the platform.​

Pro and Pro Plus plans include hosted video and photo storage, plus the ability to add a commission-free online store. You can sell physical products, services, and digital downloads. To accept payments, you’ll need a PayPal Business or Stripe Business account. Payment transaction fees apply.

All plans include Workflow, Format’s client management suite. It can be used to manage contacts, share password-protected client galleries for proofing, send contracts, and deliver files. Format integrates with Adobe Lightroom, making it easy to publish and update portfolios and client galleries directly from Lightroom. ​Plans cost $14 to $36 per month, or $10 to $26 per month billed annually. All plans include hosting, and Pro and Pro Plus come with a free custom domain for one year. Format offers a 14-day free trial.

Key Features to Look for

When choosing a website builder, look for a platform that offers customizable templates, an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor, and mobile-responsive designs.

If you plan to sell products or services, prioritize a builder with e-commerce features that fit your company’s needs. Look for a platform that offers built-in payment solutions or integrates with third-party payment processors.

Built-in SEO tools are essential if you want your content to be discovered by search engines. AI-powered tools can speed up the site-building process, while third-party integrations let you connect the marketing, invoicing, and productivity tools you already use.

Compare costs and choose a platform that aligns with your budget. If you get a deal for the first year, make sure you understand what you’ll pay after that.

The Bottom Line

Website builders make it easier for small business owners to create professional sites without coding. No single solution is ideal for every business, so as you compare options, focus on the features and tools that fit how your business actually operates. Also consider that some AI features require credits, so check how many are included in your plan before relying on them.

Why You Can Trust Us

To prepare this guide, we spent hours evaluating each website builder through real-world testing, including creating mock websites on every platform. We assessed capabilities like drag-and-drop editing, template variety, customization, e-commerce features, AI-powered tools, mobile responsiveness, and more.

FAQs

Is it worth making a website for my small business?

Yes. Many customers look for information online before deciding to work with a company, so a polished, professional website can help them feel more comfortable hiring your business.

Do I need coding skills to use a website builder?

No. Many of the best website builders for small businesses feature no-code drag-and-drop editors, user-friendly interfaces, and customization tools, so you can put together a professional-looking site without any technical experience.

What’s included with a website builder?

Most popular website builders offer customizable templates, drag-and-drop editors, AI-powered tools, built-in SEO features, and mobile-responsive designs. Many also include a free custom domain for the first year, or you can connect an existing domain purchased elsewhere. Website builders typically include hosting, so you won’t need to invest in a separate service.

Feature image credit: Adobe Stock

BY NATASHA ETZEL

Sourced from Inc.

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Online ad firm Adform’s script compromised to steal cryptocurrency

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By Bill Toulas

Online advertising firm Adform suffered a supply-chain attack that delivered cryptocurrency-stealing scripts to websites using its ad platform, replacing wallet addresses copied to visitors’ clipboards with ones controlled by an attacker.

Adform is one of Europe’s largest adtech firms, providing a full-stack platform that includes Demand-Side Platform (DSP), Supply-Side Platform (SSP), ad servers, and management tools.

Security researcher Kevin Beaumont discovered the malicious activity, saying that it stemmed from ‘trackpoint-async.js,’ Adform’s JavaScript tracking script served from ‘s2.adform.net’ and embedded in every website using the advertising platform.

According to the researcher, the trojanized JavaScript continuously monitors the clipboard of users visiting websites that embed trackpoint-async.js.

If the script detected Bitcoin, Ethereum, or TRON wallet addresses, it replaced them with an attacker-controlled address to redirect cryptocurrency payments.

Compromised Adform script replacing crypto addresses
Compromised Adform script replacing crypto addresses
source: BleepingComputer

“This allows end-user devices of downstream websites to be compromised with crypto-stealing malware. Meaning if you visit example.com and they use Adform, example.com will compromise your device,” Beaumont explains.

The researcher also observed other malicious Adform-hosted scripts communicating with an attacker-controlled server at 84.32.102[.]230:7744, sending the victim’s IP address, referring website, and URL path.

Running the script through the VirusTotal scanning platform shows that it is not flagged as malicious by any of the available antivirus engines.

VirusTotal scan of the script comes clean
VirusTotal scan of the script gives clean result
Source: doublepulsar.com

Current status

Beaumont notes that the malicious code was removed from Adform’s tracking script soon after his discovery.

Adform confirmed its detected suspicious activity on July 27 and discovered a “cybersecurity threat.” The company said that it removed the malicious code and “took further measures to protect website visitors, our clients, and the Adform platform.”

“To our knowledge, the code was not designed to install software on a user’s device or establish persistence. It operated only while an affected webpage was open,” Adform says.

The company states that its services are now safe to use but its investigation continues.

Individuals who visited websites that embedded the “affected Adform technology on 27 July 2026” are impacted and the recommendation is to clear browser cookies to eliminate the malicious code.

“Adform has informed affected clients through dedicated communications and provided them with relevant information and recommended actions.”

Beaumont has shared a sample of the malicious script via Pastebin for security engineers to analyze.

BleepingComputer’s analysis of a sample stored on Archive.org also confirmed that a self-executing payload had been injected into the Adform tracking library served from the company’s infrastructure.

The malicious code was appended in obfuscated form at the end of the legitimate library and included a function that replaced any string matching a crypto wallet address format.

Apart from hijacking clipboard content, the malware can also rewrite wallet addresses on web pages. This way, if a payment address is displayed, it would be the attacker’s.

Beaumont says the malicious activity delivered through Adform has been ongoing for the past week without being detected. The oldest sample BleepingComputer could find was from from the Archive.org snapshot on July 26, taken at 23:29:03 GMT.

BleepingComputer has contacted Adform to request a statement regarding Beaumont’s findings and will update the story if we receive a response.

By Bill Toulas

Bill Toulas is a tech writer and infosec news reporter with over a decade of experience working on various online publications, covering open-source, Linux, malware, data breach incidents, and hacks.

Sourced from BLEEPINGCOMPUTER

 

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Beyond Standard Social Media Tactics: How To Build A Brand Community

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Sourced from Forbes

While social media still matters, it no longer guarantees the visibility or engagement many brands once relied on. As algorithms continue to prioritize different signals and organic reach becomes harder to earn, marketers are looking beyond the traditional playbook to create stronger relationships with the people they want to reach. The objective today isn’t simply to get attention but to give audiences a reason to seek out a brand via various avenues, participate and stay connected over time.

This shift means creating value that extends well beyond the feed by looking past the platforms themselves toward the relationships, habits and trust that keep people coming back on their own. Here, members of Forbes Agency Council share approaches that can help brands connect with audiences and build real communities, without relying on an algorithm to do the work.

1. Build A Content Pillar Plan

If you plan to spend any time at all on driving organic social media growth and awareness, you need to have a plan of attack built around your brands content pillars. How do posts turn into leads that turn into conversions, and how do we replicate this funnel week after week? These are questions you need to ask yourself to ensure the time you’re putting into social media marketing is actually yielding material results for your business; frequent posting isn’t enough anymore. – Tyler Dykstra, SFL E-commerce

2. Show Up For Your Community

I’ve been a Sideshow Collectibles customer for years, and here’s what I still remember: One of their community managers once donated to a Human Rights Campaign fundraiser I organized. It was a small thing, but it stuck with me. Be a brand that actually shows up for their people, not one that just talks at them. When you build real relationships with folks who care about your brand, you create advocates who stick around—no matter what the algorithm does. – Mike Demopoulos, hosting.com

3. Take UGC To The Next Level

Brands should take user-generated content to the next level. In a world flooded with AI-generated content, authentic customer voices stand out. Invest in product gifting, influencer seeding and community-building through email and loyalty programs. Turn customers into creators and advocates; their content often drives more trust and engagement than traditional social media tactics. – Bernard May, National Positions

4. Create A Ritual Worth Returning To

Create a repeatable ritual your audience would miss if it disappeared. A weekly challenge, member briefing or insider tool gives people a reason to return on purpose, not by accident. That shifts the brand from posting for reactions to becoming part of a habit. The result is deeper retention, stronger memory and community built on usefulness rather than visibility. – Vaibhav Kakkar, Digital Web Solutions

5. Build Value-First Community Groups

We’ve seen stronger results by building value-first WhatsApp and Facebook communities for brands. For a baby products client, we shared parenting advice, nutrition guidance, baby care tips and live workshops for new moms before promoting products naturally. As trust grew, members began sharing reviews and recommendations within the group itself, creating organic buzz, stronger loyalty and higher sales. – Vin Sonpal, CS Web Solutions

6. Move Engagement Into Private Channels

Don’t confuse fewer likes with less relevance or visibility. SEO stopped being “hot” the day it became mandatory, but it still drives demand. Social’s going through the same shift: The real engagement is moving from on the feed to in the DMs: less public applause, more private conversion plus real connection. So accessibility and authenticity matter because people trust receipts, not reach. – Monica Alvarez-Mitchell, Pulse Creative, LLC

7. Own A Single-Interest Niche

Diverse organic reach is getting smaller. A follower almost means nothing today. However, platforms are optimizing by interest—so singular topic “themed” pages are outperforming pages talking about diverse topics. A recent example: A page with zero followers posting about the same topic, using the same angle, got 7 million in organic reach in 30 days. As Gary Vaynerchuk put it, algorithms optimize for interest, so singular interest pages and channels will win. – Dean Seddon, Maverrik

8. Design Experiences That Make People Want To Belong

Community is built by creating experiences that give people a reason to participate and belong. Whether that’s through events, partnerships, shared causes or customer involvement, the strongest communities grow because people see themselves in the brand; not because they clicked “like.” – Jacquelyn LaMar Berney, VI Marketing and Branding

9. Post Useful, Not Promotional, Content

Many brands in the B2B sector—my area of expertise—could deliver much better engagement by thinking about how they can help their customers, rather than simply promoting their products and services. Your audience isn’t going to LinkedIn or other social networks to see thinly-disguised advertisements. Content that is genuinely useful, particularly if it’s also fun to read, will always drive engagement, whatever happens with the social media algorithms. – Mike Maynard, Napier Partnership Limited

10. Turn Employees Into Brand Advocates

Your most powerful influencers are already in-house. When employees share authentic content about their work, wins and expertise, they consistently outperform branded channels, earning greater trust, broader reach and real community. Empowering your team to post as themselves is the highest-ROI social strategy most brands still overlook. – Katie Meyer, MoonLab Productions

12. Empower Authentic UGC

Traditional social media audiences remain enormous despite the numbers seeming to reflect a decline, so they cannot be abandoned. Part of the challenge today is around authenticity. Influencers too often lack authenticity for the brands they promote because they signed up as an ad spokesperson under the guise of influencer. Throw in an AI, and any notion of organic is lost at sea. There’s nothing new about UGC, but when it’s empowered, it can foster engagement and further UGC. – Dean Trevelino, Trevelino/Keller

13. Build Utility People Actually Use

Build utility, not just content. The strongest communities form when brands create something people return to because it helps them do a better job—things like a tool, system, experience or insight they actually use. When you become not just visible but useful, engagement becomes a genuine by-product of the value you offer rather than a fight against shrinking reach. – Firdosh Tangri, Fantasy

14. Invest In Real-World Relationships

Invest in real-world relationship building. Events, workshops, networking groups and educational experiences create direct connections instead of relying on algorithms. Pair that with strategic partnerships with complementary businesses to build referral networks that generate trust, strengthen the community and support long-term growth beyond social engagement metrics. – Brock Murray, seoplus+

15. Own The Audience You Can Reach Directly

Take advantage of environments where trust compounds: niche communities, owned newsletters and the forums real buyers actually read. A genuine presence in a relevant subreddit or Discord beats chasing reach on a feed that throttles you. These are also the sources AI models pull from when assessing authority. Own the audience you can reach directly instead of renting attention from an algorithm. – Lior Eldan, Moburst

16. Build A Brand Around People, Not Products

One approach that consistently outperforms traditional engagement tactics is building a brand around people rather than products. Audiences connect with authentic founder stories, real team members and behind-the-scenes content. Giving people access to the journey and daily reality of a business creates trust and fosters deeper engagement. – Leon Gitterle, MyMedia Marketing

17. Lean Into Experiential Marketing

Brands should invest more in experiential marketing. As AI generates more content and organic reach declines, people increasingly value real experiences and human connection. Creating memorable, immersive moments that put brands directly in front of their target audience fosters authentic community, emotional loyalty and word-of-mouth advocacy that can outperform traditional social engagement tactics. – Marilyn Cowley, PREM – PR & Social

18. Curate Groups Around Your Niche

A private newsletter, podcast or membership group gives you direct access to your audience without being at the mercy of algorithm changes or pay-to-play reach. For a niche business like homebuilding, a curated email list or private Facebook or Slack group of past clients and prospects consistently outperforms chasing likes because the audience is self-selected, trust is higher, and every touchpoint compounds over time. – Nicholas Cormier, Home Builder Marketers

19. Do Employee Social Media Training

Your employees are your greatest untapped resource on social media. Get your leaders and team actively posting to grow your brand’s audience and visibility. We held an employee social media training with a large Midwest-based bank; in the month following the training, the brand’s LinkedIn followers increased by 28.6%, impressions increased 20.9% and the engagement rate on brand content jumped 66.7%. – Kristi Piehl, Media Minefield

20. Start Investing In GEO

When you search for a solution, you will likely turn to AI at some point. Your clients do the same. Start investing in generative engine optimization, so high-intent users who are already in search or decision mode can find your brand. Being consistently surfaced in AI answers builds familiarity and strengthens perceived authority over time, which makes clients more willing to join your community. – Nataliya Andreychuk, Viseven

Feature image credit: Getty

ByExpert Panel® COUNCIL POST | Membership (fee-based)

Successful PR, media strategy, creative and advertising executives from Forbes Agency Council share trends and tips. Visit Expert’s website.

Sourced from Forbes

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Apple Tried for Years to Stop This, but It Could Finally Put More Money Back Into iPhone Users’ Wallets

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By Herby Jasmin

Apple’s services division grew 12% year-over-year to $30.7 billion during the June quarter. However, the result fell short of analyst expectations, leading the company’s chief financial officer to explain the shortfall on Thursday’s earnings call.

CFO Kevan Parekh pointed to two factors dragging on App Store performance: a slowdown in mobile gaming spending and fee structure changes Apple has been forced to adopt in several markets.

In the U.S., a federal court ruling requires Apple to allow developers to link users to external payment pages without collecting a cut of those transactions.

In the European Union, apps distributed through alternative marketplaces now pay reduced fees. Japan and Brazil have also seen adjustments to Apple’s standard commission structure.

What the Court Ruling Actually Costs Apple

The U.S. situation stems from the Epic Games lawsuit, which resulted in a court order compelling Apple to allow developers to direct customers to outside payment options.

When purchases happen through those external links, Apple collects nothing. Parekh confirmed that arrangement continues to weigh on revenue, though he declined to quantify the impact. Apple said it welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision to hear its appeal of that ruling.

For consumers, those link-out provisions mean some apps now offer the option to pay through a developer’s own website, sometimes at a lower price than going through Apple’s own in-app purchase system. That dynamic has been playing out quietly across a range of apps since the ruling took effect.

Mobile Gaming Revenue Is Flattening

Gaming has historically been among the largest revenue categories inside the App Store, driven heavily by in-app purchases in free-to-play titles. Parekh described the current environment as soft without providing specific figures.

The mobile gaming market broadly has been under pressure for several quarters as player spending habits shift and some of the biggest titles age without replacement hits emerging at the same scale.

Despite those pressures, Parekh noted the App Store still posted a June quarter revenue record. Growth elsewhere in the services portfolio offset the drag, with double-digit gains in cloud storage, Apple TV+, Apple Pay, and advertising. Apple Pay in particular reached a record number of active users during the quarter.

1.5 Billion Paid Subscriptions

Apple now counts 1.5 billion paid subscriptions across its ecosystem, including everything from iCloud storage plans to Apple One bundles to third-party app subscriptions transacted through the App Store.

Both the number of paying accounts and the number of transacting accounts hit all-time highs in the quarter.

Currency headwinds added another layer of pressure. Parekh said foreign exchange movements reduced reported growth, and a year-over-year comparison was made harder by the theatrical release of the F1 film during the same quarter last year, which had no equivalent this year.

Looking ahead, Apple guided for services growth in the September quarter to come in at roughly the same rate as June, once a 2.5 percentage point currency drag is stripped out.

By Herby Jasmin

Herby has a healthy obsession with all things Apple, especially the iPhone. He loves to rip things apart to see how they work. He is responsible for the editorial direction, strategy, and growth of Gotechtor.

Sourced from GOTECHTOR

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Circle K gets serious about retail media

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By Mitchell Parton

Circle K is more openly promoting and expanding its retail media network, Full Circle Media, as a way for advertisers to reach shoppers across its convenience stores, fuel pumps and digital channels in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Last year, Circle K named Joell Robinson director of retail media for Circle K. She was previously senior director of retail media at Giant Eagle, where she helped build the Leap retail media network. The company began using the Full Circle Media branding in February. Before then, the company had been relatively quiet about its retail media business. Full Circle Media reaches more than 6,600 locations in the U.S. and delivers up to 200 million monthly impressions, according to Circle K.

“Circle K has had a network; it just hasn’t been out there,” Robinson told Modern Retail. “We’ve had suppliers participating, but [we are] really building up our capabilities, and our measurement, and the scalability of the whole thing, and making sure it’s built to last.”

Robinson said that previously, the company had been focused on retail media through its proprietary upsell screens, called Lift, in stores. The company has 13,200 screens installed at 6,600 locations, in addition to in-store digital walls. She describes the Lift screens as working similarly to sponsored searches online: When a customer purchases one candy bar, for example, it may tell them there’s a “two for $3” deal, indicating they should pick up another one.

“But there’s so much more,” Robinson said, adding that the retailer also has screens at the fuel pumps as well as placements on its app and emails. “We have a lot of great properties. In the past, we had kind of played in those areas, but [had] not necessarily put a formal offering around it,” she said.

Circle K’s approach to building out its retail media network is a bit of an anomaly in the industry. Other retailers, including Giant Eagle, are only just beginning to add in-store screens for retail media and have instead focused more on building out more advertising functionality on mobile and the web. Robinson said Circle K instead has had a heavy in-store media presence and is now building more digital components. Circle K does not have an e-commerce website. “I had to shift my thinking a bit, because I was used to having sponsored search and a lot of online placements.”

Robinson said her team’s focus has been to create a retail media program that spans many different channels instead of just mainly in-store media. In May, the media network started offering social and off-site placements. “Focusing on the full journey is really, really important to us,” Robinson said. “What we’ve been doing is better utilizing some of the channels we have.”

Her focus has also been on working more with Circle K’s merchandising team. “When the organization is supporting, say, a certain promotion, we really try to work with our suppliers to make sure that we’re the megaphone on that promotion, and that people know about it,” Robinson said.

She said the company is also experimenting with closed-loop measurement, as well as incrementality measurement, in email. “The idea is to get to this all-encompassing, omnichannel, closed-loop measurement,” Robinson said. “It’s really aligning the things underneath to make sure that that is transparent and defensible.”

Robinson said her team has been trying to bring more measurement to the fuel pump, and has been testing ways to bring those customers into the store via the screen or through SMS or push notifications on their phones. Full Circle Media includes screens at more than 3,800 fuel pumps.

“We have so much traffic at the pump, and I think even if we could get a small percentage of that, it would be material,” she said. “That gives them just the opportunity to engage with us and engage with our customer service folks, which I think is where we win them.”

Robinson also plans to leverage Circle K’s loyalty program, Inner Circle, which offers discounts on fuel and beverages, among other perks. The loyalty program has grown to more than 5,000 stores in 34 states, and has 14.7 million members. Circle K just redesigned the program to reward customers based on how often they visit the store or the pump.

“Especially in retail media, having a strong loyalty program is really the foundation of what we’re trying to do,” Robinson said. “Our willingness and our enthusiasm around our loyalty program has been incredibly refreshing for me, and great to see from a retail media standpoint, because who I know I can measure. Who we know, we can engage with.”

Convenience-store retail media is still in the early innings in the U.S. Retail media analyst Andrew Lipsman, in his Media, Ads and Commerce newsletter, said C-store retail media networks are often an afterthought in the U.S. retail media conversation because the market is fragmented between too many different chains.

“In the quest for CPG brand dollars, they take a back seat to Amazon, Walmart, Kroger, Instacart and nearly a dozen others,” he wrote. He said outside of 7-Eleven’s Gulp Media Network — which reaches more than 13,000 stores across the country — he believes “for other C-store RMNs to achieve viability, the market will ultimately need to consolidate into an aggregated media network.”

Frank Beard, principal of Konbini Strategy, a marketing and PR firm for companies that serve the fuel and convenience-retail industries, said it’s a “no-brainer” for Circle K to want to invest more into retail media. “Convenience stores have a lot of traffic flow,” he said. “It’s a natural place to put an advertisement, especially when it comes to products that are sold in a convenience store.”

But he said retailers can’t lose sight of investing in the customer experience in favour of functions like retail media that are aimed at attracting advertisers rather than customers. “Retail media works when you have a compelling enough retail offer to drive people into the store in the first place.”

By Mitchell Parton

Sourced from ModernRetail

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From Tinder and Reddit to Amazon, unwanted AI images are freaking people out

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Users complain of ‘fake photos’ being created without their consent.

Amazon, Reddit and Tinder might not seem to have a huge amount in common, but all three are jumping on AI trend that many users find unfathomable. They’ve been pushing AI imagery on users without being asked for it.

This week, the dating Tinder app said it had suspended a controversial experimental feature that used AI to automatically edit some users’ profile photos. Meanwhile, sellers on Amazon and advertisers on Reddit complain of automatically generated fake product images.

It seems that whether you’re trying to sell groceries, video games or yourself, these three very different tech companies think their fake imagery will help you do it. But with consumers so wary of AI, why are they pushing it into use cases where it doesn’t belong?

In Tinder’s case, the latest controversy involved a ‘Photo Enhance’ feature. Some users found that the app automatically edited their profile photos to make them look clearer, brighter, or even to change their own physical features.

In the TikTok above, Tinder user Jeni Rubin describes her confusion when she saw her profile picture had been given “someone else’s teeth”. It’s like posting a Photo to social media and the platform automatically applying one of those controversial glamour filters . On an app whose whole purpose is to help people meet up with strangers, it felt a bit like they wanted to take catfishing in house.

Users were told their photo had been “enhanced” and they could undo the action if they wanted, but only after the photos were already live. They weren’t asked if they wanted to use the feature in the first place, and there appeared to be no way to opt out.

Tinder’s not the only app that’s been pushing unexpected AI image generation on users. One of the first examples that made headlines was Uber Eats way back in 2023 when it started adding fake images of business’s menu items. It was so bad that a New York pizzeria’s margheritas were depicted as pastry tarts.

That hasn’t put tech companies off. Over on Reddit this week (above), an indie game developer was surprised by their experience when they decided to pay for adverts for the first time. Reddit used their gameplay images to generate fake screenshots.

Adding the fake images to ads is optional, but the developer wonders why Reddit would generate them in the first place and whether some users might accept them unintentionally. Could some of those games people are dismissing as AI slop actually be decent titles whose marketing has been scuppered by Reddit’s ad platform?

“I didn’t prompt these. Reddit just generates a bunch of images for you without asking. I don’t know how Reddit thought this would provide value to advertisers,” the developer writes.

“As far as I can tell, they don’t seem to be automatically added to the media list the ad uses, but it still feeds your promotional artwork into the AI without your clear consent,” they add. “Then when going through ads setup pressing ‘ok’ on everything, [you’re] one accidental ‘add all’ misclick away from being used in your official ad campaign.”

Amazon Shop by Style AI

Amazon’s AI ‘shop by style’ feature (Image credit: Amazon)

On Wednesday, Amazon announced a new feature that will display AI-generated images of products based on users’ search queries. The idea is that fake photos will help consumers find what they’re looking for by helping to narrow down searches to real products that might resemble them.

I can see an argument for that. You might be looking for something made from a certain material and not know what it’s called, for example. But the feature could also add more confusion to a marketplace where it’s becoming harder to tell what’s real. Some Amazon sellers complain of AI-generated images being automatically added to their product listings.

“Am I able to opt out? I don’t like the pictures they generated, and they don’t even show the right appearance of my products. It may cause the confusion,” one person writing on Reddit fears.

They’re right to be concerned. Various online marketplaces are being taken over by AI-generated images. For some listings, fantasy AI ‘lifestyle images’ might be the only images provided. They might draw attention and increase initial click through, but are people going to buy a product if they can’t see what it really looks like? If they do, isn’t there more chance of negative reviews and returns?

Why companies are doing it

It’s common for tech companies to make new features opt out. Opt-in features tend to fail when they’re things that nobody asked for. But are these AI features intended to create value for the user or for the platforms themselves?

The precise reasons for the implementations might vary among platforms, but reducing user churn and disillusionment is probably one of the main objectives. People stop using Tinder and won’t buy a subscription if they get few matches. Blurry or poorly lit photos make that more likely, so by editing images, Tinder hopes people get more response and stay hooked on the app for longer.

On platforms like Reddit, AI-generated images make it easier for small businesses and everyday users with limited resources to create ads and spend money on the platform. Repeating the same images can lead to ad fatigue, causing users to scroll past, while AI-generated variations allow for more A/B rotation to see which gets the more clicks. More clicks mean more money for Reddit if you’re on Cost-Per-Click payment.

Amazon also sells per click advertising, but it also sells AI image generation as a product for advertisers. Even if it gives products the feel of dodgy knockoffs, the company has an interest in normalising use of the technology.

In every case, there could be benefits for the user too if they get more visualisations from prospective customers (or matches). The risk for the tech platforms is the continued negative public sentiment regarding AI, which probably isn’t being helped by companies pushing unrequested features that also drive up the cost of hardware.

By 

Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.

Sourced from CREATIVE BLOQ

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Your billboard is becoming a search query. What happens when OOH triggers AI?

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For many years, OOH has been measured by what happens after someone sees a billboard: search, clicks and website traffic. But AI is changing what happens next. A billboard can now trigger a question in an answer engine, making the digital footprint behind a campaign just as important as the physical media itself. Here’s why the OOH-to-AEO journey matters.

For years, one of the clearest signs that an out-of-home advertising campaign had worked was a spike in search.

A billboard went live. People saw it. Someone searched the brand name. Branded search increased, website traffic followed and, suddenly, there was a digital trail showing that something happening in the physical world had created an online response.

The billboard is no longer the end of the journey

That relationship between OOH and search still matters.

But the way people find information is changing. Instead of typing a few words into Google, someone can ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or another AI-powered search tool a much more complicated question and expect an answer immediately.

The journey can now look very different:

See billboard → ask AI → receive an answer → investigate brand → visit website → take action.

That creates a new question for OOH planners. What happens after someone notices the campaign?

What information will they look for and what will an answer engine tell them when they ask?

OOH creates the question. The digital ecosystem has to answer it

Outdoor advertising has traditionally been treated as a broadcast medium.

You buy the location, create the artwork, put the campaign live and measure reach, impressions, recall and perhaps a lift in search.

But a strong piece of OOH can create something more valuable than an impression: a question.

If a billboard makes a surprising claim, people may want to verify it. If it introduces a not-so-familiar brand, they may want to understand it.

If it shows an unusual price, statistic or comparison, they may want to know whether it is true.

That means the campaign does not necessarily finish when somebody walks past it. The physical creative can become the trigger for a digital information journey.

A York Street campaign offers a useful example

Our recent campaign on York Street in Leeds illustrates the principle. Two 48-sheet billboards were placed next to each other, contrasting an existing quoted price for the same site.

The message was deliberately simple enough to understand from the road, but provocative enough to create a second life online. People photographed the boards, publications picked up the story and the physical campaign became digital content in its own right.

It is the mechanism: a physical message created curiosity, curiosity created discussion and that discussion created a searchable information trail.

AEO is about being understandable

There is a temptation to treat answer engine optimization as simply the latest acronym marketers need to add to a presentation. That misses the more important point.

AEO is fundamentally about making an organization understandable to systems that retrieve and synthesize information.

Who are you? What do you actually do? Where do you operate? What do your services cost? What evidence supports your claims? Who has written about you? Are independent sources talking about you? Can an AI system find consistent information about your business across your website and the wider web?

These are not questions that can be solved simply by changing a meta title or adding an FAQ section. They require a broader digital footprint and clear, useful information.

The question becomes part of the campaign strategy

This creates an interesting opportunity for OOH. Instead of planning only for what the audience will see, planners can start thinking about what the audience might ask afterward.

A campaign could be designed backward: creative → likely question → search behavior → available information → AI answer → action.

That does not mean every billboard needs to contain a question or every campaign needs an elaborate digital strategy.

It means the likely second step in the consumer journey deserves consideration alongside location, reach, frequency and format.

Design the question, not just the impression

OOH planning already asks important questions: Where is the audience? How much reach do we need? What frequency are we looking for? Which formats fit the budget?

The next layer could be just as simple: What question might this campaign create? What will somebody search after seeing it? What might they ask an AI system? Where will they find the answer? Is that answer accurate, useful and credible?

That is a different way of thinking about outdoor advertising. It treats attention not as the end metric, but as the beginning of a wider journey.

The OOH-to-AEO pipeline

Physical attention: A person sees the billboard, bus, digital screen, taxi, airport advert or Underground campaign.

Curiosity: The creative creates a question, emotion or reason to investigate.

Search or AI prompt: The consumer searches the brand or asks an answer engine for more information.

Digital ecosystem: The consumer finds the company’s website, content, reviews, press coverage and other authoritative information.

AI-generated answer: An answer engine can now use that wider context when responding to the consumer.

Action: The consumer visits the website, makes an inquiry, buys something, visits a location or shares the campaign.

The billboard may actually be the first prompt

I do not think the billboard is becoming less valuable because people are spending more time with AI. There is a case for the opposite.

The more powerful AI search becomes, the more valuable real-world triggers may become. AI can answer questions, but it cannot put your brand physically in front of somebody walking down a high street.

A billboard can create the question that sends somebody to search or AI in the first place.

That is the opportunity.

The next generation of OOH campaigns will not just be designed to be seen. They will be designed with what happens afterward in mind: attention, curiosity, search, AI discovery, discussion and credibility.

The billboard may actually be the first prompt. What happens next is up to the rest of your digital ecosystem.

Sourced from The Drum

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Salesforce agents gain a runtime that pursues goals over weeks, not chats

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By Luis Rijo

Seven prebuilt agents cover sales, service, commerce and back office, with six generally available and outbound seller Hunter held in pilot until November.

In Short

Salesforce packaged seven ready-made AI agents, each built for one job such as customer support, IT help desk, online shopping, outbound sales, supply chain, inbound lead qualification and customer experience workflows. Six can be bought and switched on immediately; the outbound sales agent, Hunter, stays in pilot until November 2026 and is the first to run on new plumbing that keeps an agent working toward an objective over weeks instead of ending when the chat window closes. For marketing and revenue teams, the practical shift is that pipeline generation, chat commerce and service deflection now arrive as configured products rather than as components to assemble.

Seven agents, six of them available immediately

The announcement, issued from San Francisco, names each agent and assigns it a function rather than a capability. Casey handles customer service resolution across voice, SMS, WhatsApp and web chat, shipping with prebuilt handling for frequently asked questions, returns, account management and escalation to a human. Paige covers IT and human resources requests through Slack, internal portals and existing employee tools. Carter works the shopper path, helping buyers find and compare products, answering questions and closing the transaction through in-chat checkout. Marshall sits in the back office, orchestrating end-to-end processes with what Salesforce describes as deterministic execution and an audit record of every action taken.

Piper works websites and inboxes to engage, qualify and convert inbound leads into pipeline for business-to-business sales and marketing teams. Fin resolves customer experience workflows across channels, running on a customer operations agent called Operator and on Fin Apex, a set of models the company says are custom-trained for customer experience work. Those six are generally available.

Hunter is the exception. Described as an outbound sales agent that works a pipeline from research through outreach and collaborates with sellers over weeks and months, it is in pilot now with general availability set for November 2026.

Every agent connects to Customer 360 and inherits the customer records and business processes already held there. Customers can rename an agent, and each operates inside the buyer’s own business rules, permissions and security model. Behaviour can be specified through Agent Script, the open-source language Salesforce published for agent behaviour, which mixes model reasoning with deterministic rules so that certain decisions follow fixed logic rather than inference. That combination is the quiet part of the release: a system that reasons freely is hard to audit, and the back-office agent in particular is sold on its audit record.

The runtime underneath Hunter

The second half of the announcement concerns infrastructure rather than packaging. Salesforce built a long-horizon runtime for Agentforce, and Hunter is the first agent to run on it. The company says more agents in the portfolio will move onto the runtime over time, and that customers will eventually build long-horizon agents themselves.

Three capabilities sit underneath. Memory carries context and progress between sessions, so a plan survives the end of an interaction. Durable execution keeps that plan running and allows the agent to resume or correct course when circumstances change. Dynamic steering adjusts behaviour in response to an individual user’s feedback and direction.

The worked example Salesforce gives is a seller asking Hunter to rescue at-risk deals before quarter end. The agent converts that instruction into a measurable goal, builds a plan, and determines which tasks to complete, which tools and context are required, and where the guardrails sit between acting autonomously and requesting seller approval. Nothing in the announcement specifies how those guardrails are configured, how approval thresholds are set, or what happens when a long-running plan conflicts with a change in the underlying record.

The distinction matters more than the vocabulary suggests. The OECD, in a 34-page working paper published in February 2026, separated a single AI agent that acts with some autonomy from agentic AI, meaning multiple coordinated agents pursuing complex objectives over extended periods with minimal supervision. Sustained goal pursuit over weeks is the second category, and it is the category where oversight, liability and specification questions have been least settled.

Two of these agents arrived by acquisition

Piper and Fin did not originate inside Salesforce. Piper is the inbound sales development product built by Qualified, the San Francisco company founded in 2018 by former Salesforce executives Kraig Swensrud and Sean Whiteley. According to Salesforce’s quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company acquired Qualified in April 2026 for consideration valued at approximately $1.2 billion, of which roughly $1.1 billion was cash, recording $954 million of goodwill and about $290 million of intangible assets.

Fin is Intercom. The same filing records that Salesforce entered into an agreement in June 2026 to acquire Intercom, Inc., listed under the name Fin. A separate filing by Hercules Capital, an Intercom lender that committed $250 million in March 2026, put the transaction at approximately $3.6 billion.

Presenting both as members of a single portfolio is a product decision rather than a technical statement. Neither the announcement nor the filings describe how deeply either system has been rebuilt on Salesforce’s own stack, and the release attributes Fin’s performance to its own models rather than to Agentforce reasoning.

The customer figures, and what they leave out

Salesforce published six deployment statistics. Engine resolves half of its chat inquiries through a help agent named Eva. Perk builds 60% of its sales pipeline through Hunter. Autism Queensland resolves 70% of administrative requests through Paige. Hibbett AI covers 90% of core shopper journeys and went live in six weeks. Asana’s website agent, Piper, now drives four times the conversation volume, with Piper deployments averaging 45 days. Anthropic resolves 79% of the conversations Fin sees without human involvement.

All six are vendor-supplied, and none carries a denominator, a measurement window or a definition of resolution. A resolution rate depends entirely on which contacts enter the funnel: an agent that handles password resets and order status will post a higher figure than one exposed to billing disputes. Four times the conversation volume describes activity, not outcome. Sixty per cent of pipeline built by an agent says nothing about what share of that pipeline closes.

One figure also carries a naming discrepancy worth flagging. Salesforce’s April 2026 material on Engine, covered when the company opened its platform to external coding agents through Headless 360, named the customer service agent Ava, built in 12 days and handling 50% of customer cases autonomously. The September 11 release names the same agent Eva and gives the same 50% figure. The release does not explain the change, and it is not clear whether the earlier spelling, the later one, or a rename inside Engine accounts for it.

Work units as the headline metric

Salesforce framed the release with volume rather than revenue. Over the past two years, it says, 7 billion Agentic Work Units have been delivered across Agentforce and Slack, including 3.2 billion in the second quarter alone.

An Agentic Work Unit is Salesforce’s own metric, first disclosed at its fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 results in February 2026, and defined as one discrete task accomplished by an agent: a prompt processed, a reasoning chain completed, or a tool invoked. The company positioned it explicitly against token counts, arguing that tokens measure consumption rather than completed work. At that February disclosure, the cumulative figure stood at 2.4 billion units, with 771 million recorded in the fourth quarter, up 57% quarter over quarter.

Set against that baseline, the arithmetic is the story. Cumulative units moved from 2.4 billion to 7 billion in roughly two quarters, and a single quarter now accounts for 3.2 billion, more than four times the quarterly figure disclosed seven months earlier. The metric remains defined and counted by the vendor, with no external audit and no published breakdown by agent type in the September release, so it measures platform activity rather than customer outcome. A tool invocation that fails still counts as work performed.

The platform layer around the agents

Three additions accompany the portfolio. AI Skills inside Agentforce Coworker lets an employee teach the agent how to complete a task once, then reuse that method across the workforce and across interfaces; it is in pilot now with general availability in October 2026. Multi-Agent Orchestration routes work between specialised agents so that a job crossing roles, systems or stages of a customer journey is handled as one coordinated sequence, and it is generally available. Agent Optimizer assists teams through the agent lifecycle, covering construction and refinement of agents, subagents and actions, performance testing, and analysis of session traces to identify what to change; general availability is set for October 2026.

Multi-Agent Orchestration is the component with the widest implications, because coordination between agents is where interoperability questions surface. Routing inside one vendor’s platform is a solved problem in a way that routing between vendors is not, and the announcement describes the former.

Salesforce closed the release with a standard disclaimer that it may reference services or features still in development and unreleased, and that customers are directed to base purchase decisions on currently available functionality. Three items in the announcement carry future dates.

Measured against Salesforce’s own research

The most useful counterweight to a long-horizon runtime comes from Salesforce AI Research. Its CRMArena-Pro benchmark, published on June 10, 2025, found that leading language model agents succeeded in 58% of single-turn business tasks and 35% of multi-turn ones across 19 business tasks and 4,280 query instances. Workflow execution proved the most tractable skill, exceeding 83% in single-turn conditions, while confidentiality awareness was a consistent weakness across every model tested.

That study measured agents completing tasks inside a conversation. The runtime announced on September 11 extends the horizon to days and weeks, which multiplies the number of turns, tool calls and state transitions between instruction and outcome. Salesforce has not published an updated benchmark measuring long-horizon performance, and the release offers no error rate, no intervention rate and no figure for how often a plan is abandoned or corrected.

The wider evidence base is mixed in the same direction. Google Cloud’s survey of 3,466 senior business leaders found 88% of early adopters reporting positive return on agent deployments, a figure drawn from self-assessment rather than audited accounts. Marc Benioff said in July 2025 that agents were performing 30% to 50% of work inside Salesforce and resolving 85% of customer service inquiries, and the company has used its own operations as a proof site since.

What this changes for marketing and revenue teams

Two of the seven agents sit directly in marketing workflows. Piper occupies the inbound path, engaging traffic on a website and in an inbox, qualifying and converting it into pipeline. Carter occupies the commerce path, running product discovery and comparison and completing the purchase inside the conversation.

Carter is the more structurally interesting of the two, because in-chat checkout moves the conversion event off the product page and into a dialogue. That direction is not specific to Salesforce. Google set out the Universal Commerce Protocol at the National Retail Federation conference in January 2026, defining how agents discover a merchant’s catalogue, build carts and complete payment; Salesforce joined its Tech Council in April 2026 alongside Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Stripe. Adoption of that standard has lagged its endorsement list, with a scan in May 2026 finding 26 public sites carrying the required files out of more than three million checked. A conversion completed inside an agent conversation does not fire the same events as a checkout completed on a page, which leaves attribution and measurement to be rebuilt rather than reconfigured.

For service and support functions, the packaging argument is simple: prebuilt agents shorten the distance between purchase and deployment, and Salesforce cites deployment windows of six weeks for Hibbett and an average of 45 days for Piper. Those windows describe implementation, not payback.

The governance question is the one the release addresses least. Across the wider agentic advertising market, guardrails have become the current product cycle rather than an afterthought, with PubMatic shipping a five-component governance layer on August 5, 2026 that constrains what autonomous buying agents may do at the point of execution. Salesforce’s answer is Agent Script plus per-agent permission inheritance, which places control at the level of business rules rather than at the level of spend.

The timing is not incidental. Dreamforce 2026 runs from September 15 to 17 at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco under the theme of becoming an agentic enterprise, four days after this release. Salesforce has already announced Claudeforce with Anthropic, an arrangement disclosed on August 26, 2026 that put 37 prebuilt sales skills inside Claude for pilot customers and named Claude the default model across several Salesforce surfaces. The September 11 portfolio arrives as the applications layer of that architecture, and the pricing, packaging and edition structure attached to it were not part of the announcement.

Timeline

Summary

Who. Salesforce, with named customer deployments at Engine, Perk, Autism Queensland, Hibbett, Asana and Anthropic. Piper originated at Qualified, acquired in April 2026; Fin is Intercom, subject to a June 2026 acquisition agreement.

What. Seven prebuilt agents covering customer service (Casey), IT and HR service (Paige), shopping (Carter), outbound sales (Hunter), supply chain (Marshall), inbound pipeline generation (Piper) and customer experience workflows (Fin), plus a long-horizon runtime built on memory, durable execution and dynamic steering, and three platform additions: AI Skills, Multi-Agent Orchestration and Agent Optimizer.

When. Released September 11, 2026. Six agents generally available immediately; Hunter in pilot with general availability in November 2026; AI Skills and Agent Optimizer generally available in October 2026. Dreamforce follows on September 15 to 17, 2026.

Where. San Francisco, with agents operating across voice, SMS, WhatsApp, web chat, Slack, internal portals, websites and inboxes, connected to Customer 360.

Why. Salesforce is moving from selling an agent-building platform to selling configured agents for named jobs, backed by a volume metric it defines itself: 7 billion Agentic Work Units over two years and 3.2 billion in the second quarter, against 2.4 billion cumulative units disclosed in February 2026. The deployment statistics attached to each agent are vendor-supplied and carry no denominators, and the company’s own benchmark research still records a sharp drop in agent reliability once tasks run past a single turn.

By Luis Rijo

Luís Rijo has written PPC Land daily since founding it in 2016. Over 10,000 articles, funded by readers, no sponsored coverage. Tips and corrections: [email protected]

Sourced from PPC Land

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AI doesn’t reward scale. That changes everything for multicultural agencies.

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By Nita Song

For agencies that have always had to do more with less, the level playing field is finally here, writes Nita Song, president and chief momentum officer of IW Group.

For the first time in my 30-plus years in the agency space, a major technological shift is not rewarding scale.

A 10-person boutique agency and a 1,000-person holding company shop can access the same artificial intelligence platforms, generate the same research summaries, automate the same workflows and produce the same first drafts. The tools don’t know the difference.

That single fact should be reshaping how this industry thinks about where innovation, strategy and creative leadership will come from next.

For decades, advertising operated on a simple, unspoken rule: size wins. Bigger agencies had bigger production budgets, larger research teams, deeper infrastructure and more resources to absorb risk. Everyone else operated with a fraction of those advantages and were expected to deliver comparable — and often better — results.

AI changes that equation.

AI makes many things easier. Culture isn’t one of them

As AI adoption accelerates, many people assume the technology itself will become the competitive advantage. I think the opposite is true.The tools will become increasingly accessible. The differentiator will be what organizations know that the tools don’t.

Here’s what most people miss: AI is exceptionally good at looking backward. It learns from what already happened — what people clicked on, purchased, shared or responded to. Culture doesn’t move that way.

Culture is happening right now, in conversations, communities and experiences that haven’t made it into a dataset yet.

Multicultural agencies have never had the luxury of waiting for the data to catch up. They’ve always had to understand communities before they become trend reports. They’ve had to recognize shifts in behavior before they appear in dashboards.

A large-language model can summarize what Asian-American consumers purchased last quarter. It cannot tell you why a message resonates differently with a second-generation Chinese-American household in Los Angeles than it does with a first-generation Vietnamese-American household in Houston. AI cannot replace years of community relationships, cultural fluency and lived understanding.

That distinction matters because multicultural consumers don’t simply consume culture — they create it. Many of the trends, conversations and behaviors that eventually shape mainstream marketing begin in multicultural communities long before they reach the broader market.

Understanding those signals requires something technology alone cannot provide: proximity. That remains one of the greatest strengths multicultural agencies possess.

AI finally solves the economics problem

For years, multicultural agencies faced a frustrating challenge.

They knew the value they created, but the difficulty was proving that value in ways traditional marketing organizations, procurement teams and budget models could easily quantify. AI has the potential to change that.

Research that once required months of lead time can now happen in days. Campaign adaptation that previously required extensive production resources can now be scaled efficiently. Multi-versioning can deliver culturally nuanced creative across multiple audiences at a fraction of historical costs. Most importantly, measurement is evolving.

Advanced attribution models and AI-powered analytics are making it increasingly possible to isolate audience behavior, understand performance by segment and connect multicultural marketing efforts to business outcomes with greater precision than ever before.

For decades, multicultural agencies often had to argue for investment using incomplete measurement systems.

Now the measurement systems themselves are becoming smarter.

The result is not simply greater efficiency. It is greater visibility into the value multicultural marketing has always generated.

The opportunity is bigger than multicultural marketing

The future of marketing is becoming more fragmented, more personalized and more culturally nuanced. Brands increasingly need to speak to multiple audiences simultaneously, adapt messages across communities and create experiences that feel relevant at a deeply individual level.

That environment looks remarkably familiar to multicultural agencies.

We’ve been navigating multiple cultures, languages, identities and generations for years. We’ve been translating between communities, helping brands understand nuance and identifying emerging cultural shifts before they become mainstream.

What was once considered a specialty capability is becoming a core business requirement.

The real opportunity isn’t simply that multicultural agencies can compete more effectively.

It’s that the skills developed in multicultural marketing are increasingly becoming the skills required for all marketing.

The industry has spent years asking whether multicultural agencies are keeping up.

That has always been the wrong question.

The better question — and the one the AI era is now forcing everyone to confront — is whether the rest of the industry has been paying attention.

Because AI didn’t create this advantage.

It revealed one that was there all along

Feature image credit: Getty Images

By Nita Song

Sourced from MARKETINGDIVE

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‘Not testing will break you’ in commerce media’s agentic shopping age

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By Maria Greaves

Circana’s Cara Pratt and Lindsay Pullins unpack how AI, social commerce and agentic shopping are compressing the path to purchase, and why brands that stop experimenting risk disappearing from the buying journey completely.

“There’s an incredible amount of experimentation, and the cost of experimenting is decelerating. But the cost of not experimenting is significant,” says Cara Pratt, president of global retail and media at Circana, speaking alongside Lindsay Pullins, Circana’s senior vice president of retail media.

As AI transforms how products are discovered, evaluated, and bought, Pratt argues that brands can no longer afford to wait for the perfect strategy. The priority is understanding how machines interpret brands today, before AI agents begin making more purchasing decisions on consumers’ behalf.

Marketing to machines

As commerce becomes increasingly agentic, brands will need to persuade algorithms, not just people.

“The brand needs to be thinking about, how am I showing up, how is that AI system evaluating my product, what kind of reviews do I have, what kind of claims do I have, and is it crystal clear what the brand stands for?” says Pullins.

This means that clear product data, accurate taxonomies, trusted reviews and consistent brand signals will become as important as creative campaigns in determining which products AI recommends.

Experimentation alone isn’t enough

Pratt argues that success also depends on combining strong data foundations with speed, precision, and scale.

That means building feedback loops where brands can test, learn, and optimize continuously as AI reshapes consumer behaviour in real time.

The conversation also signalled a broader shift for retail media.

Rather than operating as another advertising channel, commerce media is evolving into a connected ecosystem where retailers, publishers, brands, and AI platforms share richer signals to drive both brand building and performance.

Watch the full conversation to learn how agentic commerce will reshape retail faster than many brands expect, how social commerce is rewriting the path to purchase, and what to do now.

By Maria Greaves

Sourced from The Drum

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