AI News

This problem has plagued sales and marketing organizations for as long as these functions have existed. Companies invest massive amounts in martech stacks and sales databases, only to see them underperform—not because of the technology itself, but due to poor input. Specifically, the issue is qualified, highly engaged contacts held tightly—like clutched pearls—by the sales […]

AI has been changing the way users search for and interact with information, as well as how they discover and engage with brands. Today, users increasingly rely on generative AI systems, including AI summaries and LLM chatbots, to learn about brands and related information. As a result, brand perception is easily shaped by these systems,

Salesforce is moving beyond simple generative tools with a major upgrade to Slack’s signature assistant — now a true AI-powered work agent that could change how marketers and cross-functional teams get work done. The rebuilt Slackbot, now generally available to Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, taps into your actual Slack conversational data to answer questions, organize

AI is forcing digital experience platforms (DXPs) to do more than deliver content. It is making them become intelligent systems that can understand user intent, evaluate context, and in many cases, act autonomously on behalf of the brand. That raises the stakes for accuracy, trust and governance. As enterprises adopt agentic architectures, MCP and A2A

It’s January. The budget is set, campaigns are in motion and teams are executing the plan you spent months building and defending. You think you have a solid approach, and then management asks tough questions: How are you driving impact? How do we know we are delivering incrementality? Are we sure it’s working, and why?

In MarTech’s “MarTechBot explains it all” feature, we pose a question about marketing to our very own MarTechBot, which is trained on the MarTech website archives and has access to the broader internet. Q: What’s the difference between visible and invisible AI in customer experience, and how can marketers ensure seamless transitions between the two?

Shopify announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) yesterday, an open standard co-developed with Google that lets AI agents connect directly to merchants and complete transactions. Alongside the protocol, Shopify is rolling out native commerce experiences across major AI platforms, including Google’s AI Mode in Search, the Gemini app, Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT — all managed

About five years ago, I was asked to evaluate whether my company should build a customer data platform (CDP). The market pressure was intense, and clients kept asking us to integrate with the platforms they were buying. It was tempting to follow the trend.  But after digging into the use cases, the economics and the

Dirty data damaged marketing — not because it was messy or incomplete, but because it trained systems to misunderstand people with confidence. Partial signals were treated as truth. Inference replaced intent. Surveillance masqueraded as insight. And an entire economy was built on the comforting lie that activity equals meaning. Clean data makes something different possible.

AI is everywhere in marketing and customer experience. It’s writing emails, answering questions, generating social content and guiding product recommendations. But as automation scales, something else is becoming more valuable — something AI can’t replicate. Human connection. In 2026, the brands that win attention and trust won’t be the ones that automate the most. They’ll