Fisher & Paykel's chief digital officer Rudi Khoury says customers are already using GPT-style tools as research interfaces, pushing the appliance company to treat AI as a marketing and discovery problem, not just a customer-service efficiency tool. The company's Agentforce-based service agent and broader roadmap reflect a view that discovery, service and conversion are converging inside conversational AI environments.
Jon Miller, co-founder of Marketo, and Nick Bonfiglio, Marketo's former EVP of Global Product, launched Phave on September 23, 2026 — a marketing automation platform whose AI engine, Maestro, sequences marketing touches for individuals, accounts, and buying groups rather than relying on fixed rule-based journeys. Priced at $36,000 per year, Phave positions itself as a direct replacement for Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot, and Eloqua.
Phave, a new B2B marketing automation platform co-founded by Marketo creator Jon Miller, emerged from stealth on September 23, 2026, offering an AI-native system that selects the next best marketing touch for each buyer rather than following static rules. The product reached general availability in August and starts at $36,000 per year. Customer claims and vendor benchmarks remain unverified by independent sources.
Iterable has unveiled a major Fall Product Release adding native RCS messaging, Nova Conversations, an Integrations Hub, and new Nova Intelligence Agents to its AI customer engagement platform. The company says the update is designed to connect fragmented customer data across the marketing stack and create a continuous intelligence loop in which every interaction informs the next.
Enterprise digital visibility company Conductor has appointed Wei Zheng as Chief Executive Officer, promoting her from her previous role as Chief Product Officer. The move comes as Conductor deepens its focus on Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) amid the growing influence of AI on how consumers discover and evaluate brands.
HubSpot's chief marketing officer and a senior growth executive say the inbound marketing model they helped create is no longer fit for purpose, citing a loss of 5 million blog visits in a single month and a 37% rise in AI-driven search as evidence. Writing in Fortune, Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan argue that AI answer engines have shattered the traditional buyer funnel and call for a full organisational transformation built around a new "Loop Marketing" framework.
A joint analysis by WARC, LinkedIn and LIONS Advisory, building on earlier research by LinkedIn and Bain & Company, argues that B2B brands must move beyond visibility to build verifiable "Buyability" signals — a shift made more urgent as large language models take a growing role in the purchasing journey. An examination of 700 B2B campaigns found that those with high Buyability scores were significantly more likely to report improvements in ROI and incremental revenue.
A webinar hosted by Go Fish Digital and OpenAI outlined the distinct roles of paid ChatGPT ads and earned generative engine optimization (GEO) visibility, explaining how to measure brand presence in AI-generated answers and why website evidence must come first.
Generative and agentic AI is shifting ecommerce from self-serve search funnels to continuous, natural-language shopping conversations, with data from Adobe, Shopify, and Amazon pointing to rapid consumer adoption, according to a Martech360 analysis published 24 September 2026.
A Sprout Social survey of 2,286 consumers across the US, UK and Australia finds that more than half plan to reduce holiday spending amid tariff concerns and rising prices, while social media has emerged as a top destination for gift discovery and customer service throughout the shopping journey.
VML's 10th annual Future Shopper report finds that while 82% of consumers have used AI, shoppers remain cautious about autonomous AI purchasing and increasingly distrust AI-generated content, even as businesses accelerate AI adoption. Economic pressure is reinforcing a focus on price, trust, and seamless experience.
NoimosAI, developed by AGOS LABS TECHNOLOGIES LTD, has introduced a Customer Engagement Agent that allows marketers to describe campaign goals in plain language and have the AI automatically generate behavior-based engagement flows, covering segmentation, email content, branching logic, and performance tracking.
