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.
New LinkedIn research finds 88% of Australian B2B marketers believe their company's future growth depends on engaging Gen Z and Millennial decision-makers, as LinkedIn platform data shows those generations now hold 48% of Australian leadership roles — up from 35% in 2016. The study points to expert-voice content and trusted professional networks as the most effective strategies for reaching younger buyers, while credibility is increasingly rated above visibility as AI reshapes brand discovery.
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.
Microsoft is moving its communications team out of marketing and into the Corporate, External and Legal Affairs organization led by vice chair and president Brad Smith, placing reputation management alongside legal, regulatory and government-relations functions. Brent Colburn will serve as interim communications leader while Microsoft searches for a new chief communications officer, and CEO Satya Nadella is urging more employees and executives to become public voices for the company.
Darkroom, an AI-native growth marketing agency, has launched Shadow — an AI workspace it built and used internally for six months — into public beta. The tool connects a brand's commerce and marketing data into a shared brand library and enables human-AI collaboration in multiplayer threads, with plans starting at $120 per month.
Demandbase has introduced Mojo, an AI agent designed to convert a stated B2B marketing strategy into a live, cross-channel campaign and continuously refine execution based on performance signals, marking a shift from task-specific AI tools toward fully agentic campaign management.
Senior HR executives at ITC Hotels, Raymond, and DCB Bank argue that employees should be encouraged to build personal brands alongside their corporate roles, but only within clear governance frameworks that protect organisational reputation and confidential information.
Nkateko Khosa, Business Unit Director at BOLD, argues that executives and their communications teams have fallen into a "thought leadership trap" by prioritising safe, consensus-driven content over genuine insight — rendering most of what they publish invisible to the audiences they seek to influence.
Nestlé has appointed WPP to design and operate a centralized AI-driven content operating model across its Greater China brand portfolio, targeting production of more than 35,000 content pieces annually and connecting social, commerce, media and production through a single orchestration layer powered by WPP Open | China.
Conversational AI tools are fragmenting the traditional retail search journey, forcing brands to rethink how they structure product data, create content, and measure visibility. Experts say success now hinges on verified product knowledge graphs, schema markup, and cross-functional teams — not keyword density and backlinks.
Content creators and their agencies are adding answer engine optimization (AEO) and AI search visibility to brand pitches, as conversational AI platforms become a new channel for product discovery. Industry figures from Tinuiti, Deloitte Digital, IZEA, Collectively, and IAB UK say measurement standards are still nascent but interest is growing fast.
Google, Cloudflare, and Microsoft are each piloting distinct systems to compensate publishers whose content powers AI-generated responses, but the three approaches differ significantly in how value is defined, what controls site owners hold, and how transparent the resulting data is.
