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.
Contentstack released a September 2026 update to its Assets add-on introducing AI-generated metadata, background duplicate-image detection and a new self-service subscription model, alongside headless CMS improvements covering bulk operations, multi-provider SSO and an API behavior change.
CMSWire argues that AI-driven content generation has expanded the pool of potential brand creators to "effectively unlimited" scale, forcing organizations to shift governance from reviewing finished outputs to controlling the data, rules, and sources that AI systems draw from — a model it calls "AI-native governance."
Multiple industry surveys show a widening gap between the mandate handed to customer experience leaders to deploy AI and the decision-making authority they actually hold, with Gartner, Grant Thornton and Deloitte data pointing to fragmented ownership, weak governance readiness and customer outcomes left undefended.
Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, Opella and BetMGM are among a growing tier of advertisers building in-house AI creative teams to mass-produce digital assets, reporting dramatic output gains while exercising selective guardrails on automated content.
Amazon Business has unveiled "Amazon Business Deals," a tool enabling third-party sellers to create volume and tailored offers for corporate customers. Announced at the Amazon Accelerate event in Seattle, the feature targets the platform's 11 million business customers — ranging from small shops to Fortune 100 companies — and focuses on high-spend categories including IT, office supplies, and maintenance and repair.
Stagwell's chief AI officer John Kahan has outlined how the challenger holding company is using Palantir's platform-agnostic data infrastructure and Harvard-certified differential privacy to build an AI-powered marketing platform it says outflanks competitors on flexibility and data protection.
Akamai Technologies has announced an $11.6 billion, seven-year contractual commitment with Anthropic to support the AI company's CPU workload demands using Akamai Cloud's distributed AI infrastructure and software. The deal includes a warrant granting Anthropic the right to acquire up to approximately 5% of Akamai's common stock and is expected to require around $5.5 billion in capital expenditures.
UserTesting has announced the availability of Model Context Protocol (MCP) Servers for its UserTesting and User Interviews platforms, enabling product, design, UX, and research teams to recruit participants, run studies, and retrieve customer feedback without leaving AI applications such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Figma Make. The combined participant network spans more than seven million people across 34 countries. Both servers are currently available in Early Access.
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.
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 Forrester-sourced analysis published on CustomerThink argues that AI agents are triggering the most significant transformation in business software since cloud computing, introducing what researchers call an "agentic business fabric" that replaces human-navigated systems of record with AI-orchestrated workflows — while warning that back-office systems face far steeper governance hurdles before autonomous execution can be trusted.
