CMOtech Asia

Your CEO wants more coverage. Your team wants to know whether AI will take their jobs. Your audience wants to know whether anything your company says is true. And the monthly report says impressions are up. This is the uncomfortable position PR finds itself in. We have extraordinary new tools for producing messages, just as the authority of the people delivering them is being questioned. The trust problem is real, although it needs describing accurately.

I hear a version of this conversation in almost every agency I work with these days. Someone points out how much faster everything moves now – research that used to take a junior half a day gets done by a tool in seconds, media lists that took an afternoon to build by hand now build themselves, a first draft of a press release appears before you've finished your coffee–everyone nods. On paper, this is the epitome of efficiency. It isn't.

Hotel Des Arts Saigon reported a 21.6% increase in revenue per available room after adopting the IDeaS G3 Revenue Management System. In its first year with the system, the hotel also recorded a 13.5% improvement in Revenue Generation Index. The Ho Chi Minh City hotel introduced the software to respond more quickly to changes in demand, pricing opportunities and inventory pressures in a market where booking patterns can shift rapidly.

YouTube has introduced a new set of creator and discovery tools across its platform, spanning video editing, content recommendations, live features and identity protection. More than 20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube each day, as the platform outlined changes aimed at both viewers and creators. The announcements cover how users find content, how creators make and test videos, and how they manage audience interaction.

Cloudinary has published a global retail survey on visual commerce trends, covering 539 retailers across 14 countries. The findings suggest retailers are trying to meet a wide range of consumer demands at once, with no single priority dominating decision-making. Mobile shopping was cited by 43% of respondents as a top buyer trend, followed by high-volume video at 42%, social commerce at 39%, hyper-personalisation at 35%, sustainable production at 26% and omnichannel experiences at 25%.

Firmable has published research showing that most B2B sales professionals would choose accurate prospect data over an AI sales assistant. The survey also found that respondents believe nearly a third of CRM data is flawed. The study of 222 B2B sales professionals found that 75% would prefer perfect prospect data to what was described as the best AI sales assistant on the market.

Starbucks and Alipay Ah Bao have launched an AI-based "Coffee Alarm Clock" service for consumers in China, marking a new consumer service partnership between the coffee chain and Alipay's AI agent platform. The feature lets users set a recurring Starbucks order in the Alipay app with a voice request to Ah Bao, Alipay's AI agent. A customer can ask the system to buy a drink at a set time each day.

Adyen has launched an upgraded version of Authenticate, part of its Adyen Uplift payments optimisation suite. The update routes each transaction in real time to the best-performing authentication method, while adjusting the data sent to issuers to improve approval rates. Authentication remains a persistent challenge in online payments.

SiteMinder has launched its Dynamic Commerce Engine for hotels, a system intended to address what it describes as an execution gap in hotel distribution. The product is designed to identify and act on optimisation opportunities across pricing and distribution, with hotel users required to approve each proposed change before it is carried out.

Adobe has released its Premiere mobile video editing app for Android. The free app expands Adobe's mobile editing offering beyond iPhone. Premiere mobile is now available on Android devices running Android 13 or later with at least 5GB of RAM. It is designed for Android hardware, including foldable phones, and features an adaptive user interface. Positioned as a simplified version of Adobe's established video editing software, Premiere mobile is aimed at creators producing content on smartphones.