FutureWeek

“FYI: the jobs women hold are 3x more likely to be automated by AI, yet women are using AI at a rate 25 percent lower than men on average. We don’t want to be left behind.” The actor Reese Witherspoon’s AI intervention drew lots of attention – both from those who support her sentiment, and those diametrically opposed to embracing the role of AI. For me, there’s no doubt that her point made waves precisely because she’s right.

Meta Launches Business Agent Platform Meta has launched Meta Business Agent, a global initiative to transform enterprise workflows. Announced at Meta’s Conversations 2026 conference in London, this suite of AI-powered business agents rolls out across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, allowing brands to deploy conversational AI that can answer customer queries, recommend products, and complete purchases directly within Meta’s apps.

According to Salesforce’s Connected Shoppers Report, 43 percent of retailers are actively piloting autonomous AI agents. As brands prepare for a world where consumers use AI agents to discover and shop for products, a race to understand what that means for the consumer relationship is taking place. For decades, brands owned the consumer experience. The information they would get from ad clicks, browsing behaviour, and transaction data all historically informed retail marketing.

For the past two years, the creative industry has been fixated on the “one-to-one” output of GenAI—the ability to turn a single prompt into a single asset. While impressive, this focus has largely ignored the systemic friction of the creative process. We have essentially given artists faster paintbrushes without addressing the structural weight of the workflow itself. The next frontier isn’t about better generation; it is about Agentic AI.

Walmart, Yahoo and Magnite Push Further Into AI-Powered Ad Tech Ad Age reported that Walmart, Yahoo and Magnite each unveiled new AI-driven advertising capabilities aimed at automating how media is packaged, bought and optimised. Walmart is expanding AI tools within its retail media business to help advertisers plan and activate campaigns more efficiently. Yahoo is incorporating AI agents and automation into its DSP and advertising platform to streamline campaign management and decision-making.

In this episode of The FutureWeek Podcast, host Serena Haththotuwa, Senior Reporter at FutureWeek, is joined by Phil Rowley, Head of Futures at Omnicom Media Group UK. The pair dive into OMG UK’s “Destination AI” report, exploring how AI is set to transform the travel industry ‘from search bar to sun lounger’.

For too long, brands have been forced to choose sides. When it comes to identifying and reaching audiences online, two approaches have dominated the debate: probabilistic and deterministic – and marketers have been divided ever since. The probabilistic approach uses signals including device attributes, browser behaviour, location patterns, and network data to assign likelihood scores for inferring whether different interactions belong to the same person.

In some cases, ads are appearing alongside AI slop – low-quality, mass produced, GenAI images and videos – raising new questions about brand safety and the potential consequences of appearing alongside inappropriate user-generated content. Misinformation or fake content can quickly damage brand credibility if an ad appears beside it. This has always been the case for content misaligned with ads.

Google Rewrites Search Ads for the AI Era at Marketing Live Google used its Marketing Live summit to unveil a wide-ranging suite of advertising and commerce products designed to better align brand experiences with a more conversational era for search. A new unified entry point called Ask Advisor will allow marketers to draw on data from Google Ads, Analytics, Merchant Center, and Google Marketing Platform in a single workflow — launching later this year.

At the Interactive Advertising Bureau UK’s (IAB UK) inaugural AI Growth Summit in London, Vaz told Shruti Dube, UK Country Director at Meta in a fireside chat, that organisations must accept new ways of working to achieve effective AI transformation.