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As foundation models converge, the real advantage in agentic ad buying shifts to how richly publishers can describe their own inventory. Ask any vendor in the agentic landscape what makes their agent smart, and you’ll hear about models, reasoning and autonomy. That sounds great, but it’s the wrong end of the problem. Foundation models are converging in capability and collapsing in price. Intelligence is commoditized.

Backed by the founders of Lovable and Langdock, the Finnish startup says its AI can replace the entire CRM stack. The founders of European AI startups Lovable and Langdock are among the backers of a Finnish startup challenging customer relationship management giants Salesforce and HubSpot. Zero has secured a $10.3 million seed round led by New York-based Primary Venture Partners, with participation from Inception Fund, Defiant, Greens, and founders of Lovable, Supercell, Langdock and Silo AI.

Talkdesk for Stores connects in-store, digital, and contact center data, giving retailers a fuller view of every customer interaction. Talkdesk Inc. on Tuesday announced Talkdesk for Stores, bringing the physical store into the connected customer journey.

The company says its post-trained models cut AI costs by 10 times while matching frontier-level quality for marketing tasks. Optimizely, the AI platform for marketing, on Tuesday announced a family of purpose-built, post-trained AI models designed specifically for marketing work.

A new Net Conversion survey finds 54% of consumers trust brands less when ads look AI-made, even as most use AI to research purchases. Net Conversion, the Orlando-based impact media agency, on Tuesday released the second wave of its MORE Intelligence Consumer Pulse series, revealing a sharp split in how people accept artificial intelligence: enthusiastically as a shopping assistant, and skeptically when it creates advertising aimed at them.

Mailgun Inspect lets marketers preview how campaigns render across more than 100 inboxes and devices without leaving Salesforce. Sinch Mailgun, part of Sinch AB (publ), on Tuesday released a new integration for Agentforce Marketing that allows marketers to test how emails render across inboxes and devices without leaving Salesforce.

AI can produce an insight in seconds. Knowing who trusts it, who’s accountable for it, and who defends it later is the problem marketing hasn’t solved. Marketing teams have never had this much to work with. Customer data is richer, analytics tools are sharper, and AI capability is embedded in nearly every platform a marketing organization touches. By most measures, the industry should be more confident in its decisions than ever. Despite all that, confidence hasn’t followed.

With billable utilization at a historic low, the deal wagers that services firms’ real bottleneck isn’t finding AI tools, but trusting what they produce. Certinia, the leading global provider of AI-powered Professional Services Automation (PSA), announced the acquisition of Moonnox, an AI-native services delivery platform purpose-built for the professional services sector.

Months after handing out its president’s phone number, the chain is turning thousands of complaints into a new uniformed role and a money-back promise on its signature burger.

Uniting two Pittsburgh firms, the deal bets that in an industry drowning in media data, the real edge lies in decoding why the creative itself succeeds or fails. Brunner, an independent integrated marketing agency announced its acquisition of AdSkate, an AI-powered creative analytics and marketing intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies optimize advertising performance through advanced creative insights.