MartechView

The search bar is not where shopping starts anymore. Increasingly, it starts with a conversation — and the brands that are not showing up in those conversations are not losing ground gradually. They are disappearing from the consideration set entirely. Gap has become the first major fashion retailer to enable direct checkout inside Google Gemini platform. No redirect. No separate website. A shopper asks what to wear to a job interview, Gemini surfaces Gap products, and the transaction completes through Google Pay without the customer ever leaving the AI environment. The mechanics matter as much as the milestone. Gap is not letting Gemini scrape its website — it is providing curated product data directly, retaining control over accuracy, customer data, and the overall experience. That distinction separates a considered commerce strategy from a rushed integration. OpenAI tried something similar with Walmart and Etsy. It retreated. Google has moved more deliberately — real-time inventory data, multi-item carts, and a commerce protocol designed to give merchants genuine control rather than just discovery placement. "It's not just keyword search anymore — it's conversations," said Sven Gerjets, Gap's CTO. "All of those things we need to become relevant to." Agentic commerce is still early. The number of shoppers completing transactions inside AI platforms is small. But the direction is not in question. The retailers building the infrastructure for it now are not chasing a trend — they are positioning for the moment it becomes the default. Read the full story -- https://lnkd.in/ds_BT8Pe

Solaris SE has cut 20 percent of its workforce. The headline is the layoffs. The story is what they signal. Germany's most closely watched Banking-as-a-Service company is not trimming costs — it is making a structural bet that the next phase of financial infrastructure will be built around AI agents handling operational processes, not humans. New CEO Steffen Jentsch is calling it an "AI-native bank." The 80 people losing their jobs are the price of that repositioning. The context matters. Solaris has already survived a write-down, prior rounds of cuts, and a rescue funding round from Japan's SBI Group. This is not a company operating from a position of strength — it is a company that has concluded its existing model cannot get it where it needs to go, and is making an uncomfortable pivot before the window closes. "Ten years ago, Solaris was one of the first companies in Europe to prove that cloud-based banking via APIs works," Jentsch said. "Today, we are taking the next logical step." That framing is either visionary or optimistic, depending on what happens next. Regulatory scrutiny of AI in financial services is intensifying across Europe. Investor and partner confidence is still being rebuilt. And the question the broader fintech industry is now watching Solaris answer is a consequential one — can AI-native restructuring deliver what conventional digital banking transformation has repeatedly failed to achieve? The experiment has begun. The results will matter well beyond Berlin. Read the full story -- https://lnkd.in/dX2pNbbx

Every day, millions of small business owners are asking the same questions: why is cash tight this month, which invoices are overdue, can I afford to hire? Questions that should take seconds are taking hours — because the answers are buried across multiple reports, platforms, and spreadsheets that don't talk to each other. Xero and Anthropic's multi-year partnership is a direct attempt to fix that. Claude's reasoning capabilities are being embedded into Xero's platform, and Xero's live financial data is coming into Claude.ai — giving small business owners and their accountants real-time financial intelligence within a single environment, without switching between tools. The ambition is significant. JAX — Xero's AI superagent, now powered by Claude — will handle end-to-end financial tasks across accounting, payroll, and payments proactively, before the business owner thinks to ask. On the Claude.ai side, live revenue figures, profit margins, and outstanding invoices become inputs for scenario planning, hiring decisions, and year-end analysis. "This provides small businesses and their advisors with the kind of financial intelligence that used to require a dedicated analyst or CFO," said Chris Ciauri, Managing Director of International at Anthropic. For decades, that intelligence was a privilege of scale. This partnership is a bet that it doesn't have to be — and that the 10 million small businesses Xero serves are ready for an AI that doesn't just report what happened, but tells them what to do next. Read the full story -- https://lnkd.in/d4C_HVtH

The best technology is the technology no one notices. Before you log in, check your order, or receive that perfectly timed notification — a database has already queried, an API has already connected, an automation has already fired. A one-second delay in page load reduces conversions by 7%. A notification that arrives too late costs you the customer entirely. The margin between seamless and broken is measured in milliseconds. Yet most technology investment conversations still center on interfaces — what users see rather than what they feel. That is precisely backwards. 72% of users only engage with messages tailored to them. 40% expect a response within an hour. These aren't just UX statistics — they are backend infrastructure imperatives disguised as customer preferences. The companies quietly winning on customer experience aren't doing it with better design. They're doing it with better plumbing. A polished interface attracts a user. It is the backend that keeps them — and the backend that loses them, silently, before anyone thinks to ask why. Build accordingly. Read the full story by April Miller, in the comments.

Every large enterprise has the same dirty secret: the ERP system is digital, but the work around it isn't. Spreadsheets reconciling what the system missed. Email chains chasing approvals. Manual switches between platforms to collect evidence, manage exceptions, close the books. UiPath and Deloitte just launched Agentic ERP to go after exactly that layer — the patchwork of manual work that persists inside even the most digitally mature organizations, surrounding nominally modern systems like scar tissue around old injuries. The architecture is worth understanding: AI agents, robotic process automation and human workers coordinated across end-to-end workflows, with exceptions routed to the right people and high-volume execution handled autonomously. Model-agnostic, meaning enterprises bring their own LLM. Governance built in by design, not bolted on after. "The promise of ERP modernization isn't new — but the ability to orchestrate it is," said Jerry Hoberman, SAP offering leader at Deloitte. "Clients get a practical path to scale AI safely — model-agnostic intelligence, effective end-to-end orchestration and governance by design that turns AI from pilots into performance." That last phrase is the one to hold onto. Pilots into performance. Most enterprises are drowning in AI proof-of-concepts that never scale. The bet here is that orchestration — not the model — is where the real work gets done. Read the full story -- https://lnkd.in/ddAqhBng

The gap between a small business and an enterprise has never been about ambition. It's always been about infrastructure. Thryv just launched AI Lead Flow — a platform that automates the entire customer acquisition pipeline for small businesses, from the first Google search to a closed deal, across more than 50 industries. Visibility, lead scoring, intelligent routing, automated follow-ups. No manual handoff. No leads falling through the cracks. The problem it's solving is well-documented. The Federal Reserve's most recent Small Business Credit Survey found that 57% of small businesses cite reaching customers and growing sales as their top operational challenge. Not financing. Not hiring. Getting found and converting interest into revenue. "When marketing and sales software don't work together, leads get missed," said Rees Johnson, Thryv's Chief Product Officer. "For small businesses, missed leads are real lost revenue." The customer result worth noting: Ken Cook of The Prepared Group says his business went from being booked a week or two out to booked months in advance after deploying the platform. Large companies have had integrated marketing and sales infrastructure for years. The interesting question now is what happens to competitive dynamics in local markets when small businesses get access to the same stack. Read the full story -- https://lnkd.in/dRddTydU

SurveyMonkey's new national campaign asks one question — and it's the right one. "What if you just knew?" The campaign, built entirely by its in-house agency Studio M, doesn't sell software. It puts you inside the moments every leader recognizes: a bold product idea on the table, a team that seems off, a decision that needs to be made without enough information. Then it stops there — in the uncertainty — because that's exactly where the product lives. What makes the execution worth studying: Studio M ran surveys throughout the creative development process itself, testing messaging and validating placements before a single ad ran. One finding that shaped the campaign's direction — one in four workers say they are struggling or burned out — is precisely the kind of question most leaders are trying to answer without reliable data. "When you gather feedback before you launch something, you get a glimpse at your blind spots," said Katie Miserany, SurveyMonkey's Chief Communications Officer. "You don't have to be right, but you get a chance to get it right." That's a harder discipline than it sounds. Most brands launch first and listen later. This one listened first — and made the listening the story. Read the full story -- https://lnkd.in/d6cU2x7p

Google just rewired its advertising stack — and the implications for how brands reach consumers are significant. The company is integrating its Gemini AI models into Google Marketing Platform, shifting Display & Video 360 from a reactive buying tool into a predictive recommendation engine that curates media packages before campaigns even go live. Add a live sports bidding suite, privacy-preserving publisher matching, Kroger shopper audience activation, and an AI assistant that turns a media plan into a campaign setup automatically — and this is less a product update than a structural change to how programmatic advertising works. The number Google is leading with: advertisers who added another Google Marketing Platform product to their mix saw a 76% increase in return on ad spend. Whether that holds across industries and budgets will be the real test. But the direction of travel is clear — the manual labor of campaign management is being automated, and the platforms that move fastest will define the new baseline. The question for every marketing leader right now: is your team building for the workflow that's disappearing, or the one replacing it? Read the full story -- https://lnkd.in/dswQH8zg

OpenAI just hired a Meta advertising veteran to build its ads business — and the ambitions are not small. David Dugan, former VP of global clients and agencies at Meta, has been named VP of global advertising solutions at OpenAI, reporting directly to COO Brad Lightcap. His mandate: build a credible ad business around ChatGPT, which now claims more than 900 million weekly active users. Omnicom, WPP and dentsu are already in early conversations. The minimum buy-in for brands is $200,000. Dugan announced the move himself on LinkedIn, calling it "a brand new model that's going to reshape the industry" — and promising an ads experience "governed by clear principles" that adds rather than disrupts. That trust argument will be the hardest part. OpenAI has said ads will not influence ChatGPT's responses and that user conversations will not be sold to advertisers. Dugan's decade of agency and holding company relationships may matter as much as any product OpenAI builds — because in advertising, the pitch is only as strong as the person making it. The deeper story here isn't one hire. It's a pattern — OpenAI is systematically recruiting seasoned commercial operators from the platforms it intends to compete with. Read the full story -- https://lnkd.in/dh6iwQKT

Brand loyalty in the grocery aisle isn't eroding — it's collapsing. A new Zappi survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers finds that 70% now cite price or value as the top driver of their snack and beverage choices. Consumers buying only brand-name products have dropped from 21% to 10% in less than a year. More than 90% have changed their shopping behavior because of rising costs. 11% are now using buy now, pay later services to afford groceries. That last number should stop every CPG executive cold. "The era of growth driven by price increases is coming to an end," said Nataly Kelly, Zappi's CMO. "For CPG leaders to transform their businesses, they will need to compete on value instead of price, innovating and simplifying their product portfolios in the process." The data suggests the window for that pivot is narrowing fast. A 5% to 10% price increase is enough to deter the majority of buyers in beverages, sweet snacks and cosmetics. Nearly 70% of consumers say they would accept fewer product options in exchange for lower prices. This isn't a post-pandemic correction. It's a structural reset — and the brands still betting on loyalty to absorb their next price increase may be the last to realise it. Read the full story -- https://lnkd.in/dPAHPxek