This week, major advertisers highlighted their media effectiveness initiatives during quarterly earnings calls with analysts and shareholders, signaling a notable shift in how executive leadership views advertising investments.
Across China, workers worry about AI's growing influence on job security amid a fragile labor market. In Wuhan, a recent issue with driverless taxis called Apollo Go caused significant disruptions when a system glitch left passengers stranded for hours. These AI-powered robotaxis were subsequently suspended for an extended investigation.
The labor force saw its largest one-month decline in prime-age participation since 1976, excluding the impact of the pandemic, with nearly 720,000 individuals stopping work or job seeking during this period.
Marketing capabilities—comprising the essential skills, processes, and organizational knowledge that drive customer-related initiatives and adaptability—are widely considered crucial for business success. However, the rapid integration of AI technology is reshaping marketing practices, particularly in content creation, customer targeting, and performance measurement, introducing new roles such as managing generative engine optimization (GEO).
For 18 years, The CMO Survey has tracked marketing trends, and its latest 2026 edition, which gathered input from 308 U.S. marketing leaders, reveals troubling insights. Marketing requirements are evolving faster than ever due to AI, yet marketing teams are struggling to build and sustain the necessary capabilities. This disconnect presents a paradox: companies acknowledge the importance of training and hiring to develop marketing skills but are consistently cutting budgets and headcount, undermining their own progress.
Despite recognizing agility as a key success factor, marketing teams excel more at responding to immediate challenges than at investing in the capabilities that would enable smoother, more strategic responses in the future. Seven core obstacles fuel this paradox, including a widening gap between technology adoption and the ability to use it effectively, a strong present-focused mindset that leaves little room for future planning, weak partnerships with CFOs limiting investment, and a persistent preference for building capabilities internally even as resources dwindle.
AI adoption in marketing is rapidly increasing, but organizational readiness lags behind, exacerbating capability deficits. Moreover, marketers often justify capability investments solely by short-term ROI, ignoring their long-term strategic benefits such as competitive differentiation and talent retention. The resulting vicious cycle of underinvestment restricts marketing's ability to prove value, further weakening executive support.
To address these challenges, companies must protect capability investments from short-term budget cuts, reframe them as strategic assets critical to competitive advantage, and reconsider the internal build-only mindset by embracing external partnerships where beneficial.
Ultimately, the marketing capability dilemma reflects a strategic failure to invest in the very strengths that drive lasting business results. In an era defined by AI-driven transformation, overcoming this paradox is essential for maintaining competitive leadership and organizational resilience.
Microsoft executive VP Jay Parikh has instructed employees via an internal email to limit their AI token consumption, stating that “tokenmaxxing is not our goal.” Reported by 404 Media, the email also announces that Microsoft has shifted its default internal AI model to a more cost-effective version from OpenAI. This move is part of a broader effort to manage AI resource usage and establish budgets at the division level within the company.
Deel, the global HR and payroll platform, has acquired Israeli AI cybersecurity firm Clarity, specializing in real-time deepfake detection and identity verification. The acquisition, valued between $45 million and $50 million in cash and shares, marks Deel’s 15th purchase and its entry into the Israeli market. This strategic move addresses the rising challenge of fake hires by enhancing trust and security in remote hiring processes.
Knowing the right moment to step down is an essential aspect of strong leadership.
Sustainability expectations are rapidly evolving as stakeholders demand more transparency and meaningful progress. The challenge lies in telling a sustainability story that is not only clear and credible but also distinct and reflective of real business operations. It’s about embedding sustainability deeply into business strategy, operations, and decision-making to showcase it as a true business value driver. Trust is essential, and companies must avoid generic, unfocused narratives by concentrating on material issues that align with their core business. Effective storytelling highlights genuine impact, supported by concrete plans and straightforward communication.
Sustainability drives business value through operational efficiencies like reducing energy and waste, which lower costs, and by unlocking new growth opportunities such as innovative revenue streams. Many organizations are now adopting a “back to basics” approach by focusing on achievable commitments that truly matter to their operations. For example, combining sustainability strategies after acquisitions helps create unified, simpler stories that link environmental initiatives with financial benefits. Key recommendations include focusing on fewer, credible commitments, differentiating your story to reflect your unique business, and simplifying messaging to enhance clarity. Ultimately, effective sustainability communication builds long-term resilience by aligning ambition with action.
Enterprise teams often struggle with AI chatbots that fail to retain context across users or track long-term effectiveness. At VB Transform 2026, Asana's CPO Arnab Bose revealed their solution: Agentic Work Management (AWM), an AI operating system designed to function as cooperative teammates integrated with human workflows. Built on Asana’s 18-year-old Work Graph—a dynamic database mapping tasks, projects, portfolios, and company goals—AWM allows AI agents to share memory and update project statuses collaboratively across the organization.
To protect sensitive information, Asana developed strict access controls ensuring confidential projects remain secure and their details inaccessible to unauthorized users. AWM also employs dynamic model routing that assigns AI tasks to appropriate models based on complexity, optimizing efficiency and cost predictability by charging a flat rate per task.
Unlike typical stateless chatbots, AWM records metadata from completed tasks to create persistent workflows that benefit multiple users. Early adopters like CoreWeave have streamlined product launches by automating task assignment and bottleneck detection, freeing humans to focus on strategic decisions.
Despite competition from AI model providers offering their own agent products, Asana leverages extensive workflow experience and industry-specific procedures to deliver a deeply integrated, scalable system suited for enterprise use.
Since early 2025, some organizations, influenced by the current U.S. administration, have dismissed earlier commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), claiming their hiring practices are now purely meritocratic. However, portraying DEI and merit as opposites ignores that abandoning DEI doesn’t guarantee merit-based hiring. Effective DEI practices expand recruitment beyond traditional networks without replacing talent assessment with demographic criteria. In reality, merit-based hiring is often elusive and filled with errors, despite good intentions. "Merit" in hiring is actually about validity—selection methods must be proven job-related by scientific standards. Many commonly used criteria like educational requirements, years of experience, or subjective impressions often lack validity and favor majority groups, creating a "merit mirage." True merit requires using validated, standardized assessments, but many managers rely too much on intuition and unstructured interviews, which are less effective. Additionally, valid assessments may lack face validity, leading to skepticism, which can hinder their adoption despite their effectiveness in promoting diversity and merit simultaneously. Leaders should invest in HR expertise, embrace empirically supported methods, and understand that diversity and merit are not mutually exclusive but can coexist to strengthen hiring outcomes.
