Chief Marketing Officer Stacey McCormick shares insights on Aerie's commitment to authenticity by pledging not to use AI-generated bodies in their marketing materials. The brand is actively promoting this initiative through its October campaign featuring Pamela Anderson to raise awareness about the importance of real representation.

WARC reports that if the energy crisis continues, global advertising growth could see a significant setback. In a worst-case scenario, marketers might lose up to 4.2 percentage points of projected growth in 2026, as they face increasing pressure to maintain already slim profit margins.

Aleksandar Savic

Morningstar has grown significantly over two decades, evolving from a mutual fund rating company into a global financial services leader with a tenfold increase in revenue and profits by 2025. CEO Kunal Kapoor attributes this success to a strong corporate culture centered on relentless execution. Through an analysis of employee feedback on Glassdoor, Morningstar stands out for its positive culture and commitment to core values. Kapoor emphasizes three key principles behind this execution:

1. Decentralizing decision-making to foster ownership by pushing accountability to business units, reinforcing this with performance-based compensation and organizational design.

2. Using transparent Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to create open communication about challenges and progress, enabling early course corrections and candid feedback.

3. Instilling urgency and ambitious goal-setting to prevent complacency, encouraging teams to move quickly and stretch toward challenging yet achievable long-term plans without fear of penalization for missed stretch targets.

Kapoor’s leadership style highlights disciplined follow-through and a culture that values ownership, transparency, and rapid execution to sustain Morningstar’s growth and innovation.

The enterprise voice AI sector is rapidly evolving with major players pushing innovations. Mistral AI, based in Paris, just introduced Voxtral TTS, an open-weight text-to-speech model designed for enterprise use, distinctively allowing companies to download and run it independently without relying on third-party services. This contrasts with the proprietary subscription models of competitors, such as ElevenLabs. Voxtral TTS features a compact 3.4-billion-parameter architecture, achieving six times real-time speech speed, supporting nine languages, and excelling in custom voice adaptation, including zero-shot multilingual capabilities. Independent tests show a preference for Voxtral over ElevenLabs voices in customization tasks. Mistral's approach emphasizes ownership and control over voice AI, addressing data sovereignty concerns especially relevant in Europe. Voxtral TTS completes Mistral's enterprise AI stack, enabling seamless voice-agent applications across industries. The company plans to expand language and dialect support while advancing towards fully end-to-end audio understanding models, aiming to deliver richly expressive, efficient, and controllable AI-driven voice interfaces.

Intercom, a well-established customer service platform, recently unveiled Fin Apex 1.0, an AI model specifically designed to enhance customer support. This model reportedly outperforms leading AI models like GPT-5.4 and Claude Sonnet 4.6, achieving a 73.1% resolution rate in customer issues without human intervention, which surpasses its competitors by about 2%. Besides accuracy, Fin Apex is faster and reduces hallucinations significantly compared to others. Uniquely, it operates at about one-fifth the cost of typical frontier models and integrates seamlessly into Intercom's existing pricing structure. Although Intercom has withheld details on the base model used, citing strategic reasons and plans for evolution, the firm emphasizes that their key advantage lies in post-training on proprietary customer data. This approach tailors the AI to meet specific domain needs, enhancing its effectiveness. The company also highlights the model's role in drastically improving customer experience, shifting the focus from cost savings to quality interactions. As Fin grows rapidly, expected to make up half of Intercom’s revenue soon, the model currently powers over two million weekly customer interactions and is exclusive to Intercom’s services, not available for independent licensing or API use. Intercom plans to expand the use of Fin Apex into sales and marketing sectors, competing directly with solutions like Salesforce's AI agent initiatives.

Lowe's is leveraging AI technology to enhance the shopping experience for customers while providing employees with tools to navigate complex inquiries more effectively.

Job searching today has become tougher, especially for white-collar roles, as companies hold onto current staff and hiring slows down. Automated hiring systems make applying easy but also increase competition, with recruiters facing many more applications than before. AI can be a valuable tool here—to refine résumés, personalize cover letters by analyzing company data, and prepare for interviews through mock questions. However, experts caution against using generic AI-driven résumés that look similar and discourage tricks like hidden keywords to bypass automated screening. Candidates should also be honest and authentic since AI usage guidelines are emerging. Using AI to practice interview responses is helpful, but relying on it to cheat during remote interviews is easily spotted and frowned upon. Job seekers should prepare for AI-conducted initial interviews, which are becoming more common and offer a fair screening process. Beware of AI-powered job scams that trick applicants with fake offers; always verify jobs through official company channels. Employers, in turn, are increasing identity checks to avoid hiring fraudulent candidates. Understanding how to ethically and effectively leverage AI can give applicants a competitive edge in today's challenging job market.

There is a significant and overlooked opportunity in marketing to empty nester women, currently numbering around 35 million in the U.S., many of whom are single. This group is not retreating but actively embracing new activities with time, money, and motivation. Historically overlooked or approached merely for spending growth, the true potential lies in addressing systemic market failures that have underestimated women, especially single empty nesters. Instead of validation, these women seek acknowledgment through brands that dismantle barriers such as the 'single supplement' in travel, which unfairly charges more for solo lodging. Empty nester women also remain key influencers in multi-generational family dynamics, often managing and funding activities for adult children and grandchildren. Their lifestyle is marked by vitality and empowerment rather than vanity, as many launch businesses and lead trends. Brands that take time to understand their needs and design inclusively can unlock wider markets, as seen with QVC’s success targeting this demographic through tailored strategies. To truly tap into this vast market, marketers must shift their focus from traditional demographics to genuinely solving the real-world challenges faced by empty nester women, recognizing their value beyond age or wallet size.

Walmart encountered some hurdles with its ChatGPT pilot, but remains committed to integrating AI-driven solutions in its shopping experience.

Many talented individuals in your organization might unknowingly be contributing to a critical vulnerability, impacting team morale and giving your rivals an edge.