The shift toward AI is not just about producing ads faster, it’s about giving creative capability to everyone, writes Amazon’s Nikhil Nanivadekar. AI tools can turn a difficult and expensive process into a streamlined, exciting new creative possibility, according to Amazon’s Nikhil Nanivadekar, principal engineer, consumer ad experiences at Amazon. Opinions are the author’s own.

Advertising has always celebrated creativity, but for many brands, it came with real constraints. Big ideas required big budgets, specialized teams and long production cycles. Speed was a luxury, and experimentation carried risk. For too many businesses, the gap between a great idea and a great ad felt impossibly wide.

Shifts in consumer behavior — specifically the desire for data privacy and instant, personalized recognition — and AI’s acceleration of the buying process are making traditional loyalty programs feel stale and pointless for brands and shoppers. Blanket discounts and traditional rewards aren’t what drive today’s consumers; they want value, relevance and trust in a brand. This is particularly true for Gen Z, who make purchase decisions faster and with purpose.

For years, enterprise brands built their digital commerce like impenetrable fortresses – custom, complex, and costly. These legacy e-commerce platform replacement systems, while once essential for stability, have become an existential liability – hindering agility, innovation, and your ability to meet modern consumer demands.

If crucial features take weeks to deploy, innovation is stalled by “upgrade fatigue” and you’re experiencing the symptoms of outdated infrastructure – this guide is for you, offering the definitive e-commerce migration strategy to transform your digital commerce operations and unleash unprecedented growth on Shopify.

TikTok is expanding the way advertisers can appear the moment users open the app, turning the platform’s launch page into a dedicated branded placement that advertisers can buy programmatically. The move, announced in recent industry briefings and visible in pilot campaigns this month, adds to existing ad formats such as TopView and Brand Takeover and aims to make the opening screen a predictable space for high-impact mobile ads. For marketers, the update promises greater brand visibility at scale; for users, it raises fresh questions about feed experience and early-session user engagement. The change arrives as platforms rework monetization levers across short-form video, and it immediately reshapes options for major advertisers — from global apparel groups to DTC brands — seeking guaranteed impressions in the first seconds of app use.

Consumers increasingly tap agentic AI to shop, but brand trust remains strongest in physical stores. Quad/Graphics, a marketing experience company that solves complex marketing challenges for its clients, and The Harris Poll today announced the results of a new national survey revealing widespread consumer distrust for sponsored results in agentic AI shopping platforms.

The new rules of retail trust in the age of AI survey, a continuation of the 2025 “Return of Touch” report, indicates that price-conscious consumers are using AI for convenience and to reduce uncertainty in a rapidly changing shopping landscape but still have concerns about trust and data transparency. According to the research, shoppers continue to have high confidence in in-store experiences, especially regarding item quality and pricing.

Evan Shapiro teams up with Precisify to tackle the attention economy. Our new cross-generational research report breaks down media habits across Gen Z and Millennials in the US. Get the exclusive data and expert analysis you need to cut through the noise.

Fragmentation across platforms is now the norm, what this report makes clear is that while Gen Z and Millennials may diverge in where they spend incremental time, YouTube remains the shared ecosystem where efficient, scaled cross-generational reach still exists. For advertisers, that’s incredibly important because it provides a consistent foundation for modern media planning.

Furniture retail is entering a pivotal year. Tariffs, sluggish demand, and rising content costs are putting pressure on margins. Discounting alone won’t move buyers in 2026 — trust and visual clarity will. Photorealistic visualization, real-time configuration, and AI-generated content are now primary conversion levers. The brands gaining share are turning PDPs into digital showrooms: rotating products, configuring options instantly, and placing furniture in real spaces through AR.

This survey report reveals that while organizations understand the importance of last mile delivery, operational transformation still hasn’t followed. The last mile has changed, but many organizations are still treating last-mile delivery as a cost center, tracking metrics like cost per delivery, carrier rates, and route efficiency without considering the customer experience. 

It’s an approach that doesn’t reflect reality. For many customers, delivery is now the only part of the supply chain they actually experience—and it directly shapes whether they return.