Welcome to Week In Review
From new tools transforming creative work, to campaigns reshaped by automation, we track the biggest shifts at the intersection of AI, media, and marketing. This week, the CEO of French publication Le Monde urges publishers to sign AI licensing agreements, Tesco tests an AI shopping assistant, and Microsoft and Publicis Groupe tighten ties to boost agentic AI.
Top Stories of the Week
Le Monde CEO Urges Publishers to Strike Licensing Deals
In an interview with Press Gazette, the CEO of major French publication Le Monde Louis Dreyfus urged publishers to sign content licensing deals with AI companies to stay relevant and ensure competition in journalism. This comes after the newspaper has reportedly seen “significant” new revenue from AI partnerships with OpenAI, Meta and Perplexity.
Why it matters: The licensing deals enable these AI companies to train their models with Le Monde’s content in exchange for compensation. Dreyfus claims that when Le Monde’s stories appear on ChatGPT, they convert to paid subscriptions 20 times more than the same stories on Facebook, and 50 times more than on Google Discover. This news paints a new picture about the relationship between AI companies and publishers – one that had previously been characterised by publishers being at the mercy of AI companies scraping their content for little gain.
Tesco Tests AI Shopping Assistant
Tesco revealed its testing an AI shopping assistant in its app that will help customers plan meals and find relevant products to purchase. The supermarket giant revealed the AI assistant will build shopping baskets and find suitable products using a customer’s past purchased items. Tesco claims the new assistant could help its consumers reduce food waste and save time and money.
Why it matters: The AI assistant will be tested among Tesco employees before rolling out to the public. The move from such a major retailer signals a shift towards the increased use of AI consumer tools to search for products and services, and have highly-personalised digital shopping experiences. Tesco recently signed a three-year AI deal with French LLM Mistral.
Microsoft and Publicis Groupe Expand AI Partnership
Microsoft named Publicis Groupe as its global media agency of record, in a move that expands their partnership and deepens ties around AI. Microsoft’s media account, which was previously held by Dentsu, was reportedly won by Publicis without a pitch. Dentsu will continue to control the media planning and buying for Xbox, AdWeek reported.
Why it matters: This partnership signals the changing role of the media agency from being a service provider to an AI and tech infrastructure partner, as the role of agencies continue to change in the face of AI. The deal has a focus on agentic AI, and Publicis will be integrating Microsoft’s Copilot and Azure with its own Epsilon data before rolling out to customers.
Quote of the Week
Brands & Agencies
Model Accuses Brand of Plagiarising Likeness Using AI
Influencer and model Melanie Kieback has accused a Chinese skincare brand Skaind of using her likeness in an AI-generated ad without consent. The advert features a woman that resembles Kieback, right down to an outfit previously worn by the model. Kieback reached out to the brand and it reportedly apologised, saying its marketing team created an avatar using an undisclosed AI tool.
WPP Media Creates AI-Assisted YouTube Service
WPP Media is rolling out an AI-assisted service to help agencies cut ads shown on YouTube. The new feature, called YouTube 5K, uses AI to find the best ad placements through categorising risk, content integrity and brand alignment.
OpenAI Report Suggests Four-Day Week
In a new report from OpenAI has made the suggestion that employers trial a four day work week in the face of AI tools creating major productivity and efficiency gains. The AI giant claims that AI systems could soon handle months of human work. To mitigate the impact of these time and money savings, the company suggests employers experiment with a shorter workweek such as a 32-hour week with no loss in pay.
Media
Universal Bans Use of Super Mario for AI Training
Universal Studios, which owns film brands like Fast & Furious, Jurassic World, and Super Mario Bros, has noted at the end of the film credits for Super Mario Galaxy: The Movie that the movie is prohibited from being used to train AI models. Since June 2025, the production company has included this type of message at the end of its films.
Higgsfield Launches AI TV Pilot with Influencer Stars
AI video platform Higgsfield has announced a series of AI-generated TV shows to be released as pilots, where crowdsourced participants can decide what happens next in the plot of the productions. AI influencers will have the chance to give their likeness and feature in the productions. In January, the company reached a $1.3 billion valuation.
AI Bot Traffic to Publisher Sites Surges 300%
A new report from Akamai revealed that AI bot traffic to publisher websites has surged 300 percent in 2025. AI bots can crawl websites both to fetch content to train AI models and to take content to provide real-time answers to user queries. As a result of the increase in bot traffic, organic user traffic is declining – publishers experience 96 percent less traffic than traditional search.
CNN International Commercial Develops Agentic Media Trading
CNN International Commercial, which manages the media company’s business operations outside of the US, is developing infrastructure in preparation for agentic media trading, aimed for completion by early 2027. The test will focus on enabling AI agents to exchange information, negotiate pricing and manage tasks autonomously on behalf of media buyers and sellers, using agentic protocols, first reported by Digiday.
Tech
Canva Acquires Simtheory and Ortto
The editing and design platform Canva announced it was acquiring AI agent management platform Simtheory and marketing automation company Ortto. Both companies were founded by the same people – Chris and Mike Sharkey – with the acquisition positioned as an attempt to strengthen Canva’s agentic infrastructure and AI marketing offering.
LiveRamp and Akkio Team Up
LiveRamp announced a partnership with Akkio, an AI company that powers agentic workflows, to let users access Akkio within the LiveRamp platform. Users will be able to interrogate data conversationally in the LiveRamp platform and be able to curate custom segments.
Anthropic Bans OpenClaw Subscriptions
Anthropic has banned subscribers to Claude Pro and Max from using third-party agent frameworks like OpenClaw. Now, if OpenClaw users want to use the tool with Claude, they must pay a separate ‘extra usage’ billing system.
Startup of the Week
The California-based AI startup Pomo announced it had raised $4.5 million this week – a funding round led by Kindred Ventures, and with participation from Databricks Ventures, Seven Stars, SV Angel, Timeless Partners and 645 Ventures. Pomo is an agentic tool that lets AI agents manage the full marketing cycle, including insight and campaign launch.
Number of the Week
A new report from research firm Workplace Intelligence and AI agent company Writer showed how employees are responding to their company’s AI strategy. Many workers are purposefully sabotaging AI schemes, including refusing to use AI tools, intentionally generating a lower output of work, and putting proprietary data into public AI tools.
