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, Meta launches its Business Agent Platform globally, the IAB UK forecasts a third of UK digital ad spend will be AI-driven by 2030, and the Salesforce expands agentic platform.
Top Stories of the Week
Meta Launches Business Agent Platform
Meta has launched Meta Business Agent, a global initiative to transform enterprise workflows. Announced at Meta’s Conversations 2026 conference in London, this suite of AI-powered business agents rolls out across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, allowing brands to deploy conversational AI that can answer customer queries, recommend products, and complete purchases directly within Meta’s apps. The agents are trained on each business’s own catalogue and customer data, and can escalate to human agents when needed.
Why it matters: Meta’s business agents represent a significant bet that the next era of brand-to-consumer communication runs through AI-mediated chat, not necessarily ads. For Meta, this move signals a strategic movement into enterprise AI.
One Third of UK Digital Ad Spend Will Be AI-Driven by 2030, IAB UK Forecasts
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) UK has published a forecast estimating that one third of all UK digital ad spend will be AI-driven by 2030, as automated campaign planning, creative generation, and media buying tools become standard practice across the industry.
Why it matters: For many businesses, 2030 is close enough to be a practical planning horizon, yet far enough that the gap between early adopters and laggards could prove decisive. The forecast adds pressure to AI investment decisions that many organisations are still treating as experimental – and reinforces the concern, that operational readiness rather than technology access is now the binding constraint.
Salesforce Launches New Agentic AI Capabilities
Salesforce used its annual Connections conference in Chicago to shift marketing from one-way campaign broadcasts into continuous, two-way customer dialogues. By unveiling a significant expansion of its Agentforce platform – including a content agent, marketing goals agent, and sales agents – marketers will be able to handle routine campaign execution and content generation natively.
Why it matters: Salesforce’s Agentforce expansion matters because it moves agentic AI from a bolt-on feature to a core architecture of one of the world’s most widely deployed enterprise software platforms. For marketing, this means AI agents are no longer something to evaluate separately – they are increasingly native to the tools already being used every day, potentially lowering adoption friction.
Quote of the Week
Brands & Agencies
WPP Launches AI Production Studio HEX
WPP has launched the London-based HEX, which it describes as equal parts creative production studio, R&D lab and consultancy, underpinned by AI. Part of WPP’s broader production division with around 50 creative technologists, the studio specialises in generative and agentic AI, gaming, immersive experiences and robotics, and is already delivering work for WPP clients.
Coca-Cola Launches Agency Review in AI Push
Coca-Cola has initiated a global agency review with WPP and Publicis to pivot its marketing operating system toward data, AI and agentic tools. The review signals that one of the world’s largest advertisers is moving from exploring AI to restructuring how its entire marketing function operates around it.
Brands Risk Losing Trust if Using AI, Expert Warns
At the 2026 Northeastern Global Leadership Summit in London, branding veteran Julietta Dexter warned that brands selling themselves on enduring quality need to think carefully about how they deploy AI, or risk letting loyal customers down. Dexter noted that audiences can tell when AI-generated imagery is lazy or generic, and that these touches break a deeper emotional bond that enduring brands have carefully built over decades.
Media
CMA Forces Google to Offer Publishers Opt-Out from AI Search
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has imposed a new conduct requirement on Google search, meaning — in a world first — publishers will now have effective tools to prevent their content being used to power AI features in search, such as AI Overviews. Google has nine months to implement all changes, though the CMA expects important parts of the controls to become available to publishers well before that deadline.
Scorsese AI Storyboard Controversy Divides the Film World
Martin Scorsese announced he has signed on as an advisor to AI image generation startup Black Forest Labs, and is using the company’s FLUX technology to create storyboards during pre-production on his new film. The announcement drew swift backlash from artists, with many accusing him of throwing storyboard artists “under the bus” and calling the move a betrayal that “cuts against so many things Scorsese has stood for his entire career.”
Tech
InMobi and Scope3 Launch Sell-Side AI Agent
InMobi and Scope3 have debuted a sell-side AI agent that acts as an autonomous sales representative for advertisers seeking to buy InMobi’s Glance premium commerce inventory, built on the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), an open standard for agentic advertising transactions.
PubMatic Launches ‘Decision Fabric’
PubMatic has introduced Decision Fabric, a new layer built on its AgenticOS platform that enables ad tech partners and buyers to deploy their own decision-making algorithms directly within the supply path at the moment an ad impression becomes available. By embedding custom logic closer to the transaction itself, Decision Fabric gives both buyers and sellers greater control over programmatic decisioning.
CreatorOS Launches Nutcake AI Agent for Creator Marketing
Marketing and influencer platform CreatorOS has launched Nutcake, an AI-powered assistant designed to automate creator marketing campaigns. Nutcake automates influencer campaign management end-to-end, positioning itself as an AI-powered operating system for creator partnerships.
Startup of the Week
Dutch performance marketing company Aizy has acquired ad automation and scalability platform Uptmz. The acquisition of Uptmz reflects a broader consolidation trend in European AI marketing infrastructure, where providers are scaling horizontally to provide for small and mid-sized businesses.
Number of the Week
These figures suggest that the people closest to agentic AI adoption are also the most sceptical of it. At a moment when platforms, agencies and vendors are racing to position AI agents as the future of media buying, the trust gap inside the industry may be the biggest brake on the speed of that transition.
