#personalization

#personalization

.Most e-commerce returns stem from guessing; personalized marketing builds shopper confidence.(photo credit: Courtesy of GetSelene.AI)By TAMI DEMSKY For ecommerce operators, returns have become a structural profit leak that hits in three ways: shipping and processing costs, inventory stuck in limbo, and the long-term damage to trust that lowers repeat purchase rates. The scale is significant. Retailers estimate that 15.8 percent of annual sales will be returned in 2025, totaling approximately $849.9 billion, according to the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns .

Think about the last app you opened today. Netflix probably greeted you with a show that felt uncannily right for your mood. Spotify may have lined up a playlist that matched your energy without you lifting a finger. Duolingo likely nudged you to practice just enough to keep the habit alive, without making learning feel overwhelming. Now compare that to the experience most employees have when they log into a corporate learning platform. The contrast is hard to ignore.

To use the new chatbot, users search for a grocery store in the Uber Eats app and tap the purple Cart Assistant icon on the store's page to begin shopping. Customers can enter a list or upload an image of one, and Cart Assistant will automatically add the necessary items to their basket. This includes photos of handwritten lists or screenshots of recipes and their ingredients. Users can then customize the basket by swapping items for preferred brands or adding more products from the store.

Dear Algo was inspired by users making posts with the phrase to try to influence what they see before Meta made an official version. The feature has already been available in testing in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, and now that test is launching in the US. "We'll continue iterating based on community feedback before rolling it out more broadly," Meta spokesperson Alec Booker tells The Verge.

After a week vibe coding apps using Nothing's Essential Apps Builder, I'm conflicted. I buy into the smartphone maker's vision for software that adapts to you, not the other way around, but right now it doesn't deliver. It's hard to see how this goes from cool novelty to a reliable tool without serious refinement, and a level of consumer patience it may struggle to find.

While those questions matter, the secret sauce is understanding the context behind a person's interaction with your brand at a given moment. A frequent traveler might visit an airline's website one day to research a family vacation. The next time they see, they might be booking a flight for work. Their attitudinal profile hasn't changed, but what their context - and therefore what they want from you - has.

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Personalization is a tried-and-tested way to boost engagement while gathering valuable information about existing audiences - and is proving to be a key driver for the sports industry, says Rawnet's Harry Daniel. For brands looking to score with digital marketing, personalization is a winning long-term business strategy. Personalizing the user experience (UX) via websites and apps keeps fans engaged and enhances brand loyalty. It can help brands to grow, by extending their reach to new users and unleashing untouched opportunities for victory.

The advertising industry has always been in the business of making things, such as the OOH billboard, the 30-second spot, the snappy social post, the standard website: final, finite assets polished and pushed into the world. Agencies were paid, often by the hour, for producing final versions of these things and then moved on to the next project. Even with generative AI entering the picture, much of the conversation remains focused on making those same things faster or cheaper.

In the U.S. - where the market for agentic AI is projected to grow from $2.43 billion in 2025 to $65.25 billion by 2034 - agents are adding value across the marketing funnel, attracting, nurturing and converting leads by personalizing experiences, optimizing campaigns and writing content. Acting as mini-marketers, they are drawing up plans, making real-time decisions, executing and orchestrating campaigns across channels and using results to learn and improve, with little or no human intervention.

In 2025, we rebuilt the foundations of our AI program [and] over the coming months, we're going to start shipping our new models and products, and I expect us to steadily push the frontier over the course of the new year. Our world-class recommendation systems are already driving meaningful growth across our apps and ads business, but we think that the current systems are primitive compared to what will be possible soon. Today, our systems help people stay in touch with friends, understand the world, and find interesting and entertaining content.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse dreams seem to have been replaced by a new vision: an AI-generated social feed. In an earnings call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg reiterated his belief that AI will become the next big media format, making feeds "more immersive and interactive:" We started with text, and then moved to photos when we got phones with cameras, and then moved to video when mobile networks got fast enough. Soon, we'll see an explosion of new media formats that are more immersive and interactive, and only possible because of advances in AI.

Publishers' adoption of generative AI is reducing the friction between content and format, making it easier for the same story to appear as shorter summaries, audio, or video, often in real time. To some publishers, a text article may soon be more of a vehicle for original reporting, not a final product. That information could become no longer available strictly in a static piece of content, but transformed into different shapes and formats, based on a reader's signals and preferences.

Ignacio Barreiro and his girlfriend, Guadalupe, an architect, bought this 710-square-foot apartment in Buenos Aires six months ago, it was 70 years old and "outdated, neutral, and lacking warmth and life." But the creative couple had imagination, and saw the potential in the small space. "We wanted our first home to reflect who we are and who we aspire to be," Ignacio begins. "Through thoughtful design choices, color, and light, we transformed it into a warm, vibrant, and personal space that truly feels like home."

Ahmad Al-Dahle, who most recently led generative AI at Meta and the team behind its Llama open-source models, joins the company Wednesday and will oversee its engineering and data science teams.

At 4:45 pm on Wednesdays, I'm used to hearing my editors discuss the evening's stories. This week, I eavesdropped on a conversation about the similarities between a coffee pod and an oxidized avocado. I was visiting Nespresso's new flagship location in Manhattan's tourist-heavy Flatiron district, a well-lit, open-air space that feels almost like an Apple store. The Nestlé-owned coffee company opened the nearly 14,000 square-foot store in December, billing its now-largest retail space as "a destination for modern coffee culture" in a press release.

OpenAI said conversations in ChatGPT Health would be stored separately to other chats and would not be used to train its AI tools - as well as clarifying it was not intended to be used for "diagnosis or treatment". According to OpenAI, more than 230 million people ask its chatbot questions about their health and wellbeing every week. In a blog post, it said ChatGPT Health had "enhanced privacy to protect sensitive data".

Gen Z is aging into the life moments that define entire industries. As this generation moves through milestones like marriage, homeownership, and family planning, they're quickly becoming a core target market not just for weddings, but for a wide range of service-based businesses. What matters for these small businesses is how Gen Z's arrival, set against today's economic backdrop, is reshaping expectations for how they serve their customers.

With shrinking attention spans and increasing workplace demands, traditional, long, and static eLearning courses often fail to make an impact. Learners now seek training that fits naturally into their day, feels relevant to their role, and respects their time. This shift in learner expectations has prompted L&D professionals to rethink the design of learning experiences. One innovative approach gaining momentum is Netflix-style microlearning, an experience-driven strategy that emphasizes personalization, short learning moments, and learner choice.