Birdeye has laucnhed Search AI, a first-of-its-kind platform designed to help multi-location brands manage GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). GEO is the equivalent of SEO for the AI-world. Search AI is purpose-built from the ground up for the AI era and is powered by BirdAI, Birdeye’s native AI layer that powers the Birdeye platform. Search AI ensures multi-location brands can see what their audiences are searching for, track how and when they’re being surfaced, understand what each AI engine is saying about them and their competitors, and act autonomously to boost visibility, accuracy, sentiment, and engagement. As part of this launch, Birdeye is also introducing the Search Optimization Agent, now in closed beta with select enterprise customers. The agent continuously analyzes prompts, citations, and AI-surfaced answers, and can autonomously optimize a brand’s GEO with one-click approvals. Search AI is built for marketing teams managing hundreds or thousands of locations. It enables them to: Analyze consumer prompts by brand, location, and keyword; Track brand’s visibility across AI Platforms and understand how they are performing vs their competitors — by platform, location, citation; Identify citations used by AI engines and monitor their share of voice; Audit the accuracy of AI-generated business data and brand descriptions; Monitor brand sentiment and themes in AI-generated content for you and your competitors; Benchmark rankings by themes and answers at a local and brand level; Suggest, create, and publish content that is designed for AI engines to consume
Instagram finally ships a native iPad app, defaulting to full‑screen Reels, with Stories, messaging, and a multi‑view Following tab tuned for larger displays
The Instagram app is expanding to the iPad at long last, with Instagram releasing a dedicated iPad app as of today. Instagram for iPad focuses on Reels, and when opening the app, it will go directly to the Reels page. Stories will be available at the top of the interface, with support for messaging as well. There is a dedicated Following tab that provides different filtering options. “All” will display recommended posts and reels from accounts you follow, while “Friends” will show recommended posts from accounts you follow and that follow you back. The “Latest” option will show chronological posts and reels from accounts that you follow. Instagram for iPad was designed to take advantage of a larger display area, providing access to more features with fewer taps. Instagram says that people can catch up on messages and notifications using layouts that display both tabs at the same time, and when you watch reels, you can expand the comments while the reel stays at full size. The Instagram app for the iPad is rolling out now, and it is available on iPads that support iPadOS 15.1 and later.
New TripAdvisor Cash loyalty fuses AI nudges with payments: 5% dollar‑for‑dollar cashback on hotels and experiences, plus $30 vouchers to steer spend toward activities
Under the leadership of Chief Marketing Officer Matt Dacey, Tripadvisor is reimagining its role in the traveler journey—from a place people visit for research to a platform that engages, rewards, and personalizes throughout the trip lifecycle. Tripadvisor is investing heavily in AI not just to respond to customer queries but to proactively anticipate them. By leveraging AI, Tripadvisor provides timely nudges like restaurant suggestions two weeks before a trip or reminders about travel documents just days before departure. This proactive model could shift the traveler’s perception of Tripadvisor—from a research tool to a trusted companion across the entire journey. Tripadvisor’s Viator platform now offers more than 400,000 bookable experiences, from walking tours to culinary adventures. Hotel loyalty preferences may not be shifting dramatically, but the context for decision-making increasingly comes from what people want to do, not just where they want to sleep. All of this has led to Tripadvisor’s latest move: a new membership program designed around three pillars—simplicity, flexibility, and value. Tripadvisor Rewards delivers 5% cash back in the form of “Trip Cash” on any bookable hotel or experience. Unlike traditional points systems, Trip Cash is dollar-for-dollar and can be used anywhere on the platform. Members are rewarded not just for booking, but also for planning trips and contributing reviews. Every new member also receives a $30 voucher to use on experiences—an immediate nudge toward the part of travel that consumers increasingly value most.
New TripAdvisor Cash loyalty fuses AI nudges with payments: 5% dollar‑for‑dollar cashback on hotels and experiences, plus $30 vouchers to steer spend toward activities
Under the leadership of Chief Marketing Officer Matt Dacey, Tripadvisor is reimagining its role in the traveler journey—from a place people visit for research to a platform that engages, rewards, and personalizes throughout the trip lifecycle. Tripadvisor is investing heavily in AI not just to respond to customer queries but to proactively anticipate them. By leveraging AI, Tripadvisor provides timely nudges like restaurant suggestions two weeks before a trip or reminders about travel documents just days before departure. This proactive model could shift the traveler’s perception of Tripadvisor—from a research tool to a trusted companion across the entire journey. Tripadvisor’s Viator platform now offers more than 400,000 bookable experiences, from walking tours to culinary adventures. Hotel loyalty preferences may not be shifting dramatically, but the context for decision-making increasingly comes from what people want to do, not just where they want to sleep. All of this has led to Tripadvisor’s latest move: a new membership program designed around three pillars—simplicity, flexibility, and value. Tripadvisor Rewards delivers 5% cash back in the form of “Trip Cash” on any bookable hotel or experience. Unlike traditional points systems, Trip Cash is dollar-for-dollar and can be used anywhere on the platform. Members are rewarded not just for booking, but also for planning trips and contributing reviews. Every new member also receives a $30 voucher to use on experiences—an immediate nudge toward the part of travel that consumers increasingly value most.
Liberis’ embedded AI platform provide SMBs up to $2M by five customizable funding products, leveraging 118M+ monthly data points and seamless onboarding across multiple global markets
Liberis, a global embedded finance provider, has launched the Liberis Capital Platform, an AI-powered solution designed to help small businesses navigate a fragmented funding landscape. The platform offers a suite of five financial products, providing real-time, personalized recommendations from the first day of trading to major expansion. The platform is live in the U.S. and is set to roll out globally by 2026. It offers access to funding up to $2 million. Liberis’s recommendation engine analyzes over 118 million monthly SMB data points, delivering the right offer at the right time. The platform offers co-created financial solutions, designed from five core product blueprints, covering every stage of business growth. The platform offers starter capital, working capital finance, flexible capital, pay with Liberis, and investment capital. Liberis plans to further enhance the platform by modularizing its technology for faster partner onboarding and expanding its data-driven insights. The platform aims to become the default funding infrastructure for its partners, creating an embedded experience that powers the global small business economy.
Figure Technology embeds AI and Provenance blockchain into consumer lending to cut HELOC approval to 10 days, enabling on‑chain origination, AI underwriting and smart‑contract loan trading
Figure Technology’s recent filing to go public spotlights the growth of AI and blockchain into loan origination, underwriting and secondary market trading. The company’s platform is built on the Provenance blockchain, which it describes as a “record of truth” for assets. Every loan originated through its system is recorded on the blockchain, providing an immutable record of ownership and performance. Figure combines that with automated valuation models, AI-powered underwriting, and smart contracts that govern loan sales and transfers. This approach has allowed the company to shorten approval times for home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) to a median of 10 days from an industry average of 42 days. Loan applications can be completed in five minutes, with funding available in as little as five days. Figure estimates its addressable market across lending and capital markets at approximately $185 billion in annual revenue potential, based on consumer credit originations and marketplace trading. In addition to lending, management is targeting tokenization and stablecoins as growth opportunities. The filing contends that the company has achieved profitability and scaled it in a capital-efficient way. Revenue models are built on fees from originations, servicing, gain on loan sales, and technology usage. Partner-branded lending, where banks and mortgage originators use Figure’s platform under their own brand, accounts for 77% of total originations. Figure had 168 active partners as of mid-2025. The company has also built regulatory infrastructure to support its ambitions. It holds more than 180 lending and servicing licenses, 48 money transmitter licenses, and SEC registration as a broker-dealer with authority to operate an alternative trading system. Internationally, it has crypto licenses in the Cayman Islands and Ireland. Management argues that this licensing framework differentiates it from competitors and will support scaling of new products.
MessageGears launches multi‑destination external campaigns enabling marketers to syndicate audiences across multiple platforms with single queries; reducing compute costs by 80%
MessageGears, the warehouse-native data activation and engagement platform for enterprise brands, announced a key enhancement to its campaign functionality. Marketers can now configure multiple external destinations within a single MessageGears campaign, heavily reducing the time and effort required to syndicate audiences across third-party vendors and internal systems. Key benefits of multi-destination external campaigns include: Faster campaign creation: This consolidates a commonly repeated task into a single workflow for marketing operations professionals, saving hours of redundant campaign setup. Cost savings: The number of required database extractions is now reduced, lowering compute costs and system strain. For example, a team sending a 500K member audience to five destinations previously ran five separate extractions – querying their data warehouse five times and processing 2.5M rows. Now the same result is achieved with a single query. Streamlined tech stack: This reverse ETL enhancement brings yet another CDP-level capability into MessageGears’ unique cross-channel customer engagement platform – reducing the need for redundant tech, while providing marketers with functionality other ESP and CEP platforms don’t natively support. Marketers typically need to recreate campaign segments when they want to send the same audience to multiple endpoints, manually updating each destination along the way. Now, within a single campaign configuration and using one extraction, they can send identical audience segments to multiple third-party platforms at once.
Walmart launches Shoppable series for sports fans and hobby enthusiasts, enabling to buy what’s appearing on-screen, without being redirected to another page
Walmart aims to reach sports fans and hobby enthusiasts with a new weekly series streaming exclusively on Walmart Live and featuring shoppable content. The “Collector’s Night” series is powered by live commerce platform TalkShopLive and presented in partnership with sports card and collectibles community WeTheHobby. The series will deliver nonstop thrills every Thursday with live box breaks, surprise giveaways, and exclusive drops—all designed to capture the real-time rush of the hobby. Mayank Hajela, GM Collectibles at Walmart U.S., said that there has been a surge in demand for collectibles. Walmart and TalkShopLive said in December 2021 that they partnered on a “hassle-free retail and content distribution agreement” enabling fans and shoppers to buy what’s appearing on-screen, without being redirected to another page and having to miss out on the show. “You click and you purchase right from the video player,” TalkShopLive CEO and Co-founder Bryan Moore told. . “There’s no click-through [to another site or page]; you’re not driving back to Walmart.com to buy it. There’s no click out. You literally buy it right then and there within the video player, so that’s why we convert more sales.”
Eskimi unveils DeepContext, enabling advertisers to deploy strategic brand blueprints and real-time web monitoring for precise, privacy-friendly contextual targeting across multiple languages
Eskimi has launched DeepContext — an AI-powered solution designed to help advertisers build and activate client-specific brand strategies in contextual advertising. By understanding the meaning behind content, offering real-time website monitoring, and supporting nearly all world languages, the tool makes advanced contextual targeting accessible to advertisers within and beyond mature markets. DeepContext enables agencies and brands to create or upload brand blueprints — strategic guidelines or briefs — that define how their brand should be presented in digital environments. Once a blueprint is established, the platform automatically evaluates and classifies placements based on how well they align with the brand’s specific requirements. Instead of relying on standard keyword analysis, DeepContext is able to evaluate the full-page content (e.g., tone, sentiment, and themes) and match it to a brand’s custom blueprint for maximum relevance, says Sandoval. Moreover, it delivers real-time insights, transparent reasoning for placements, and smarter brand safety that avoids false blocks while keeping ads contextually aligned. Eskimi’s latest innovation also employs real-time website monitoring, ensuring that brand placements appear on newly released and highly relevant web pages. Unlike traditional behavioral approaches, contextual focuses on the current context of a page or content, ensuring that ads align naturally with the user’s intent. This method not only improves engagement and relevance but also allows advertisers to create a seamless user experience where advertising feels helpful rather than intrusive.
Amazon targets $488B online grocery market with integrated Prime delivery, leveraging subscription model to increase customer lifetime value and reduce cancellations
By focusing on groceries, Amazon is targeting a high-frequency purchase category that directly enhances the value proposition of its Prime membership. For Prime members, same-day grocery delivery is free on orders over $25, while smaller orders incur a $2.99 fee. (Non-Prime customers pay $12.99.) This pricing model undercuts competitors and is a tangible benefit that could strengthen loyalty among Prime members. In the bigger picture, groceries and everyday essentials are a core focus of Amazon’s strategy, representing a rapidly growing segment of its delivery business. Jamil Ghani, worldwide vice president of Amazon Prime, told that 2 billion of the 9 billion items delivered in 2024 were groceries and everyday essentials, a 50% increase over the previous year. This aggressive growth highlights the strategic importance of high-frequency purchases as a key driver for Prime membership. As Ghani said, “Our store is meant to be the everything and everyday store, and [Amazon’s] everyday essentials and grocery strategy is about really bolstering the credential on the ‘everyday’ part of it.” The underlying logic of Amazon’s Prime membership model has a clear precedent in the retail sector. The rationale is simple: Customers are less likely to cancel their subscriptions as membership value increases across multiple life needs. For Amazon, Prime’s expanding suite of lifestyle services represents a modern digital parallel. Besides free or low-cost grocery delivery, these benefits include streaming on Prime Video, free shipping on books and household goods and even discounts for healthcare. The Prime Rx prescription savings program offers Prime members discounts of up to 80% on generic medications and 40% on brand-name medications when paying without insurance. The RxPass subscription also offers unlimited eligible generic medicines for a flat monthly fee. Each of these retailers has used bundled value not simply as a retention tool, but as a driver of habitual use and increased customer lifetime value. This comes on top of outright savings: Amazon Prime members save an average of more than $500 annually on deliveries alone — another compelling reason to stay on Prime. This strategic bundling makes the Prime ecosystem an integral part of a customer’s life, creating a buffer against cancellation. This enables Amazon to reinforce the value of Prime membership while competing with e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, even at the potential cost of a direct sale on Amazon’s own e-commerce platform. According to Ghani, the service’s subscription revenue significantly contributes to the company’s investment pool to fund benefits. The company believes this reinvestment deepens member engagement across the entire ecosystem.