Walmart is expanding its shoppable advertising partnership with NBCUniversal to linear (traditional )TV, starting with NBC’s Thanksgiving night football broadcast. Viewers of the NBC broadcast of the Miami Dolphins-Green Bay Packers NFL pro football game on linear TV as well as the Peacock streaming network will be able to shop for exclusive holiday deals and other items directly from the Walmart e-commerce site via an on-screen QR code. In addition, for the first time ever, viewers will be able to shop for Walmart products displayed in regular and streaming TV ads using a new NBCUniversal text-to-shop feature called “Shop the Pod,” sponsored by Walmart. Rich Lehrfeld, GM and senior VP, Walmart Connect. “The new advertising opportunities we’re introducing, powered by Walmart’s scale and reach, will be a game-changer in helping to solve the linear equation by tying our in-store purchase data to linear audiences.” The broadcast will also feature a two-minute segment from the discounter’s new holiday “advertainment” campaign known as “Deals of Desire.” The Thanksgiving NFL broadcast will mark the first time that the Walmart Connect retail media network will reach consumers via linear TV. Walmart and NBCUniversal plan to continue offering shoppable ads via linear TV programming beyond the Nov. 28 NFL broadcast.
Global Payments 2025 trends report includes – AI delivers early wins; Unifying the back end of commerce; Embedded payments make the B2B leap; New tools drive digital security and fight fraud; POS emerging as a Place of Service; Payment orchestration matures
Global Payments’ annual Commerce and Payment Trends Report reveals timely insights into the central role payment technologies are playing in business execution and customer experiences. The report identified six consequential developments that are rewriting the rules of commerce, and provides a holistic view of how small and midmarket businesses, as well as enterprises, are approaching the strategic value of the payments experience and related technologies. The six trends include: AI delivers early wins; Unifying the back end of commerce; Embedded payments make the B2B leap; New tools drive digital security and fight fraud; POS emerging as a Place of Service; Payment orchestration matures.
94% of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are already testing, deploying, or using AI to support biometrics
A report from Atlanta-based processor Global Payments Inc. shows that 94% of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are already testing, deploying, or using AI to support biometrics, while two-thirds are using the technology in tap-and-pay or tap-to-phone transactions. The research, which involved discussions with 600 payments executives and payments experts, shows that small businesses are drawn to AI technology by its ability to confer efficiencies typically available only to large enterprises. However, 13% of small businesses do not fully understand the technology and many express concern about AI’s reliability compared to 6% of larger sellers. Most respondents see potential for AI in improving digital wallets, paving the way for “super wallets” that enable voice commands for money transfers and e-commerce transactions. Smaller businesses are more active in this application, with 82% piloting or offering digital wallets, while only 25% of enterprise businesses are doing so.
Hugging Face’s SmolVLM is a compact open multimodal model that accepts arbitrary sequences of image and text inputs to produce text outputs with unprecedented efficiency: it requires only 5.02 GB of GPU RAM
Hugging Face has just released SmolVLM, a compact vision-language AI model that could change how businesses use AI across their operations. The new model processes both images and text with remarkable efficiency while requiring just a fraction of the computing power needed by its competitors. As companies struggle with the skyrocketing costs of implementing LLMs and the computational demands of vision AI systems, SmolVLM offers a pragmatic solution that doesn’t sacrifice performance for accessibility. SmolVLM is a compact open multimodal model that accepts arbitrary sequences of image and text inputs to produce text outputs. What makes this significant is the model’s unprecedented efficiency: it requires only 5.02 GB of GPU RAM, while competing models like Qwen-VL 2B and InternVL2 2B demand 13.70 GB and 10.52 GB respectively. Rather than following the industry’s bigger-is-better approach, Hugging Face has proven that careful architecture design and innovative compression techniques can deliver enterprise-grade performance in a lightweight package. This could dramatically reduce the barrier to entry for companies looking to implement AI vision systems.
Digital marketing spending by eCommerce firms Shein and Temu is making it harder for other retailers, as both companies have bid heavily on search keywords used by their competition
Digital marketing spending by eCommerce firms Shein and Temu is making it harder for other retailers, as both companies have bid heavily on search keywords used by their competition. The more demand for a keyword, the more a search engine charges. Data on Google search ads compiled by the online marketing platform Semrush shows that, for example, Temu has bid on keywords like “Walmart Black Friday deals,” “Kohls Black Friday” and “Bed Bath Beyond.” For its marketing, Shein has bid on keywords such as “Walmart clothes,” “Zara jeans,” “Mango dresses” and “Nordstrom Rack shoes” in the U.S., the data showed. And while the cost of a keyword like “Walmart clothes” has risen 16-fold in the last two years, generic keywords like “shopping” are also becoming increasingly expensive. By definition, when you increase the cost per click, the return on your marketing investment decreases. In some cases, that may mean it becomes unprofitable, and that can be highly impactful for retailers that depend on paid search ads to drive their business. Paid search ads can generate between 15% to 30% or more of a retailer’s online sales, while making up as much as half of their marketing spending.
Revolut is facing wave of complaints over APP fraud claims
Revolut is reportedly facing a lawsuit tied into a wave of anti-fraud complaints. The fraud claim was filed by Serbian firm Terna Energy Trading. The energy company had instructed its bank to send a payment of 700,000 euros ($735,880) to a Revolut account it thought was owned by a business partner. In reality, the account belonged to a 22-year-old Czech fraudster, the report said, citing court documents. While Revolut’s payment system froze initially, it ultimately cleared the transfer with no warning or intercession, the filing said. The company is seeking a repayment of the 700,000 euros as well as interest. “Despite operating a sizable regulated financial services business, Revolut provided no immediate means of communication by which it could receive suspected fraud reports,” Terna’s attorneys said. Revolut “denies all elements of the claim” and in its defense asked a judge to decide that it’s lawful for it to retain the €700,000, arguing that it received the funds in good faith, according to filings from company attorneys. The case is among thousands of complaints filed against U.K.-based Revolut relating to authorized push payment (APP) fraud, scams in which criminals dupe people into sending money online to an account beyond their control.
Kubernetes is well-suited for deploying generative AI and large language models, particularly at the edge near users
Kubernetes AI deployment is revolutionizing the way organizations integrate artificial intelligence into their operations, providing scalable, efficient solutions that enhance performance and prioritize security in cloud environments. Vultr leading the charge in scalable cloud solutions, according to Nathan Goulding, senior vice president of engineering at Vultr. The company’s infrastructure enables delivery to 90% of the global population in under 40 milliseconds, crucial for web applications and AI model deployment. Kubernetes is well-suited for deploying generative AI and large language models, particularly at the edge near users. Organizations are increasingly focused on responsibly integrating AI into their applications, with only 1% of corporate data currently utilized in large language models. This highlights a significant opportunity for enterprises to unlock value by securely architecting AI-driven systems that leverage their proprietary data, Goulding pointed out. Vultr’s Platform engineering teams prioritize consuming fundamental cloud infrastructure, particularly VMs and bare metal, to deploy applications using Kubernetes as the standard, Goulding explained.
SAP’s Incident Solution Matching is a knowledge base recommender, where the service automatically proposes relevant solutions from SAP’s range of platforms
Digital recommenders are driven by data captured across multiple customer touch points. SAP’s Incident Solution Matching is a knowledge base recommender, where the service automatically proposes relevant solutions from SAP Notes, SAP KBAs and SAP Help by analyzing case data provided in the Get Support application. SAP’s Get Support application, uses Incident Solution Matching (ISM), an AI-integrated service based on machine learning and large language models (LLM) – to improve its real-time support capabilities that address a heterogenous customer base. ISM uses proprietary AI models that apply a semantic retriever technology to boost the relevance of recommendations. The semantic retriever, coupled with a semantic ranker, helps the system prioritize solutions most likely to resolve a customer’s issue. With the help of LLM-infused models, ISM now delivers an improvement of over 25% in recommendation relevance and accuracy – ensuring faster and more personalized solutions for customers. The enhanced recommendation system allows SAP users to resolve their issues more efficiently by reducing downtimes and times to resolution, while increasing productivity. These enhancements significantly improve the quality of personalization, self-service, and agent productivity. In the end, all of this translates to a high-quality, seamless support experience that can be accessed directly from the customer’s support account.
44% of UK consumers plan to use digital wallets beyond payments
According to a PYMNTS Intelligence report, in collaboration with Google Wallet, U.K. consumers use digital wallets for far more than simple transactions. 21% of U.K. consumers have used their digital wallets for travel-related activities, such as presenting boarding passes or public transport tickets. This trend is popular among younger users: 37% of Gen Z and 27% of millennials use their digital wallets while traveling. 42% of U.K. consumers use digital wallets to pay merchants online, while millennials and Gen Z have pioneered the use of wallets for P2P payments, including splitting bills at restaurants. 19% of Gen Z and 12.5% of millennials regularly use digital wallets for bill-splitting. As younger generations embrace this functionality, they’re changing how financial exchanges happen among peers, making digital wallets indispensable for everyday financial management. Beyond younger users, 27% of all U.K. consumers say they will use their digital wallets for identity verification in the next three years. This trend underscores the potential for digital wallets to replace traditional physical IDs for a variety of uses, from banking transactions to entry into restricted venues. As adoption continues to grow, digital wallets are expected to become even more integral to consumer experiences.
Kubernetes is well-suited for deploying generative AI and large language models, particularly at the edge near users
Kubernetes AI deployment is revolutionizing the way organizations integrate artificial intelligence into their operations, providing scalable, efficient solutions that enhance performance and prioritize security in cloud environments. Vultr leading the charge in scalable cloud solutions, according to Nathan Goulding, senior vice president of engineering at Vultr. The company’s infrastructure enables delivery to 90% of the global population in under 40 milliseconds, crucial for web applications and AI model deployment. Kubernetes is well-suited for deploying generative AI and large language models, particularly at the edge near users. Organizations are increasingly focused on responsibly integrating AI into their applications, with only 1% of corporate data currently utilized in large language models. This highlights a significant opportunity for enterprises to unlock value by securely architecting AI-driven systems that leverage their proprietary data, Goulding pointed out. Vultr’s Platform engineering teams prioritize consuming fundamental cloud infrastructure, particularly VMs and bare metal, to deploy applications using Kubernetes as the standard, Goulding explained.