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In todays hyper-competitive B2B landscape, marketing leaders face a paradox: The pace of change is relentless, yet the need for clarity and purpose has never been greater. With artificial intelligence (AI) reshaping every facet of business, the imperative is not just to keep up but to lead the charge. To navigate this complexity, we must lead with vision and innovate with intentfocusing our efforts, aligning teams, and making decisions that drive the business forward. Below is a no-nonsense framework for CMOs to fulfill our mandate of not just keeping up with the market but shaping what comes next. VISION IS THE STRATEGIC COMPASS Vision is more than a lofty statement on a corporate website. Its a strategic compass that sets a clear direction for decision-making, inspires bold thinking, and aligns marketing with broader business transformation goals. AI is not just a technology trendits a strategic lens through which visionary CMOs anticipate market shifts, personalize at scale, and create new sources of value. Vision encourages us to look beyond quarterly targets and toward long-term value creation. Its not just about where were going, but why our destination matters. Peter Druckers insight that the best way to predict the future is to create it reminds us that visionary marketers dont wait for trends to unfold. They shape themoften by harnessing AIs predictive and generative power. Consider Microsofts transformation under the leadership of CEO Satya Nadella. By repositioning itself as a cloud-first, AI-forward enterprise leader, Microsofts market cap soared from ~$300 billion in 2014 to over $3 trillion by 2024. Unified branding, thought leadership, and marketing aligned with product visionand a bold embrace of AIwere instrumental in this journey. The lesson is clear: A rebrand aligned with long-term strategy and market trends, especially those driven by AI, can unlock massive shareholder value. INNOVATION IS THE DIFFERENTIATION ENGINE In saturated markets, differentiation is survival. Innovation allows us to stand out, not just in what we offer, but in how we engage, deliver, and evolve. AI-driven insights empower marketers to test, learn, and iterate at unprecedented speed, turning data into differentiated experiences that set brands apart. Whether through product, experience, or brand voice, marketers must respond to evolving customer needs and emerging technologies. The challenge is to build a unique voice, foster a culture of innovation, and lead with empathy and agility, even while navigating internal barriers like silos and legacy systems. Steve Jobs captured this imperative when he said, Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. For marketing leaders, innovationnow supercharged by AIis the engine that powers strategic impact. Apples journey from the dot-com bust to unprecedented growth is a testament to visionary leadership and relentless innovation. Strategic repositioning built a premium brand and loyal customer base. The transformation wasnt just about technology. It was about storytelling, experience, and strategic marketing, now increasingly powered by AI-driven personalization and creative tools. When marketing aligns with product innovation, long-term strategy, and the intelligent application of AI, it can redefine industries and drive valuation from billions to trillions. VISION MEETS INNOVATION At onsemi, our own transformation showcases how aligning vision and innovation can redefine a brand. Once known primarily as a reliable supplier, onsemi has emerged as a high-value technology leader in intelligent power and sensing. Under CEO Hassane El-Khoury, our identity evolved from traditional, engineering-focused to forward-looking, innovation-driven. Marketing played a pivotal role in translating the strategic vision into measurable results. Marketing leaders operationalize and bring vision and innovation to life with a strategic framework that tightly aligns marketing with business goals. Today, they must put AI at the center of every pillar. The backbone of a modern AI-centered marketing engine includes these eight fundamentals: Brand purpose and positioning: AI-powered sentiment analysis and competitive intelligence inform meaningful, consistent messaging. Market and audience intelligence: AI enables dynamic segmentation, lookalike modeling, and predictive analytics for personalization at scale. AI-powered demand generation: Generative AI creates dynamic content, while predictive models fuel pipeline growth through targeted outreach. Optimized digital experiences and customer intelligence platforms: AI-driven personalization engines and recommendation systems ensure every interaction is seamless and insight-rich. Unified messaging architecture: AI helps keep the story coherent across channels, adapting in real time to audience feedback. Innovative tactics: Agile marketing models, strategic AI personalization, and customer journey mapping empower teams to iterate quickly and adapt to change. Customer experience: A relentless focus on customer experience transforms every touchpoint into a strategic advantage. AI tools can anticipate needs and deliver value before customers even ask. Cross-functional collaboration: Marketing collaborating with sales, product engineering, and corporate strategy ensures that marketing is at the table, shaping the future rather than just communicating it. Taken together, these elements create a marketing engine that drives growth, relevance, and long-term impact. LEAD WITH VISION, EXECUTE WITH INNOVATION, DELIVER WITH IMPACTPOWERED BY AI If theres one takeaway for marketing executives, its this: Lead with vision, execute with nnovation, and deliver with impact. Vision inspires teams and aligns stakeholders. Innovationnow inseparable from AIkeeps us relevant and unlocks differentiated value. Impact is measured not just in impressions and engagement, but in pipeline, revenue, and strategic growth. When we connect vision to execution, harness the power of AI, and measure our impact, we elevate marketing from a function to a force. The future belongs to those who shape it. Lets continue to lead with clarity, execute with creativity, and deliver with purposeembracing AI as a core leadership competency for the next era of marketing. Felicity Carson is chief marketing officer at onsemi.
Category:
E-Commerce
A Gustav Klimt portrait painting that helped save the life of its Jewish subject during the Holocaust sold Tuesday for $236.4 million, a record for a modern art piece. Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer sold after a 20-minute bidding war at Sothebys in New York, where the flashiest item of the night was a solid gold, fully functioning toilet that went for $12.1 million. The 6-foot-tall (1.8-meter-tall) portrait, painted over three years between 1914 and 1916, depicts the daughter of one of Vienna’s wealthiest families adorned in an East Asian emperors cloak. It is one of two full-length portraits by the Austrian artist that remain privately owned. The work was kept separate from other Klimt paintings that burned in a fire at an Austrian castle. The colorful painting depicts the Lederer family’s life of luxury before Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. Nazis looted the Lederer art collection, leaving only the family portraits, which were considered too Jewish to be worth stealing, according to the National Gallery of Canada, where the painting was previously on loan. In an attempt to save herself, Elisabeth Lederer made up a story that Klimt, who was not Jewish and died in 1918, was her father. It helped that the artist spent years working meticulously on her portrait. With help from her former brother-in-law, a high-ranking Nazi official, she convinced the Nazis to give her a document stating that she descended from Klimt. That allowed her to remain safely in Vienna until she died of an illness in 1944. The portrait was part of the collection of billionaire Leonard A. Lauder, heir to cosmetics giant The Estée Lauder Companies. He died this year at 92, leaving behind an impressive collection worth more than $400 million. Sothebys declined to share the identity of the portrait’s buyer. The sale topped a previous record for 20th-century art set by an Andy Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe, which sold for $195 million in 2022. Five Klimt pieces from Lauder’s collection sold at the auction for a total of $392 million, Sotheby’s said. Pieces by Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch were among other notable sales. Later in the evening, an 18-karat-gold toilet by Maurizio Cattelan the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall hit the auction block. Cattelan has said the 223-pound (101-kilogram) piece, titled America, satirizes superwealth. Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise, he once said. The toilet, owned by an unnamed collector, was one of two that Cattelan created in 2016. The other was displayed in 2016 at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, which pointedly offered to lend it to U.S. President Donald Trump when he asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting. Then the piece was stolen while on display in England at Blenheim Palace, the country manor where Winston Churchill was born. Two men were convicted in the toilet heist, but it’s unclear what they did with the loo. Investigators aren’t privy to its whereabouts but believe it was likely broken up and melted down. America was exhibited at Sothebys New York headquarters in the weeks leading up to the auction. Sothebys called the commode an incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value. Hannah Schoenbaum, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
Google announced its widely anticipated Gemini 3 model Tuesday. By many key metrics, it appears to be more capable than the other big generative AI models on the market. In a show of confidence in the performance (and safety) of the new model, Google is making one variant of GeminiGemini 3 Proavailable to everyone via the Gemini app starting now. Its also making the same model a part of its core search service for subscribers. The new model topped the scores of the much-cited LMArena benchmark, a crowdsourced preference of various top models based on head-to-head responses to identical prompts. In the super-difficult Humanitys Last Exam benchmark test, which measured reasoning and knowledge, the Gemini 3 Pro scored 37.4% compared to GPT-5 Pros 31.6%. Gemini 3 also topped a range of other benchmarks measuring everything from reasoning to academic knowledge to math to tool use and agent functions. Gemini has been a multimodal model from the start, meaning that it can understand and reason about not just language, but images, audio, video, and codeall at the same time. This capability has been steadily improving since the first Gemini, and Gemini 3 reached state-of-the-art performance on the MMMU-Pro benchmark, which measures how well a model handles college-level and professional-level reasoning across text and images. It also topped the Video-MMMU benchmark, which measures the ability to reason over details of video footage. For example, the Gemini model might ingest a number of YouTube videos, then create a set of flashcards based on what it learned. Gemini also scored high on its ability to create computer code. Thats why it was a good time for the company to launch a new Cursor-like coding agent called Antigravity. Software development has proven to be among the first business functions in which generative AI has had a measurably positive impact. Benchmarks are telling, but as the response to OpenAIs GPT-5.1 showed, the feel or personality of a model matters to users (many users thought GPT-5 was a dramatic personality downgrade from GPT-4o). Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis seemed to acknowledge this in a tweet Tuesday. [B]eyond the benchmarks its been by far my favorite model to use for its style and depth, and what it can do to help with everyday tasks. Of course users will have their own say about Gemini 3s communication style, and how well it adapts to user preferences and work habits. With the release of Googles third-generation generative AI model, its a good time to look at the wider context of the race to build the dominant AI models of the 21st century. The contest, remember, is only a few years old. So far, OpenAIs models have spent the most time atop the benchmark rankings, and, on the strength of ChatGPT, have garnered most of the attention of all the players in the emerging AI industry. History on its side? From the start, Google has enjoyed some distinct advantages. Its been investing in AI talent and research for decades, starting long before OpenAI became a company in 2015. It began developing machine learning techniques for understanding search intent, defining page rank, and for placing ads as far back as 2001. It bought London-based AI research lab DeepMind back in 2014, and DeepMind has been responsible for some of Googles biggest AI accomplishments (AlphaGo, AlphaFold, Gemini models). The big research breakthroughs that enabled the current wave of generative AI models took place at Google. In 2017, Google researchers invented the transformer language model architecture that allowed LLMs to learn much more from their training data than earlier language models. The following year Google used the transformer architecture to build its BERT language model, which led directly to the GPT models that power ChatGPT. In fact, the search giant developed an AI chatbot well before OpenAI did, but was conflicted about releasing it or infusing it into its other products because of legal and business model concerns. All the data Google has access to more and better-quality training data than any other AI company. Its been indexing most of the information on the web since 1998. It also owns huge amounts of information such as local business data, mapping data, and customer reviews, which can be used to train AI models or augment their output (within search results, for example). Generative models are just now gaining the ability to learn about the world from video footage in the same way that models learn from large amounts of text. With YouTube, Google has access to mountains of it, and its AI models could gain an increasing intelligence advantage by training on it. As AI begins to manage more and more of our personal and work tasks, Googles advantages in experience, talent, and data and other resources may help sustain Geminis state-of-the-art status and overall functionality in the years to come. High stakes This is more than about which company can sell the most API access to its models or subscriptions to a chatbot. As models like Gemini, Claude, and GPT-5 may eventually become smarter, perhaps far smarter, than humans at almost any task. The company with the models that reaches that level, also called artificial general intelligence (AGI) may dominate the marketplace for consumer and business AI in the same way Google has dominated search in the first decades of this century. With tech companies already spending hundreds of billions to build the infrastructure for their AI businesses, the pressure is mounting to push harder and faster on the development of new generations of AI models.
Category:
E-Commerce
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