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What’s happening right now — and what it actually means.

Virginia projected its data center tax exemption would cost $1.5 million a year when it was created in 2008. In fiscal 2025, the state’s own report put the actual cost at $1.9 billion — a gap that has become a reference point in data center tax debates in more than a dozen other states.

AI has not solved marketing’s measurement problem, it has raised the stakes, because boards now expect proof of ROI at the same time as the tools that were supposed to provide it have made attribution harder to defend

Ohio suspended its data center tax break after the cost to the state hit $1.6 billion — eleven times what legislators had approved — making it the first major US state to pull back on AI infrastructure incentives over actual fiscal cost

Starbucks is now selling almost as much protein cold foam as flat whites, which means customers are paying two extra dollars to make their coffee taste a little more like a protein shake

Nearly 150,000 tech workers have been laid off so far in 2026 with AI cited as the reason, at companies that are simultaneously posting record revenues, and the gap between those two facts is starting to show up in public opinion data about every brand associated with the industry

WPP left its beach at Cannes Lions this year after holding it for years and an independent AI agency took the space, which is a minor real estate story that happens to describe the entire holding company model in a single transaction

An agency submitted fabricated case study materials to Cannes Lions last year, won a Grand Prix and 11 other awards on the strength of them, had all 12 revoked, and the festival responded by requiring every future entry to be personally signed off by the CEO and the CMO

When an AI interaction goes badly, 38% of consumers blame the brand and not the AI vendor, which means every AI deployment in a customer journey is a brand risk that most legal and marketing teams are still treating as a technology decision

For twenty years Google held more advertising revenue than any company on earth. In 2026, Meta is forecast to overtake it by $4 billion on the back of an AI system that selects the audience, writes the creative, and optimizes the budget without a human in the loop

A Clemson study reframed consumer happiness and the finding is this: shopping calms stress for an afternoon, but the purchases that actually raise long-term wellbeing are the ones that disappear into how someone already lives

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