The Connected Brand Playbook for an AI-Driven World

When purchase decisions are made or influenced by AI before a consumer ever visits a retailer’s website, how can you ensure visibility when machines decide what shoppers should see? “Your PDP Is Now Training Data for AI: The Real Battle Isn’t Commerce. It’s Decision-Making." is a guide to help brands navigate this new paradigm and optimize around a stronger Brand Data Core to capture share of decision in AI search. 

“Modernize For AI, With AI" explores how enterprises can close the gap between AI ambition and AI readiness through a strategic approach to modernizing data, applications and infrastructure. From legacy systems modernization to building agent-ready architectures, get practical steps to create scalable, future-ready foundations for growth and insights on foundational capabilities organizations need to support enterprise AI successfully. 

The future of commerce isn’t built on more tracking. It’s built on smarter, privacy-first collaboration. In the latest piece in our Unlock series "The End of the Map? Navigating the New World of Commerce with Data Clean Rooms," Tim Hartmann explores how brands can navigate the shift away from third-party cookies using data clean rooms and Amazon Marketing Cloud to unlock measurable growth and secure, privacy-first collaboration. 

At the enterprise level, AI has moved from being a component of transformation to being its core engine. With agentic AI, the organizations that win will invest equally in people, processes and platforms. Our whitepaper "Agentforce Unlocked: Accelerating Digital Transformation with Salesforce Agentforce & VML" is a roadmap for brands to navigate these forces of change and turn the potential of AI into an engine of growth. 

In today’s competitive digital landscape, organizations leveraging Salesforce solutions are under constant pressure to extract maximum value from their investment. Our whitepaper "Unlock the Full Value of Salesforce Marketing Cloud: What Actually Drives ROI Across Customer Journeys" lays out the steps for organizations to extract maximum value from their Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform. 

AI is reshaping how consumers discover, evaluate and choose brands and much of that decision-making is now happening in environments marketers don’t directly see. In this Unlock report, “The Invisible Shelf: Your Guide to Winning in Agentic Commerce," Amanda Bailey and Molly Schonthal of the VML NA Commerce Enterprise Solutions team explore how AI agents are transforming discovery, consideration and selection. 

Gen Al is here, but widespread adoption remains elusive for many organizations. Our Unlock whitepaper "From Hype to Habit: Embedding Gen AI to Secure an Essential, Future-Proof Edge" presents a practical, people-first approach to Gen AI enablement, grounded in change management to embed Gen AI into day-to-day work – with four core principles to align leadership, assess readiness, build a change network and sustain momentum. 

Legacy e-commerce platform replacement systems have become an existential liability – hindering agility, innovation, and your ability to meet modern consumer demands. Our Unlock whitepaper "The E-Commerce Migration Manual: A Strategic Guide to Platform Migration and Growth on Shopify" offers the definitive e-commerce migration strategy to transform your digital commerce operations and unleash unprecedented growth on Shopify. 

How do you embrace personalization while ensuring each interaction still conveys the same foundational brand truth? Our Unlock whitepaper “The Content Consistency Paradox: How to Scale AI-Powered Personalization Without Fracturing Your Brand” delivers a three-layered governance framework and six steps to implement it to personalize your brand content using AI within carefully set guardrails.

Our whitepaper "Unlocking Transformation Potential Through Change Management: Why People Are Crucial to the Success of Business Transformation Programs" highlights the human factor for transformation and how success begins with placing individuals, processes and organizational culture at the core of your transformation strategy. 

Our Unlock whitepaper “The AI-Powered Automotive Revolution: A Strategic Blueprint for the Modern Automotive CMO” explores how to harness AI's potential for growth. From overcoming inefficient and time-intensive model year content cycles to closing the post-sale experience gap and strengthening data privacy practices, the paper presents a practical and safe framework for deploying AI. 

For brands, a $13 trillion disability dividend remains untapped due to inaccessible digital experiences. Accessibility is even more critical with agentic AI – if your digital ecosystem is inaccessible, it’s invisible to AI agents. Our Unlock whitepaper “Mine the Gap Between Total Addressable and Total Accessible Markets to Capture New Growth” reveals how brands can make accessibility a competitive strength. 

Our VML Unlock whitepaper "How Intelligent Experiences Can Fuel Enterprise Growth Engines” gives you immediate actions to future-proof your website into an engine for growth. In an AI-first world, value accrues to systems that can respond, adapt and explain themselves. Organizations that act now will transform their websites into systems that drive revenue – those that don't risk being misinterpreted by machines they don't control.

With 5.4 billion social users and over 50% already making in-app purchases, this dynamic market is expanding 2.3x faster than digital commerce overall. Our whitepaper “Shrinking the Distance From Discovery to Purchase to Make Social Commerce Work" offers practical steps and a proven strategy for enterprise brands to generate social commerce success in weeks, not months. 

"From Fragmented To Unified: Building Customer Experiences That Are Human First, Data-Inspired and Deliver Results" outlines a strategic framework for building a unified customer experience, transforming disparate data points into a powerful engine for growth by leveraging Customer Data Platforms (CDP), first-party data and the strategic use of AI in CX.

"Using AI Voice to Reduce Buyer Uncertainty and Increase Conversion" lays out the steps to assess your readiness for AI voice and start your exploration into AI voice for e-commerce. Discover why AI voice matters, how it enhances customer experience, increases conversion rates and reduces costs by handling common customer queries. 

“From Promise to Performance: Helping You Master Adobe's Agentic AI Capabilities” is an essential guide for anyone seeking a proven partner to implement Adobe's sophisticated AI solutions. Download the guide to get the playbook for deploying agentic AI, proving the ROI of your Adobe investment, and leading your industry in the new era of autonomous marketing.

Should your organization build its own AI marketing solutions, or should you partner with experts to develop them? “Unlock AI in Marketing: Partner or Build – And How to Start,” by Alan Davies, Head of Client Business Transformation at WPP and Global Consulting Lead at VML, explores the trade-offs behind the build-vs-partner decision and offers a practical roadmap to help brands act with confidence in a fast-evolving landscape.

Today, AI-powered shopping assistants like Amazon Rufus are transforming product discoverability and conversion in the era of agentic AI. Our new whitepaper "Beyond the Search Bar: How AI Assistants like Rufus are Redefining the Future of Digital Shopping" lays out the steps for brands to adapt their content strategies to win in the era of agentic AI. 

As we enter the Machine-To-Machine Agentic AI era, proactive AI agents will disrupt how audiences discover, shop, buy, live and work. "Have My Agent Call Your Agent: Winning the Machine-To-Machine Marketing Future" shows you how to prepare for Agentic AI and why algorithms, not people, are the new gatekeepers. 

To optimize your digital shelf and prepare for agentic commerce this holiday season, "The Marketplace Holiday Playbook: Why Black Friday Starts in the Algorithm" shows you how to master the marketplace algorithms to ensure holiday shoppers find your products discoverable, shoppable, and recommendable.

AI is redefining business transformation, but its impact depends on the quality of the data behind it. "From Data to Dominance: How Data Readiness Fuels AI Growth" explores how clean, connected and accessible data turns AI into a measurable growth engine and how data readiness empowers faster, more accurate and scalable AI adoption.

AI is no longer a future trend, but a competitive necessity. Fragmented and inconsistent data is what prevents brands from moving from AI experimentation to real, measurable impact. “From Chaos to Clarity Through AI: Turning Data, Insights and Intelligence Into Measurable Brand Growth” is here to help you conquer that chaos.

In today's fragmented digital landscape, enterprise marketing leaders face a critical challenge: scaling content production without sacrificing brand consistency or budget. "AI Powered Content Supply Chain for the Enterprise" unpacks how to reinvent your enterprise content supply chain with AI and navigate the factors that hinder growth.