Harriet Kingaby, Founder of the Conscious Advertising Network, cited a Reuters study revealing that “58% of the public are struggling to identify the truth”. This is a result of social media echo chambers and AI summaries of social media disinformation that many trust at face value, creating a ‘no-click internet’. Content creators are no longer being paid, which poses an existential threat to news and independent media. Falling ad revenue for news publishers will mean independent journalism fades away. A third of publishers could close by the end of 2026. 

As a result, discrimination has become normalised and prejudiced. We are witnessing a new form of digital censorship, where “the rules are invisible and machines are the referees”. Misinformation in times of crisis whips through platforms faster than the truth, slowing emergency response and increasing civil unrest. Civil unrest slows GDP by up to 1.5% and increases the cost of disaster recovery by as much as 15%. 

Ebiquity’s Group Director of AI Solutions, Travis Lusk, encouraged brands to codify all elements of their expertise using AI; expertise is a combination of an organisation’s institutional knowledge and its experience, and how that knowledge is deployed. Codification of “how we do things around here” from any and every source into a single AI tool enables brands to build both a competitive moat and the runway to be experimental. Brands can then share grids of codified expertise with all relevant teams, functions, and agency partners, and this is the key to scaling. 

NVIDIA’s Matt Groshong took ERA26 delegates on a whistlestop history lesson from Perception AI (e.g. speech recognition) to Generative AI (content creation), on to Agentic AI (coding assistants) and ultimately Physical AI (self-driving cars and general robotics). Always stressing the importance of guardrails, checks, and balances, Matt identified how, at each step of this still-in-progress journey, AI has helped to close the “know-do” gap for business. He also encouraged brands to jump on board this new industrial revolution and build their own AI factories, whose inputs are power and data and outputs are business transformation at scale.