News & Events

Announcements, milestones, and happenings from The Matchbox team — new capabilities, client wins, research releases, and where to find us next.

News & Events

The $725 Billion Signal: What the AI Capex Supercycle Means for Marketing

The numbers behind the AI buildout are almost hard to read: roughly $725 billion in hyperscaler capex in 2026 and worldwide AI spending nearing $2.6 trillion. For marketers, the headline isn't the spend — it's the second-order effects: AI tooling getting cheaper and better every quarter, discovery moving onto AI surfaces, and a hype cycle that demands ROI discipline. Here's how to read the supercycle without getting swept up in it.

Jun 26, 2026

News & Events

The EU AI Act's Real Deadline Is Weeks Away: A Marketer's Field Guide

The EU AI Act's most consequential date for marketers lands August 2, 2026, when enforcement powers and key transparency obligations take effect. If your team uses AI to generate content, target audiences, or run chatbots, some of those obligations are now yours — including labeling AI-generated content and disclosing when people are talking to a machine. Here's a plain-English field guide to what changed and what to audit before the deadline.

Jun 23, 2026

News & Events

Commerce Comes to the Answer Engines

ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google have all turned their AI answers into shopping surfaces — through Instant Checkout, Buy with Pro, and Google's Universal Cart. Adobe reports AI-sourced traffic to US retailers grew 393% year over year in Q1 2026 and converts better than non-AI traffic. The new question for brands is not just whether you rank, but whether the AI will select your product — which depends on clean, complete, machine-readable product data.

Jun 19, 2026

News & Events

Google I/O 2026: AI Mode Goes Global

At Google I/O 2026 on May 19, Google made AI Mode the default Search experience for everyone globally, powered by its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model, and shipped the biggest Search box upgrade in 25 years. AI Mode passed a billion monthly users a year after launch. For marketers, the AI answer is no longer a tab you can ignore — it is the front door, and getting cited in it is now the job.

Jun 16, 2026

News & Events

The Privacy Sandbox Wind-Down: What Advertisers Should Do Now

On October 17, 2025, Google announced it is retiring most of the Privacy Sandbox ad and measurement APIs — including Topics, Protected Audience, and the Attribution Reporting API — after low adoption. Third-party cookies are not being deprecated, but the privacy-preserving replacements largely are. The winning move for advertisers is to stop waiting on browser APIs and invest in first-party data and server-side measurement you control.

Jun 8, 2026

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News & Events

The $725 Billion Signal: What the AI Capex Supercycle Means for Marketing

The EU AI Act's Real Deadline Is Weeks Away: A Marketer's Field Guide

Commerce Comes to the Answer Engines

Google I/O 2026: AI Mode Goes Global

The Privacy Sandbox Wind-Down: What Advertisers Should Do Now

Let's build thegrowth engine.

Let's build the
growth engine.