June can be busy between Q2 winding down and getting outside to soak up all those glorious, long daylight hours. If you haven’t had time to check in on this month’s AI in marketing happenings, don’t sweat. These recent headlines made waves in June 2025, curated here for your convenience.
AI Becoming More Popular for Shopping
More than half of shoppers are using AI to fill their carts, according to the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Professor Luca Cian describes a shift toward “augmented decision-making,” where shoppers lean on AI to ease mental load while retaining final say.
Users’ climbing proclivity toward AI shopping assistants solidifies a couple of brand, marketing and SEO ideas that we’ve seen coming for some time:
- Brands must compete not just for consumer attention but algorithms’, too, for a chance at winning traffic.
- Marketing approaches must differentiate between transactional engagement and richer, deeper human connections.
In light of these increasingly common revelations, it won’t hurt to heed these best practices:
- Optimize for AI-first discovery: Structure product data, metadata and other important information with AI visibility in mind.
- Balance automation with human touch: Keep human support in place for complex or emotional purchase paths.
- Prioritize transparency: Offer explainable AI outputs that build trust, i.e., “AI chose this because…”
- Differentiate marketing strategies: Tailor messaging for practical vs. emotional purchase contexts.
- Build brand equity before AI filters: Cultivating an emotional connection with customers remains a priority; however, establishing brand familiarity and trust early is key.
Are We En Route to a Cognitive Revolution?
People are beginning to compare the current AI revolution to the industrial revolution — perhaps not in the way you’re thinking, though.
With AI continuing to offload human cognitive effort for various manual tasks, comparing it to how the industrial revolution mechanized manual labour isn’t far-fetched. The interesting part is whether this trend will make humans vacuous; less intelligent.
Did the evolution of technology make humans physically weaker post-industrial revolution? It’s tough to say, but some studies suggest that humans partake in much less incidental physical activity as a result.
Whether the same will be true of AI and our cognitive capabilities is still unknown, but it’s not unrealistic to believe traditional methods of reading, writing and research will prove increasingly valuable for our cognitive health as humanity adopts more autonomous tech.
That said, if you’re a marketer who’s already exercising responsible and ethical AI use — and engaging in thoughtful hobbies outside of work — I don’t think you have much to worry about.
Copyrighted Content Clashes Continue
AI training data is a hot topic, straddling a fine line between ethicality and robustness. Large AI businesses scrape the surface web, gathering swaths of data to train LLMs to their heart’s content with little regard for copyright. Many brands have even taken today’s largest AI player, ChatGPT, to court for similar claims, but there’s a new bout brewing: Perplexity vs. the BBC.
In a strongly worded letter to the Jeff Bezos-backed AI assistant Perplexity, the BBC alleges that the chatbot produces BBC content “verbatim” in its responses. As such, the BBC is demanding that Perplexity:
- Immediately cease scraping BBC content for AI training.
- Delete any content already collected.
- Submit a proposal for financial compensation related to its alleged misuse.
In response, Perplexity is quoted as writing, “The BBC’s claims are just one more part of the overwhelming evidence that the BBC will do anything to preserve Google’s illegal monopoly.”
This clash, and many others like it, are growing more common in a world racing toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). This is the first time the BBC has taken such legal action in this space, marking a turning point in the struggle to define how AI startups can use public-sector and journalistic content in model training.
The silver lining across these disputes is that, should courts back publishers’ claims and take their side, the build-out of AI-powered news may become more regulated, ensuring better standards of attribution and accuracy.
Alternatively, many researchers are hard at work contriving competitive ways of using completely ethically sourced data to train large language models that stack up to the market dominators.
Jobs Most Easily Automated by AI Are… Growing?
Many people may have guessed that AI would help increase productivity levels across organizations. The proliferation of generative AI over the past few years has led to productivity growth in industries most exposed to AI — such as financial services and software publishing — which nearly quadrupled from 7% (2018–2022) to 27% (2018–2024), according to PwC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer. But what about job growth?
Fears of AI taking people’s jobs, especially highly automatable roles, started ringing out from the very beginning. Contrary to those concerns, PwC’s data shows that various jobs — including ones most ripe for automation — actually grew by 38%. If you were understandably worried about job loss, perhaps this new information can provide solace. But there is a bit of a catch: PwC also reveals that learning new AI-related skills is the secret to not just job security, but premium pay, too. Roles requiring AI skills command a 56% wage premium. Cha-ching!
If you’ve yet to really spend time learning about AI, how to use it well or even build your own models from user-friendly open source tools, now is the time.
The Only Certainty Is Surprise
This month’s roundup is a bit of a mixed bag between content and training data clashes, an interesting revelation about how AI may not be the job-stealing bandit many thought and what the future may look like as AI continues to offload various cognitive tasks.
If there’s one consistent thing you can count on when it comes to AI development, it’s that you never know what tomorrow, next week or next month will bring. There’s always something new.