Karen said “[Mittal] is not short-term. He’ll be completely constructive and collaborative with BT, he really understands the holistic approach of telecoms." She added that taking a stake in BT was not an obvious move for the company but Mittal’s experience will have given him an understanding of where BT needs to focus.

Joseph said the AI search market was “hotting up”. “The risk from AI is . . . that general web search as a whole is made redundant by new ways of matching users with information, products and services,” he said. The “big unknown”, however, is whether it can be reliable enough for mainstream use. “AI is stubbornly prone to confabulation,” Teasdale said. “At the scale of billions of queries per day, serious failures are inevitable.”

One of the key points of contention is the removal of proposals for controls on material that is “legal but harmful”. The wording sparked concerns of an incursion on free speech, but critics say the U-turn amounts to a watering down of the rules. “These original proposals were too far-reaching and did have the potential of incentivising platforms to limit free speech online,” says Niamh Burns at Enders Analysis. “But it could be argued disinformation has slightly fallen through the cracks in the end.”

Gareth said “The direction of travel for console sales is grim....Microsoft have had a terrible year; Sony have followed them having a terrible quarter. And in some respects, it's not a surprise because what we're seeing is that the model they’re offering is really coming under stress"

As Jamie MacEwan, Enders Analysis pointed out, there’s a clear disconnect between what AI can offer and what makes a good advert. “Marketers want to make AI relatable by showing it in personal and creative settings, but highlighting it in this way makes it easy to caricature as a clumsy or even destructive interloper,” he said.

“Among big tech, Meta is perhaps best placed to realise short-term returns on its AI investments,” comments Jamie MacEwan, Senior Media Analyst at Enders Analysis. “Unlike Google with search, Meta does not have to be concerned about Gen AI replacing its core social networks.” “Meta’s cost control around AI looks better than its rivals, with its capex growth rate coming in at less than half Google or Microsoft’s,” says MacEwan. “Meta doesn’t expect to actually make money from gen AI for years, but ‘Core AI’, where they use the tech to improve ad targeting and content recommendations, is already having an impact,” says MacEwan. “The message to investors is it is better to be early than late, and that this AI infrastructure could be redirected towards core revenue drivers like ranking and recommendations should the demand for pure gen AI products not pan out as hoped.”

“The idea that we’re going to move to a world where half the ads that you see on TV are for you is unlikely,” said Joseph Teasdale, head of technology at the research firm Enders Analysis. “But the fact that the medium does support targeting changes the way you think about it.”

Industry experts told Digiday that Google’s policy change might spur more advertisers and agencies to explore such unusual targeting approaches. “I fully expect these experiments to continue,” said Jamie MacEwan, senior media analyst at Enders Analysis. He noted that, although it’s unclear now how many users might choose to enable cookies on their browsers, “the supply of cookie-enabled inventory will tighten.

"If OpenAI can deliver technology that matches its ambitious vision for what AI can be, it will be transformative for its own prospects, but also the economy more broadly," Hamish Low and other analysts at Enders Analysis wrote in a recent research note. "Falling short could be fatal." The stakes are high for OpenAI, which is facing off against a growing list of wealthy, big-spending rivals. The analysts added that staying at the cutting edge of AI was key to the startup justifying itself to the big tech backers on which it depended.