Expedia Group announced a significant expansion of its B2B technology platform with new APIs and advertising solutions designed to empower travel partners and enhance traveler experiences. These updates, revealed at Expedia Group’s EXPLORE™ event, include GenAI-powered discovery tools, advanced automation, and deeper integrations with leading AI platforms.

Smarter Connections with New B2B APIs

Expedia Group is scaling its Private Label Solutions by launching next-generation APIs that give partners access to expanded travel inventory and capabilities:

• Car API: Inventory from 110+ brands across 190 countries, including exclusive providers

• Activities API: Over 170,000 bookable experiences worldwide

• Insurance API: Trip protection integration, starting on Expedia TAAP for travel agents

• Air API: Soon enabling seamless combination of flights with lodging and car rentals

Alfonso Paredes, President of Private Label Solutions, highlights the platform’s growth:
"We delivered over 135 million room nights globally in 2024, and these new APIs will further deepen partner engagement, loyalty, and revenue."

Streamlined Hotel Operations with Reservation Management API

Expedia Group introduced a Reservation Management API with 15 new features, built on GraphQL, aimed at reducing operational costs by automating workflows. This tool enables hoteliers to efficiently manage bookings, payments, and data recovery, freeing up resources for higher-impact tasks. The solution addresses an estimated $120 million annual cost from manual operations.

GenAI Redefines Travel Discovery

Leveraging GenAI, Expedia Group launches innovative traveler experiences:

• Expedia Trip Matching: A first-of-its-kind feature turning Instagram reels into personalized travel recommendations, available for beta in June. Travelers can share reels and receive AI-generated itineraries and tips.

• AI Agent on Hotels.com: Integrates conversational discovery and servicing, offering real-time, personalized recommendations and booking assistance.

• OpenAI Operator and Microsoft Copilot Actions: Integrations bridging the gap between AI travel conversations and bookings, ensuring Expedia brands meet travelers across emerging AI platforms.

Enhanced Advertising Solutions for Travel Partners

Expedia Group Advertising delivers new tools for reaching travelers earlier in their journey:

• Creative collaboration with Beautiful Destinations: Partners co-create viral, shoppable content reaching 50 million+ followers.

• Offsite targeting via The Trade Desk: Precise, privacy-first audience targeting using Expedia’s first-party data.

• Advertiser-Funded Loyalty: DMOs can sponsor bonus rewards to drive bookings and loyalty through OneKeyCash incentives.

Rob Torres, SVP of Expedia Group Advertising, remarks:

"Our expanded media network and loyalty offerings help partners connect with high-intent travelers with relevant messaging at the right time."

Pricefx, the global leader in AI-powered, cloud-native pricing software, announced the release of its next-generation pricing AI platform with expanded capabilities designed to speed up deployment and enhance pricing decision-making. The platform improvements include advanced agentic AI, strengthened data foundations through PricingAI by Pricefx™, and new productized price optimization use cases tailored for complex B2B environments.

Accelerating Pricing Transformation in Volatile Markets

In today’s volatile market landscape, shaped by tariff fluctuations, supply chain disruptions, and unpredictable costs, pricing agility is critical. Traditional manual pricing processes are often too slow and risky, especially for companies managing thousands of products and complex pricing tiers. Pricefx’s enhanced AI platform empowers businesses to move from spreadsheet-driven, intuition-based pricing toward dynamic, data-driven strategies.

Benefits of Pricefx’s AI Platform

• Faster Pricing Decisions: Pricing experts can reduce decision times from weeks to minutes, with some processes fully automated.

• Greater Pricing Clarity: Improved insights into customer willingness to pay and demand forecasting enable fair and market-aligned price setting.

• Scalable Confidence: Sales and business leaders gain comprehensive visibility and confidence in consistent, profitable pricing at scale.

These advancements come on the heels of Pricefx’s recent recognition with a Gold Globee award for best AI-powered pricing optimization solution and as a finalist for SAP’s Pinnacle award in AI application.

impact.com, the world’s leading commerce partnership management platform, announced strong growth in the first quarter of 2025, driven by rising recognition that partner-led marketing is essential for authentic consumer connections and revenue growth. The company added over 700 new clients, including New Balance, Hydrojug, and Monzo, now serving more than 4,500 top global brands.

Partner-Led Marketing Emerges as Key Growth Driver

With marketing budgets tightening and consumer distrust of traditional ads growing—only 2% of consumers consider traditional ads important—brands increasingly turn to trusted recommendations from creators, publishers, and advocates. The global creator economy is expected to surpass $32 billion in 2025, reflecting this shift.

impact.com CEO David A. Yovanno emphasized that partnerships are no longer optional but critical for brands seeking authenticity and competitive advantage.

Q1 2025 Product Innovations and Industry Leadership

• Creator: Enhanced product gifting streamlines brand and creator collaboration.

• Advocate: Launched Cash Rewards, a flexible incentive for referral motivation.

• Performance: Introduced automated partner re-engagement and Event Risk reporting to detect suspicious activity.

Additional highlights include expanding the leadership team with Justin Morrison as Chief Revenue Officer and announcing the return of the Partnerships Experience event (iPX) in June, featuring keynote speaker James Clear.

Awards and Research

impact.com earned multiple industry awards for platform excellence and partnership success, including G2’s Best Software and the US Partnership Awards. The company also released key research exploring evolving consumer journeys and effective affiliate measurement.

At ShopAble 2025, Skai, a leading omnichannel commerce media platform, announced the general availability of Celeste AI, the first GenAI-powered agent specifically designed for commerce marketers. Following a successful closed beta with over 50 clients, Celeste AI is now fully integrated into Skai’s platform, delivering actionable insights on budget, bidding strategies, cross-channel performance, and anomaly detection. Early adopters have reported up to 50% efficiency gains and 20% performance improvements.

Celeste AI Empowers Marketers to Unlock Growth Opportunities

Kelly Gerrard, Director of eCommerce Marketing at Marshall, praised Celeste AI’s impact on managing complex campaigns, highlighting how it uncovered a high-converting niche in the kids and youth segment by analyzing competitor insights — a critical advantage ahead of peak season.

New Suite of Unified Commerce Solutions

Skai also launched several complementary solutions powered by Celeste AI to unify marketing and commerce operations:

• Strategic Digital Shelf: Real-time product visibility, buy box metrics, competitor tracking, and keyword data for media optimization.

• Retail Insights: Comprehensive tracking of sales, profit, inventory, and customer behavior across 100+ retailers.

• Content Optimization: AI-driven content gap detection, keyword optimization, and automated listing updates to reduce ACOS.

• Retail Operations: Automated catalog issue detection and resolution to protect content accuracy and performance.

• Revenue Recovery: Identifies and recoups lost revenue from chargebacks and invoice errors to reinvest in growth.

Nich Weinheimer, Skai’s Chief Strategy Officer, emphasized the platform’s seamless integration: “One login, one contract, no compromises,” meeting marketers’ demand for combined commerce operations and media capabilities.

Skai’s Vision for Next-Gen Commerce Media

Gil Sadeh, Skai’s President, stated: “Our mission is to cut through complexity and drive growth. With omnichannel media activation integrated with commerce operations and powered by GenAI, only Skai can make this powerful solution possible.”

Corsearch, a global leader in trademark and brand protection, today unveiled Corsearch Zeal 2.0, an AI-native platform designed to transform how brands combat counterfeiting and online abuse. Moving beyond traditional takedown volume metrics, Zeal 2.0 offers an outcomes-driven approach, providing brands with real-time visibility into online channel health and powerful tools to proactively neutralize threats with unmatched speed and precision.

Innovations Powering Zeal 2.0’s Intelligence-Led Brand Protection:

• Cleanliness Score™: A proprietary, real-time metric that transparently measures a brand’s online health, quantifying consumer and commercial risk beyond simple takedown counts.

• Deep Semantic Detection & AI Search: Advanced AI-powered indexing, image recognition, and cross-brand datasets uncover sophisticated infringements, even when disguised or lacking explicit brand identifiers.

• ‘Search, Enrich, Act’ Automation Engine: This AI framework dramatically boosts efficiency by dynamically generating keywords, auto-classifying content with high precision, and automating enforcement for faster takedowns and higher success rates.

• AI-Native Architecture: Built from the ground up to process up to 150,000 listings per client daily, enabling scalable, industry-defining innovations beyond bolt-on AI solutions.

Corsearch CEO Abel Clark highlighted the paradigm shift: “The era of vanity metrics in brand protection is over. Zeal 2.0 empowers brands with near real-time threat visibility, adaptive risk assessment, and prioritized enforcement delivering clear ROI and consumer protection.”

Matteo Amerio, President of Brand and Content Protection, emphasized: “Corsearch Zeal 2.0 gives brands mastery over their online distribution through speed, efficiency, and AI-driven precision, building on our 75-year legacy.”

Additional features include automated reporting, SKU detection, machine learning-driven keyword generation, and advanced risk clustering — providing a comprehensive suite for modern brand protection challenges.

5WPR, one of the largest independently owned PR and digital marketing firms in the U.S., announced it has won a Gold Stevie Award for PR Campaign of the Year (Technology). The award honors its rapid-response media campaign supporting Huntress, a leading cybersecurity firm, following the discovery of a critical vulnerability in ConnectWise ScreenConnect in February 2024.

In collaboration with Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan and his team, 5WPR executed a swift and targeted media strategy, securing 104 media placements and generating over 14 billion impressions within the first month. Huntress was prominently featured in 90% of ConnectWise-related coverage, including top-tier outlets such as Axios, TechCrunch, Dark Reading, and TechRepublic. This campaign cemented Huntress as a trusted voice in real-time cybersecurity insights.

Lori Ruggiero, Managing Partner and EVP, Corporate and Technology at 5WPR, said, “Winning the Gold Stevie reflects the speed, precision, and expertise our team delivers in high-stakes communications. We are proud to support Huntress in protecting businesses and shaping critical cybersecurity conversations.”

The Stevie Awards are globally recognized honors celebrating excellence in marketing, communications, and PR across industries. The win highlights 5WPR’s expertise in translating complex technical issues into impactful narratives that build visibility and credibility.

Over half of businesses (55%) are currently using AI for localization, with 81% planning to adopt hybrid approaches combining AI and human review within a year, according to a new survey from Lokalise of 500 business leaders across Europe and North America. The findings highlight AI’s transformative role in enabling companies to meet growing demands for personalized, culturally relevant content.

Insights from the report include:

• 42% of businesses expect AI to handle most translation tasks within a year.

• 46% predict AI will run all localization workflows within a year.

• AI is most frequently applied to website/app content (52%), marketing materials (48%), regulatory documents (48%), and internal documentation (46%).

• 74% of companies say localization contributes over 26% of their revenue growth; for 11%, it accounts for more than half.

• Despite growing reliance on AI, 63% acknowledge human review remains essential to maintain quality.

• Over two-thirds of companies face localization maturity gaps, with 43% still using spreadsheets for localization management, causing inefficiencies.

• Larger enterprises show higher localization maturity and are more likely to invest in sophisticated localization processes.

Magnus Slind-Näslund, CTO at Lokalise, stated, “Localization is no longer a ‘nice to have’—it’s a core driver of revenue and customer satisfaction. While many recognize this, too few have mature processes in place. The surge in AI adoption is set to close that gap, enabling businesses to scale globally with greater efficiency.”

This comprehensive report, titled “The Revenue Impact of Localization: Why You Can No Longer Afford to Ignore It,” arrives amid rapid content growth, cost pressures, and heightened expectations for culturally relevant experiences, offering practical strategies for global teams to improve localization maturity and unlock growth.

Cineverse, a next gen entertainment studio, has announced the formation of the Cineverse Motion Pictures Group. 
This strategic move is aimed at expanding and optimizing new business opportunities within the feature film sector. 
To lead the initiative, Yolanda Macias has been appointed Chief Motion Pictures Officer. 
The announcement underscores Cineverse’s commitment to bolstering its theatrical film slate following the remarkable success of Terrifier 3.

Developments and Strategic Appointments:

1. Leadership Update and New Division Formation

• Cineverse establishes the Motion Pictures Group to enhance its film business initiatives.

• Yolanda Macias is appointed as the Chief Motion Pictures Officer, a newly created role.

• Macias will report directly to the Office of the CEO, which includes Chairman and CEO Chris McGurk and President/Chief Strategy Officer Erick Opeka.

2. Executive Team Renewals

• Key executives Chris McGurk, Erick Opeka, Mark Torres, and Gary Loffredo have extended their contracts.

• Mark Torres, Chief People Officer, now also oversees Cineverse Services India.

• Mark Lindsey, CFO since 2023, continues in his role and reports to the Office of the CEO.

• Gary Loffredo, Chief Legal Officer, also continues under the same reporting structure.

3. Success Driving Strategic Expansion

• Following the box office success of Terrifier 3, now the highest-grossing unrated theatrical release ever, Cineverse is scaling up its theatrical efforts.

• Chairman Chris McGurk emphasized the strength of the executive team and the company's growth ambitions, especially in theatrical distribution.

Upcoming Film Releases and Slate Highlights:

1. Franchise Expansions & New Projects

• The Toxic Avenger – Scheduled for theatrical release on August 29.

• Silent Night, Deadly Night – Slated for December 12.

• Wolf Creek: Legacy – Set for release in 2026.

• Return to Silent Hill – Release date TBA.

2. Original Indie Film Investments

• Lesbian Space Princess – Coming in 2025.

• Escape from the 21st Century – Scheduled for 2025.

• The Things You Kill – Also expected in 2025.

• Additional titles to be announced throughout the year.

3. Multi-Platform Distribution Strategy

• Cineverse Motion Pictures Group will distribute films across all windows, including theatrical, digital, and physical platforms.

• Focus remains on serving niche and passionate fan communities, particularly through genre and franchise content.

Cineverse’s latest strategic move positions the company for a robust expansion in the motion picture landscape. With the establishment of the Cineverse Motion Pictures Group and the leadership of Yolanda Macias, the studio is doubling down on its theatrical slate while leveraging its executive strength and cross-platform distribution strategies. This marks a pivotal moment in Cineverse’s growth trajectory, signaling a bold step into a future of ambitious cinematic storytelling.