Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ: WDAY), the enterprise AI platform for HR, finance, and IT, today named Sarah Kennedy Ellis chief marketing officer, effective October 5, 2026, reporting to Aneel Bhusri, Workday co-founder, CEO, and chair. Kennedy Ellis will lead Workday’s global marketing and communications organization and will be responsible for championing the company’s brand narrative and growth strategy for the AI era.

Kennedy Ellis brings more than 20 years of marketing expertise to the role. She joins Workday from Google, where she led global marketing for Google Cloud and Google Workspace and helped build the engine behind one of the fastest growing businesses in enterprise technology. Prior to joining Google, she was chief marketing officer of Adobe Experience Cloud, and chief marketing officer of Marketo, playing a critical role in Marketo’s successful acquisition by Adobe in 2018.

“I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Sarah to the Workday leadership team,” said Aneel Bhusri, co-founder, CEO, and chair, Workday. “She’s driven growth at scale for some of the biggest technology companies in the world, and has spent the last decade at the center of enterprise AI. As every organization actively navigates the future of AI to better manage their people and their money, Sarah’s unique ability to translate complex technological shifts into compelling, customer-centric stories is exactly what we need.”

“I am incredibly honored to join Workday at such a pivotal moment for enterprises and the humans that power them,” added Kennedy Ellis. “We have entered an era where AI is fundamentally redefining how businesses operate and Workday sits at the center of that transformation, uniquely positioned to help organizations harness the power of their most vital assets—their people and their money. I look forward to working with the team to tell that story and fuel our next phase of global growth.”

MBA Group, a leader in customer communications for both print and digital, today announces a major new expansion with the launch of its brand-new conversation intelligence platform, MBA Pulse.

For over 40 years, MBA has worked with major regulated brands, including industry giants such as AMEX, Deloitte, Legal and General, and National Trust, and this next step marks an exciting period for the Group, whose new platform will fully integrate with current tech stacks, coordinating workflows and delivery.

With a huge increase in AI adoption across organisations and many teams rolling out agents and automation, businesses are at risk of compounding issues in current workflows, rather than addressing the problem of siloed working. This is further demonstrated by research from Aspire CCS, which has found only 13% of organisations describe themselves as fully integrated. MBA Group has used four decades of customer communications expertise to address this problem; Pulse can solve siloed workflow problems and improve customer communications without having to entirely replace existing tech. The Pulse technology is easily implemented into enterprises, and additionally, there are several ways a business can choose to integrate it.

Unlike many platforms in this space, which require businesses to rip out and rebuild their existing technology stack, Pulse integrates directly with what’s already there. It’s able to connect to existing systems, data sources and communication tools rather than replacing them, allowing businesses to modernise their communications without disrupting the infrastructure they already rely on.

The flexibility of Pulse also extends to the operational level. MBA Pulse can consolidate large customer communication chains into one platform, giving teams the ability to set up multi-channel campaigns in under ten minutes. Built around four connected capabilities: View, Create, Orchestrate, and Deploy, Pulse unifies fragmented data and siloed channels into a single, reliable customer view. To demonstrate the flexibility of the platform, businesses can manage the full platform themselves, hand it over entirely to Pulse to run on their behalf, or take a hybrid approach. In practice, this may look like running the ‘Create’ in-house while Pulse manages ‘Orchestrate’ and ‘Deploy’. There is flexibility with scaling support up or down as needs change.

MBA Group, as an entity, is a family-run powerhouse competing with major industry giants. Sami Aintaoui, CEO of MBA Group, comments on Pulse, sharing “We built Pulse as the first comprehensive customer experience platform for complex businesses. A modular platform that can be used as a powerful supplement within your existing stack, or as a pre-integrated comms ecosystem in its own right. No longer do you need one tool for marketing and another for servicing. Pulse is a unified platform that empowers your teams to do more and marks the next step in our own evolution, from output partner to the technology behind how brands actually talk to their customers.”

Key features of Pulse

Feature-level detail per module of the platform includes:

• Create: Pulse has the ability to build compelling and compliant communications across every channel. As a collaborative communications management layer, it’s designed to help you create clarity and cut-through.
• Orchestrate: Complex campaigns are mapped and managed visually, with the ability to build journeys step-by-step (trigger, send, wait, split) or describe them in natural language for the AI assistant to build.
• Deploy: Reach across SMS, Email, WhatsApp, push, print, video and emerging channels like RCS. Once live, track customer communications in real-time with analytics across every touchpoint and reporting metrics built directly to your KPIs.
• View: Every interaction is instantly accessible. You’re able to unify fragmented data into one reliable customer context for meaningful customer conversations.

Pulse can be fully implemented within five weeks, with some businesses already seeing a 76% uplift on industry average in customer engagement

Compared to other market players, some of whom have legacy standings in the industry, Pulse promises a refreshing implementation process, taking just five weeks to implement into an existing business, no matter the size of the enterprise. The agility and sheer capabilities of the platform are something that current customers have openly praised.

One of those is Dan Young, Head of Process Improvement at OutsideClinic. Young states, “If we work out the time it’s saved from other people, we’re now spending a lot less time having to try and get cohorts of data together, and sending things off to the print house where it would then need to be proofed to make sure it’s printed correctly. Whilst within Pulse, you can do all of that instantly.”

OutsideClinic has already seen and measured tangible results. With their customer communications, they’ve already seen a 35% increase in open rates (a 76% uplift on industry averages) and a 6x increase in email enquiries, directly from using Pulse.

At the moment, through wider use cases, there are over 9 million customers receiving communications through Pulse, with billions of data points being processed at a rate and quality which isn’t possible with legacy technology.

Beyond OutsideClinic, current customers using Pulse include Currys, OVO Energy, Affinity Water, The Atlanta and MarkerStudy Insurance Group, Melton Building Society and Funding Circle.

To get in touch for further information or a platform demonstration, contact Katie Mousley at kmousley@mba-group.com.

Notes to editor: Please provide a link back to https://www.mba-group.com/pulse/ should you publish this story.

Insights: 13% statistic courtesy of Aspire CCS.

Proven agency leader Julie Batliner to succeed Padilla veteran Matt Kucharski as part of planned executive transition

Padilla, an integrated communications agency with 7 offices across the U.S., has named Julie Batliner the firm’s next president. Batliner will succeed Matt Kucharski, who will transition to a planned retirement at the end of 2026. She becomes only the fifth leader of Padilla since the agency was founded in 1961.

Kucharski joined Padilla (then Padilla Speer Beardsley) in 1989 as the first assistant account executive to work on a new technology client that is still on the agency’s roster today. During Kucharski’s more than 37 years at Padilla, he helped transform the agency’s services and capabilities, led the teams that secured several of the largest clients in the firm’s history, expanded its industry expertise and guided the company through significant growth and change. He has been president since 2017 and was central to Padilla’s transition from an employee-owned firm to the U.S. division of holding and management company AVENIR GLOBAL, while maintaining the entrepreneurial culture of its independent agency roots. He will transition to a fractional role with the agency as an executive counselor through the end of the year.

“From Padilla’s roots in public relations, we’ve purposefully evolved into a multi-dimensional brand and communications firm that brings strategic counsel and results-based, data-driven execution to clients who want to grow their relevance, protect their reputations and transform their businesses,” said Kucharski. “I couldn’t be more confident in Julie as the right person to build on that foundation and write its next chapter. She brings vision, a track record of building businesses and a deep understanding of our industry that will lead Padilla into the future.”

Batliner has nearly 30 years of agency experience and a history of building integrated teams that deliver results. Most recently, as president of Carmichael Lynch, she led the agency through unprecedented growth and earned numerous industry awards for both client work and agency culture. Her experience aligns closely with several of Padilla’s core focus areas, including food and beverage, financial services, consumer and corporate sectors. Prior to that, Batliner spent nearly 10 years at FleishmanHillard as chair of the food and nutrition practice.

“I’ve long admired Padilla for its strategy and creativity; it’s an honor to step into this role following Matt’s leadership and all that he and the team have achieved,” said Batliner. “Padilla has tremendous momentum, with deep expertise across industries, a strong culture and a drive to embrace new approaches that blend decades of experience with new data- and AI-based technologies creating greater value for clients. I’m excited about the opportunity to leverage those strengths and work with the broader AVENIR GLOBAL team to drive the agency’s next phase of growth.”

Batliner will be based in Padilla’s Minneapolis headquarters and report to Montreal-based AVENIR GLOBAL president and CEO Jean-Pierre Vasseur.

“Julie’s significant agency leadership experience, business-building mindset and appreciation for our culture made her the right fit at the right time for Padilla, and we are delighted to welcome her to the AVENIR GLOBAL family,” said Vasseur. “We’re incredibly grateful for Matt’s dedication, leadership and many contributions to Padilla, and look forward to celebrating all he has accomplished.”

Accel and Together Fund-backed AI presentation maker used by more than 12 million users combines automatic brand sync, native editable PPTX export and data-driven presentation automation connected to Salesforce, HubSpot, Snowflake and other business systems. Presentations.ai is ChatGPT for presentations. The AI platform turns raw input into structured, decision-ready slide decks.

The AI slide generator category is moving beyond tools that turn prompts into attractive slides. Business presentations often need to carry company branding, incorporate changing business data and remain editable inside Microsoft PowerPoint. Presentations.AI, an AI presentation maker used by more than 12 million people worldwide and backed by Accel Partners and Together Fund, addresses these requirements by connecting AI slide generation to automatic branding, editable PowerPoint output and data-driven presentation automation. For more information visit https://www.presentations.ai/ai-pitch-deck-generator

Presentations.AI is an AI presentation maker and AI slide generator for business presentations. It can generate presentations from prompts and existing documents, automatically apply company branding, export the result as an editable PowerPoint file and connect recurring presentations to changing business data.

Business presentations impose requirements that one-off slide generation does not. Sales presentations, investor pitch decks, board presentations, quarterly business reviews and management reports need narrative structure, accurate data visualisation, consistent branding and, in many cases, continued editing after generation.

Presentations.AI accepts prompts, outlines, PDF, Word and Excel files, Notion pages, Markdown and website URLs as source material and generates presentations ranging from 10 to 50 slides in less than one minute across more than 80 languages. Layouts, copy, imagery and typography remain editable after generation.

Its Clip-E conversational assistant allows users to modify content and structure through natural-language instructions without restarting the presentation. Adaptive templates reorganise layouts as content changes, allowing users to revise AI-generated slides without manually reconstructing individual layouts.

Presentations.AI’s proprietary Brand Sync technology automatically creates company-branded presentations from a company website URL. It identifies the organisation’s logo, fonts and colours and applies them across generated slides, making automatic presentation branding part of the generation process rather than a separate formatting task.

For businesses looking for an AI slide generator that exports to PowerPoint, Presentations.AI generates native, editable Microsoft PowerPoint (.pptx) files. Text, shapes, layouts, charts and styling remain editable after export, allowing teams to continue working on AI-generated presentations directly in PowerPoint. The platform also exports to PDF, Google Slides, PNG, JPEG, HTML and JSON.

This editable PowerPoint capability supports business workflows where presentations move between different people and applications. An AI-generated presentation may subsequently be edited by an employee in PowerPoint, reviewed by an executive, shared with a customer or handed to an agency for further modification.

Presentations.AI competes in the AI presentation software market alongside Gamma, Canva, Beautiful.ai, Plus AI, Pitch, Prezi, Microsoft Copilot and other AI slide generators. These products approach AI-assisted presentation creation from different starting points. Gamma provides a browser-first creation environment spanning presentations, documents and web pages; Canva combines presentations with a broader visual-design ecosystem; Plus AI operates inside Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Slides; Beautiful.ai focuses on automated presentation layouts; and Prezi uses its distinctive spatial presentation format.

Presentations.AI focuses on business presentations that may need to remain branded, editable and connected to changing information after their initial generation. This extends the role of an AI slide generator beyond creating the first version of a presentation.

Presentations.AI’s patented Presentation Refresh technology provides presentation automation for recurring and data-driven presentations. Organisations can establish a master presentation, specify fixed and changing sections, and connect information from manual sources and business systems including Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Google Sheets, Tableau, Looker, Mixpanel, Snowflake and BigQuery.

Presentation Refresh can automatically update presentations as underlying business information changes. Regeneration can be scheduled daily, weekly or monthly, initiated on demand, or activated in response to qualifying triggers.

This allows organisations to automate recurring presentations including sales reports, QBR presentations, customer business reviews, management reports and other data-driven presentations that would otherwise need to be updated manually.

The same presentation automation architecture can generate audience-specific versions of a master presentation for different companies, industries and prospects while preserving the underlying narrative, design and brand. A sales organisation, for example, can maintain an approved master proposal and generate company-branded sales presentations adapted to individual prospects and accounts.

Shared presentations on paid plans provide slide-level engagement analytics including total views, time spent on individual slides and completion rate. These signals allow sales, marketing and other business teams to understand how recipients interact with a presentation after it has been shared.

For organisations generating presentations programmatically, Presentations.AI provides an AI presentation API and PowerPoint generation API for embedding automated presentation generation into software and business workflows. The REST API supports OAuth 2.0, role-based access control and webhook triggers. White-label output is available on qualifying plans.

The presentation API extends AI slide generation into programmatic infrastructure, allowing businesses and software systems to generate, personalise and update presentations without treating every deck as an independent manual project.

Presentations.AI was founded in Bengaluru in 2018. The United States is its largest market, accounting for approximately 23 percent of revenue, followed by India, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Canada and the Middle East. The company reached one million users within 84 days of its 2023 public beta and now reports more than 12 million users worldwide.

Generating a first draft from a prompt addresses one part of the business presentation workflow. Presentations.AI is building its AI slide generator around what follows: maintaining company branding, editing presentations in PowerPoint, incorporating changing business information, adapting presentations for different audiences and automatically updating recurring presentations.

This product direction reflects Presentations.AI’s broader focus on adaptive presentations that can evolve with their information, audience and intended outcome. To learn more visit https://www.presentations.ai/

• The QKS Group SPARK Matrix™ provides competitive analysis & ranking of the leading Intent-Led Account Based Revenue Platforms (IL-ABR) vendors.
• Informa TechTarget, with its comprehensive platform, has received strong ratings across technology excellence and customer impact.

QKS Group announced today that it has named Informa TechTarget as a leader in the SPARK Matrix™: Intent-Led Account Based Revenue Platforms (IL-ABR), Q3 2026.

Vaishnavi, Principal Analyst at QKS Group, states, “Informa TechTarget provides a large scale, first party intent data ecosystem built on buyer research activity across its technology media network. The Informa TechTarget Portal is a unified go–to–market intelligence platform that gives GTM teams access to account–level and contact–level intent signals, active buying groups, audience insights, and tools for demand activation and sales prioritization in a single environment. It’s Prospect–Level Intent™ uses buyer activity to identify individual members of buying teams and their topic interests, enabling more precise targeting and personalization. Through its media and data assets, Informa TechTarget supports programs such as digital advertising, content syndication, webinars, promotions, website and audience targeting, and email–driven engagement, and integrates with leading CRM, marketing automation, ABM and sales platforms to extend orchestration into external systems.

Informa TechTarget further differentiates itself in the market by complementing its self-service IL-ABR platform with an established services portfolio that helps enterprises operationalize sophisticated account-based and revenue orchestration strategies. This services-led approach positions Informa TechTarget as more than a platform provider, combining proprietary intent data, market expertise, and operational guidance to help organizations translate buying signals into measurable pipeline acceleration and revenue outcomes more effectively.”

Umang Thakur, Vice President and Principal Analyst at QKS Group, states “Informa TechTarget differentiates through its large-scale first-party intent ecosystem, leveraging directly observed buyer research behavior to deliver high-confidence account and buying-group intelligence. By combining buyer intent, market intelligence, and GTM activation, the platform helps B2B organizations identify in-market demand earlier, prioritize high-value accounts, and improve sales and marketing alignment.”

QKS Group defines the Intent-led Account-Based Revenue Platforms (IL-ABR) market as “A unified data-led solution designed to orchestrate precision-targeted, high-impact B2B engagement. It aggregates and enriches diverse datasets- including client first-party behavioral data, partner-provided second-party data, and third-party intent data- to create dynamic, more unified account views. Leveraging AI-powered predictive analytics and real-time buying intent signals, these platforms define and prioritize Total Addressable Market (TAM) and Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) segments, surface in-market accounts with high conversion potential, and enable proactive engagement across the buyer’s journey.

Modern IL-ABR platforms are built for omnichannel orchestration, offering native or integrated support for display, connected TV, digital audio, video, social media advertising, web personalization, content syndication, and sales engagement platforms, among other emerging channels. This ensures scalable, consistent, and personalized experiences across touchpoints. Advanced platforms also provide sales intelligence, real-time account scoring, AI-driven next-best-action recommendations, and orchestration playbooks that align marketing and sales teams around shared revenue goals. IL-ABR platforms empower revenue teams to accelerate pipeline growth, optimize ROI, and scale strategic go-to-market initiatives globally.”

Informa TechTarget is differentiating itself by complementing its self-service IL-ABR platform with an established services portfolio that helps enterprises operationalize sophisticated account-based and revenue orchestration strategies. Beyond providing technology, the company extends strategic and execution support across areas such as TAM and ICP development, audience planning, omnichannel campaign activation, sales and marketing alignment, reporting, and continuous optimization. This services-led approach positions Informa TechTarget as more than a platform provider, combining proprietary intent data, market expertise, and operational guidance to help organizations translate buying signals into measurable pipeline acceleration and revenue outcomes more effectively.

The QKS Group SPARK Matrix™ includes a detailed analysis of the global market dynamics, major trends, vendor landscape, and competitive positioning. The study also provides a competitive analysis and ranking of the Intent-Led Account Based Revenue Platforms (IL-ABR), 2026 providers in the form of the SPARK Matrix™. The study also provides strategic information for users to evaluate different vendor capabilities, competitive differentiation, and market positions.

“Marketing leaders today face immense pressure to demonstrate measurable revenue impact while navigating increasingly complex buying journeys,” said Staci M. Gullotta, Chief Marketing Officer at Informa TechTarget. “This recognition validates what we aim to deliver to clients every day—intent-driven solutions that give marketers the precision data, actionable insights, and execution capabilities they need to identify the right accounts, engage buying groups at the right moment, and prove their contribution to pipeline and revenue.”

Additional Resources:

• For more information about Informa TechTarget, visit Here
• SPARK Matrix™ Intent-Led Account Based Revenue Platforms (IL-ABR), 2026

A decade in, the agency marks its anniversary with a growing slate of field marketing and creative strategy programs across CPG and pharma, and a run of 2026 industry recognition.

Enthuse Marketing, a New York City-based agency, today celebrates its 10th anniversary. The agency opened its doors with a single client program and one guiding belief, teach the world to love your brand, and an education-led approach has shaped its work ever since.

Over the past decade, Enthuse has built its business by pairing strategic and creative thinking with deep expertise in field execution. From national field teams and brand education programs to live experiences, the agency helps brands drive quantifiable business growth for its client partners.

“Ten years ago, we set out to prove that when people truly understand a brand, they’re far more likely to value it, trust it, and choose it,” said Kim Lawton, CEO, “That belief shaped everything we do. I’m incredibly proud of how much we’ve grown, but even prouder that our growth has come from clients who continue to place their trust in us. We have always worked to be an extension of their business, not simply another agency on the roster.”

That approach, pairing field marketing with creative strategy and treating every client as a true business partner, is what Enthuse credits for its growth over the past decade.

That growth has also earned industry recognition. In 2026 alone, Enthuse was named to the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies and Adweek’s Fastest Growing Agencies list, received an ANA B2 Award in the Channel Partner Ecosystem Program category, won six Hermes Creative Awards, and was named to Ad Age’s 2026 Best Places to Work.

Looking ahead, Enthuse plans to deepen its field marketing and creative strategy work, growing its client roster while continuing to invest in the people and culture that built its first decade.

Now in its sixth year, the event turns months of client strategy work into signed 2027 media commitments in a single day, giving brand and agency buyers a head start before rates climb.

Company Recognized for 472% Three-Year Revenue Growth, Earning a Place Among the Nation’s Most Successful Independent Businesses

Influencing Hollywood’s Elite During the 78th Emmy® Awards Season