Veteran leader will guide marketing, advertising, and communications as the company expands its presence in talent, consulting, and AI.

PearlMountain Limited is pleased to announce the launch of CutBay, an AI video agent designed to turn ideas, documents, links and media assets into finished videos through a conversational workflow. Instead of requiring users to begin with a blank timeline, CutBay starts with the message they want to communicate and the materials they already have.

At its core, the launch addresses a familiar obstacle in video production. A marketing team may have a product page and campaign brief, an educator may have a presentation, or a business may have a report filled with useful data. Turning those materials into a coherent video has traditionally involved separate steps for scripting, scene planning, design, animation and editing. CutBay brings those stages into one AI-assisted process, while leaving detailed creative decisions with the user.

“Video creation should begin with an idea, not with the challenge of learning complex software,” says Lin Xiao, CEO of PearlMountain Limited. “With CutBay, people can explain what they want to make, review how the story is taking shape and request changes in ordinary language. The goal is to make production more direct while ensuring that users remain in control of their content and final presentation.”

CutBay accepts a range of source material, including written prompts, images, video clips, presentations, documents, spreadsheets and web links. The AI video agent analyzes the input, identifies key points and develops a structured script. It can then arrange scenes and add visuals, captions, voiceovers, music, animation and motion graphics to produce a working video.

Once a draft is ready, users can continue the process through chat. They can ask CutBay to revise a script, change a scene, adjust pacing or explore a different visual direction. A canvas-based editor supports direct changes to text, fonts, colors, sizing and positioning, giving users an immediate way to refine individual elements without relying on another AI generation cycle.

The combination of conversational direction and hands-on editing is intended to reduce the technical effort behind motion design. Tasks that once called for specialized animation software can be approached through straightforward instructions, while the canvas remains available when precision is needed. Users can review the developing video at each stage and make changes before export.

CutBay also provides templates for business communications, marketing, social media, data visualization, education and training. A template can serve as a starting structure rather than a fixed design: users can adapt its scenes, visual style and presentation to suit their own material. This supports projects ranging from product demonstrations and campaign videos to explainers, lessons, onboarding content and animated reports.

By linking source materials, automated production and editable output, CutBay offers a single path from an initial concept to a share-ready video. The platform is available online, with additional information at https://www.cutbay.ai/.

Medeo’s AI video agent now runs the full creative lifecycle, from spotting what’s trending to publishing and earning from the finished video

New analysis of over 3M cold calls shows power dialing outperforms parallel dialing on every outcome metric, with TitanX scoring a measured connect rate of 23% to 29%—a 3.5x to 4x increase compared to the industry average.

Workbounce adds a semantic knowledge layer to the GTM Context Graph, unifying ZoomInfo’s verified market data with the unstructured knowledge inside a company’s own tools

Research initiative under LMC’s AI Accelerator will provide benchmarking insights for small and mid-sized businesses, help local media companies strengthen relationships with local advertisers

The Local Media Consortium (LMC) today announced the launch of its SMB AI Benchmarking Study, a research initiative presented by its Digital On-Demand Services (DODS) division in partnership with Borrell Associates. The second initiative under LMC’s recently launched AI Accelerator for Local Media program, the study will examine how small and mid-sized businesses are using artificial intelligence and navigating a rapidly changing business environment. Findings will provide participating SMBs with valuable benchmarking data while helping local media organizations better understand and support local advertisers.

The research comes at a pivotal moment for local media organizations. Data from the 2026 LMC Industry Insights Survey found that the percentage of publishers identifying agency services as a top priority  declined by 80% year over year, highlighting the need for new ways to serve local advertisers and build sustainable revenue streams. The study is designed to help publishers better understand how businesses perceive, adopt and invest in AI while identifying opportunities to provide more valuable guidance, services and support.

Participating businesses from industries ranging from healthcare and professional services to retail, hospitality and home services will gain access to benchmarking insights that compare local findings with broader regional and national trends. Depending on participation levels, businesses may also be able to compare results within specific industries and local markets. Initial aggregated findings are expected in November 2026.

“Small and mid-sized businesses are being asked to make important decisions about marketing, technology and AI at a pace that is often difficult to keep up with,” said Fran Wills, CEO of the LMC. “Research suggests concerns about the accuracy of AI-generated information remain widespread among small businesses, reinforcing the need for trusted local partners who understand their markets and can help separate hype from reality. This study will help us better understand what local businesses need most and identify new ways local media organizations can support their growth and success.”

The study is expected to identify opportunities for local media organizations to expand the services and expertise they provide to advertisers while deepening their role as trusted advisors. Findings will help publishers better understand how businesses are navigating AI, how AI impacts marketing and technology decisions and where they need additional support.

“I don’t think anyone will disagree that AI is already having a profound effect on the way we conduct business. What’s still a mystery is how deep the seismic shift is being felt among those very busy, very practical SMBs,” said Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates. “Past surveys have shown they’re yearning for a trusted advisor to help them navigate the complex marketing world. This survey will help us learn whether AI has begun filling that role, and how deeply AI may already be embedded in their marketing activities. I’m confident it will uncover early opportunities for local media companies to complement their migration toward AI adoption.”

Participating businesses will have the opportunity to receive a summary of the findings and contribute to one of the most comprehensive studies examining the intersection of AI, advertising and local business growth. The findings will help inform future products, services, educational resources and support programs that strengthen relationships between local media organizations and the businesses they serve.

The SMB AI in Benchmarking Study is part of the Local Media Consortium’s AI Accelerator, a broader effort by the LMC and its Digital On-Demand Services (DODS) division to help local media organizations identify new opportunities for growth, strengthen advertiser relationships and develop solutions that meet evolving market needs. The initiative is supported through funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part of the News Media Help Desk, an online resource created by the LMC and the Reynolds Journalism Institute to support the long-term sustainability of local media.

Co-founders Sandi Pearce and Kevin Miles combine distinct strengths in strategy, storytelling and language to help companies build narratives that shape perception and create distinction.

The Narrative Authority (TNA), a narrative strategy firm founded by Editorial Director Sandi Pearce and Creative Director Kevin Miles, has officially opened. TNA helps companies, founders and organizations define the stories they tell the market at a time when AI has made content easier to produce and distinction harder to achieve.

TNA was built on a conviction both founders developed across more than two decades of work: companies do not need more content. They need a clear, credible idea of what they stand for—and language and creative expression that make it matter.

AI can produce words. It cannot replace taste, nuance or judgment. More words than ever are being produced; fewer are landing. TNA closes that gap by building narratives and messaging systems that connect what organizations stand for with how they show up in the market.

Pearce conceived the firm after seeing the potential in combining two different ways of approaching the same problem: Miles’s instinct for finding the central idea and building a compelling story around it and her ability to identify where the thinking, strategy and language could be stronger.

“I saw pretty quickly that Kevin and I brought different strengths to the same problem,” said Pearce. “I believed there was a company in that combination before either of us knew exactly what it might look like. Seven months later, we began building what would become TNA.”

“What makes the partnership work is that Sandi and I don’t see the work the same way,” said Miles. “We notice what the other might not, and that’s the point. TNA grew out of what happens when those perspectives challenge each other and make the work stronger.”

Pearce has spent more than two decades shaping language and ideas across advertising, healthcare, financial services, publishing and enterprise communications. At Crispin Porter + Bogusky, she helped strengthen work for numerous brands, including Microsoft’s worldwide Windows 7 and American Express’s Small Business Saturday campaigns, both from initial development through launch, as well as the Domino’s Pizza Tracker.

Her work on Baked In, the business book by John Winsor and Alex Bogusky, began by accident. Pearce spotted the manuscript shortly before it was due to print, realized it needed another editorial pass and reedited the book in five days. As the sole editor on 17 accounts at Sterling-Rice Group, she brought strategic and editorial thinking into the development of advertising and marketing rather than treating editing as a final checkpoint. She later applied that approach in highly regulated financial-services and pharmaceutical work, where language had to perform while meeting legal, medical and regulatory requirements.

“Strong language can’t rescue a weak idea,” said Pearce. “The work is in seeing where an idea loses its strength and bringing the strategy, thinking and language into alignment.”

Miles brings more than two decades of creative expertise across advertising, entertainment, technology, sports and consumer brands, with work recognized by major international creative awards.

He created “One Game. One Love.,” the NBA’s first marketing campaign geared specifically toward international fans, which ran in 43 countries and territories and 10 languages. He also wrote the Reese’s Puffs Rap for General Mills in 2009. The campaign later found a second life online, with more than 239,000 TikTok videos using the rap by February 2022, and was rebooted in 2026 by The Martin Agency in a branded entertainment video featuring GloRilla.

Earlier in his career, Miles and creative partner Terry Taylor developed a campaign in just two-and-a-half days that helped DMB&B New York win the Burger King account—an account move The New York Times described at the time as the biggest in advertising history. His work has also been recognized internationally, including finalist honors in MoveOn.org’s “Obama in 30 Seconds” competition.

“A big idea has to do more than get attention,” said Miles. “It has to give people something worth remembering. That’s where story becomes strategy: the idea shapes everything that comes after it.”

TNA’s work spans brand narrative, thought leadership, executive communications, advertising, marketing, digital experiences, complex enterprise content, proposals, pitches and personal branding.

To learn more or connect with The Narrative Authority, visit thenarrativeauthority.com.

More than 1,000 companies already use Clueso to create videos for marketing, customer success, training, sales enablement, operations, change management and more.

Clueso, the agentic video platform for business, today announced a $10 million Series A led by Dharana Capital, with Founders Future and Neotribe Ventures joining as new investors and continued participation from Y Combinator and f7 Ventures. The round brings total funding to $12 million, with more than 80% of the new capital coming from existing investors doubling down.

More than 1,000 companies already use Clueso to create videos for marketing, customer success and education, onboarding and training, and more. Customers include Atlassian, Zendesk, Gainsight, GlobalPartners, Seismic, and Ironclad among others. Teams have reported over 5x productivity gains and an 80% reduction in video production costs.

“Clueso has fundamentally simplified how we produce learning videos at scale,” said Garrett Marttinen, Head of Customer Learning at Atlassian. “They help us turn rough, scrappy input into polished, on-brand output, streamlining our workflows and dramatically reducing the burden of creation and maintenance for my team. Clueso has also been a genuine partner, pushing the boundaries of video creation and quickly turning our feedback into shipped product”

The Clueso platform.

An agentic approach to business video
While much of the recent innovation in AI video has focused on consumers and creators, business video has a different set of requirements, and hence a very different kind of platform. Clueso is building AI agents that understand a company’s products, processes, brand and context, then use that knowledge to create and maintain video across the organization.

The company was founded by Akash Anand, Prajwal Prakash and Neel Balar, who faced this problem first-hand at their previous company.

“We originally started by helping customer-facing teams create product tutorials faster,” said Akash Anand, Co-Founder and CEO of Clueso. “We quickly saw the same problem across marketing, sales, training and internal documentation. That made us realize the opportunity was much bigger. Today, Clueso acts as an AI video production team that anyone or any team in the organization can rely on, handling the work of creating, editing and maintaining videos as the business moves.”

“Video is one of the most effective formats enterprises use to train teams, educate customers, and sell products. However, traditional video production was never designed for enterprise volume and velocity,” said Vamsi Duvvuri, Founder and Managing Partner at Dharana Capital. “With AI, video is evolving from static media files into living, context-aware assets that continuously adapt as business processes and products change. Clueso is building the infrastructure powering this shift. We are impressed by their customer obsession and speed of execution, and are excited to partner with them in their next phase of growth.”

Companies typically start with Clueso in one team, then quickly expand as more teams adopt it for their own video needs. Over time, Clueso becomes the centralized video creation platform across the organization.

At Zendesk, Clueso is used for both internal and customer-facing content. “Clueso’s agent makes it easy to automatically transform product knowledge into polished, engaging learning experiences with far less manual effort,” said Kevin Gross, Senior Manager of Instructional Design at Zendesk. “It has helped us reduce production time and expand our video output.”

How Clueso Works
Clueso’s agents cover the full video workflow, from capturing footage and production to brand consistency and keeping content current. The platform can:

• Capture products & workflows itself: Clueso’s computer agents navigate real software, perform workflows and automatically capture the footage required for a video.
• Handle production & editing end-to-end: Clueso creates scripts, voiceovers, motion graphics, captions and edits automatically, with a browser-based editor for finer control.
• Keep content current. When a product or process changes, Clueso can rerun the workflow and refresh the video automatically.
• Follow each company’s brand. Teams can define reusable standards for voice, visual style, localization, motion graphics, music, and more, so both agents and humans create consistently on-brand content.
• Connect video to the rest of the business. Integrations with other tools bring in context from other company systems, while the  Clueso MCP allows AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT to create, edit and manage videos directly through Clueso.

Looking ahead
Clueso will use the funding to scale its enterprise go-to-market, deepen the agentic layer behind its platform, expand editing capabilities, and connect video creation more tightly to the systems where product and company knowledge already lives.

The long-term vision is to allow agents to handle more of the production mechanics, while people stay focused on the creative decisions. As companies move faster, the content explaining them should be able to keep up.

New EVP of Marketing to accelerate growth and bring Rep Data’s expanded capabilities and ongoing innovation to more customers

Rep Data, the data quality leader for the market research industry, has appointed Melissa Dunn as Executive Vice President of Marketing. Dunn will lead the company’s global marketing strategy, helping Rep Data strengthen its market position, reach more enterprise clients and accelerate growth worldwide. Following the company’s recent expansion of its technology and services portfolio, Dunn will focus on developing a cohesive market story that brings together Rep Data’s integrated research capabilities, ongoing product innovation and the value these investments deliver to customers.

“We’ve built a company with enormous potential, and we’re ready to take Rep Data to the next level,” said Patrick Stokes, CEO and founder of Rep Data. “Melissa knows how to build brands that stand out, connect with enterprise buyers and turn marketing into a powerful driver of growth. She brings the experience, energy and ambition to help us reach new markets and win new customers. I’m excited to have her on our leadership team as we continue to scale the business and introduce more organizations to what we can deliver.”

Dunn brings more than 20 years of marketing leadership experience across the insights industry, high-growth B2B technology and global advertising agencies. Most recently, she served as EVP, Marketing & Communications at Suzy, where she built the marketing organization and helped the company double its revenue during her tenure. Previously, she led customer engagement and marketing at industrial AI company Plutoshift, helping expand its enterprise client relationships. Earlier in her career, Dunn held senior leadership roles at leading agencies including iCrossing (Hearst), MRY (Publicis Groupe), McCann and BBDO, where she worked on brand and marketing initiatives for major clients including Visa, Verizon, AT&T and Procter & Gamble.

“What drew me to Rep Data is the opportunity to help shape where the company goes next,” said Dunn. “Organizations are under pressure to make better decisions, faster, and research has an important role to play across the business. Rep Data has an incredible foundation and a much bigger opportunity to help companies put trustworthy insights to work. I’m excited to work with Patrick and the team to bring that story to market, build stronger relationships with the brands we serve and introduce Rep Data to new audiences well beyond traditional research and insights teams.”

Dunn’s appointment comes as Rep Data continues to scale its global operations and advance its mission to end the friction between question and answer, helping organizations conduct high-quality research more efficiently.