NEWS
Brand differentiation ranked as the number one challenge facing marketers
Nearly a third( 31 %) of UK marketers say they’ re struggling to differentiate their brand amid growing competition and a rise in AI-generated content.
That’ s according to new research from Optimizely, which surveyed 100 UK marketers to uncover the top challenges marketers are facing as we head into 2026 and how they plan to overcome them.
While brand differentiation ranked as the number one challenge, others include maintaining consumer trust and engagement( 26 %), scaling personalisation effectively( 24 %), budget cuts( 22 %), slow senior decision-making( 18 %) and proving ROI( 11 %).
Faced with these challenges, marketers are being forced to rethink how they operate and find new ways to keep customers engaged as complexity rises and budgets shrink.
Looking to the year ahead, 41 % see better integration of AI with marketing tools as their biggest opportunity, while over a third( 34 %) are prioritising the creation of more consistent and engaging customer experiences. A further 30 % plan to streamline workflows to save time and resources, with others turning to experimentation( 28 %) and real-time data( 25 %) to enhance campaign performance and decision-making.
Encouragingly, the research reveals that despite the pressure they’ re under, marketers have made measurable progress in improving customer perceptions year-on-year.
According to Optimizely’ s latest consumer research, customers are 6 % happier with the personalised emails they received in 2025 than in 2024. Satisfaction with website personalisation has also increased from 59 % to 62 %.
Locai Labs launches UK’ s first rival to ChatGPT
Locai Labs has launched Locai, a general AI assistant powered by
Locai L1-Large, the UK’ s first foundational large language model( LLM), marking a watershed moment for British technology and the nation’ s role in the global AI race.
For years, the development of advanced AI has been dominated by the US and China, whose tech giants have benefitted from vast data centre infrastructure and investment. Britain, by contrast, has faced a chronic shortage of domestic computing power.
Now Locai, an AI assistant designed and built in the UK and backed by former science minister Lord Drayson, is taking on global rivals including GPT-5, Claude, DeepSeek and Gemini, outperforming them on the key measure of conversational ability and human preference while delivering top tier results across mathematics, scientific reasoning and instructionfollowing benchmarks. forgetting – the tendency for models to lose previously learned knowledge when trained on new information.
The unique innovation means Locai Labs’ AI models can evolve independently without armies of human trainers or access to huge datasets; Locai L1-Large teaches itself and constantly improves without human input, generating its own training data and never forgetting what it has learned.
The breakthrough means faster progress and lower costs in model post-training, while preserving accuracy and safety.
Founders James and George Drayson have developed a new vision for‘ community AI’ that combines self-learning technology with a decentralised, community-powered architecture to create highperformance AI that can be scaled sustainably.
George Drayson has invented a technology called‘ Forget-Me-Not’ that solves one of AI’ s most persistent challenges: catastrophic
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