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Google I/O 2026 opens tomorrow morning, Tuesday 19 May, at the Shoreline Amphitheatre. The Android Show on 12 May already locked in Gemini Intelligence, Googlebook on Aluminium OS, Android 17 with generative UI, and Android XR glasses with Samsung, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. The keynote tomorrow is expected to land a new Gemini model and the developer tooling that flows into Google Marketing Live on Wednesday.

OpenAI quietly turned ChatGPT advertising into a measurable performance channel on 5 May. CPM pricing has been replaced with cost-per-click bidding at $3-$5 per click. The self-serve Ads Manager is in beta. Minimum advertiser spend has dropped from $250,000 to $50,000. OpenAI is publicly forecasting $2.5bn in ad revenue this year, scaling to $11bn by 2027.

Snap and Perplexity have "amicably ended" the $400m AI search partnership originally signed in November 2025, per TechCrunch and Engadget on 6 May. The integration never moved beyond limited testing inside Snapchat's Chat interface. It is the first nine-figure AI distribution deal between two named, well-funded companies to publicly fail, and the cleanest case study yet for the limits of platform-scale AI partnerships.

Coty has tied up with Pencil — owned by Brandtech Group, sister company to Jellyfish — to build an end-to-end generative AI content system across CoverGirl, Rimmel, Sally Hansen and Max Factor. An embedded Pencil team starts inside Coty on 1 July. It is the most credible enterprise GenAI content deployment we have seen in beauty.

Pattern across all four stories: AI is becoming the operating layer of marketing, not a feature of it. ChatGPT is now priceable. Snap is showing what happens when an AI deal fails to ship. Coty is showing what an in-house GenAI production line actually looks like. And Google is about to reset the infrastructure on Tuesday and the ad framework on Wednesday.

Watchlist: Google Marketing Live on Wednesday 20 May, and Mustafa Suleyman's 18-month white-collar automation framing recirculating across Fortune, FT and Yahoo Finance over the weekend.