Labelbox

Argos Data Names Mitchell Ison VP & General Manager

Argos Multilingual announced that Mitchell Ison has joined Argos Data as VP & General Manager, Frontier AI Data Services. Ison, who previously held go-to-market leadership roles at Labelbox and Sama, will lead Argos Data’s expansion in multilingual model evaluation, post-training data, human preference evaluation, red‑teaming support, and expert annotation for enterprise and frontier AI teams. Argos Data is described as the AI data services division of Argos Multilingual, leveraging three decades of linguistic and quality infrastructure and a global network of vetted linguists and subject-matter experts to support multilingual, market-specific AI evaluation and scaling.

Microsoft Cuts Ad Tech; Google Expands Its Dominance

Microsoft is conducting a second round of large layoffs, with Microsoft Advertising affected; the company is also deprioritizing much of its third‑party ad tech, including former AppNexus products, a publisher ad server, PromoteIQ, and the Invest DSP, which is set to shut down in early 2026. PromoteIQ was retired last year. Google is expanding its sell‑side ad tech footprint, growing enterprise sales teams as Google Ad Manager serves smaller publishers who typically see lower rates, and at least one publisher reported a shrinking share of revenue from Google’s ad tech while Google’s network has declined for years. Google also launched a paywall product called Offerwall, triggering speculation about a forced divestiture or a bid to shore up sell‑side tech amid competition from PubMatic, Magnite, and Amazon. Meta is developing AI chatbots with Alignerr to improve engagement and retention for creators and brands, a move framed by Mark Zuckerberg as addressing loneliness, following a prior bot misstep.