Canto launches its AI assistant, ending the era of the passive DAM. The new solution brings automated content readiness and AI asset distribution into Canto's platform; brands can get approved content to every audience and know which products are ready to sell Learn AI Tools Canto Global Assistant ATLANTA, Oct. 27, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Canto, a leading digital asset management (DAM) company, today launched Canto Global Assistant, an AI-powered intelligence layer built into the Canto platform that reimagines DAM for the AI era. With Global Assistant, the DAM itself finds and fixes gaps in brand and product content, then gets the approved assets to the people and channels that need them. Content teams spend more of their time on work that builds the brand, and companies go to market faster. Most organizations treat their DAM as the source of truth for brand content, and the volume moving through it keeps climbing as brands sell across more channels. At that scale, keeping every asset complete and every product properly imaged turns into a full-time job, and gaps tend to show up after content is already in market. Canto built Global Assistant in close collaboration with its customers, mapping the solution's capabilities to the jobs content teams most wanted done with agentic tools. At the top of the list were making changes across thousands of assets with a single request and getting approved content to the right people and channels faster. "Brands put years into building their libraries, and the volume keeps growing faster than any team can manage by hand," said Wain Kellum, CEO, Canto. "Global Assistant brings agentic AI into the DAM itself. It finds what's incomplete across assets and products and fixes it at scale, and has the power to automatically build distribution portals to deliver the finished content to the right people and places at the right time. The intelligence is built into the Canto platform itself, so every new agent we add works across a customer's entire library from the first day, with nothing extra to set up." Learn AI Tools Global Assistant launches with two complete workflows, content readiness and AI asset distribution, which together cover five everyday jobs for content teams. Using the solution, brands can: * Know the health of the library. A live Library Health dashboard shows every asset and product that needs attention, such as missing alt text, missing rights information, expiring assets, or products with no linked imagery. The assistant is already scoped to the affected content and ready to fix any gap. * Turn every upload into a completed workflow. Global Assistant enriches new uploads as they arrive, including alt text, at about 20x the pace of doing the work by hand. It also flags compliance issues and duplicates before they settle into the library, and each upload ends with a checklist of anything still incomplete. * Get content to external audiences fast. From any selection of assets or an album, users describe what they want to share, who they want to share it with, and Global Assistant builds a branded portal, ready to adjust in a visual editor and publish in minutes. Partners get current, approved versions of every file. * Find and fix content in one place. With Canto DAM for Products, users search assets and products together in plain language or by visual similarity, then hand the results to the assistant for bulk changes, such as rewriting metadata or linking assets to the right products. When a request is open-ended, the assistant asks follow-up questions before it acts, and nothing changes until the user confirms. * Know which products are ready to sell. Global Assistant flags and enriches any products missing required imagery or channel-specific attributes, and finds photography that was shot but never linked to a product. E-commerce and brand teams see which products are ready before anything goes to a channel. Global Assistant runs on a set of specialized agents, and the assistant decides which ones to call based on what the user asks. Customers never have to build or configure any of them. Every agent works from the same governed foundation. Discover more Find Suppliers Optimize Ops "That shared foundation is why the assistant can go from fixing a product's metadata to building the portal that shares it without losing context," said Alan Beiagi, Chief Product & Technology Officer, Canto. "It's also built to let customers pull approved content from the DAM into the AI tools they already use, with all the same permissions and rights rules applied. Content readiness and AI asset distribution are just the start of our agentic capabilities, with much more to come." Learn Engineering Global Assistant runs inside Canto's governed environment, and customer content is not passed to third-party systems. Every change it makes is logged, and Canto's existing security and compliance certifications, including SOC 2 and ISO 27001, cover its operations. About Canto Canto is a leader in digital asset management (DAM), helping global brands maximize the value of their digital content with an intuitive, AI-powered platform. Our solutions make it easy for businesses to centralize, organize and share digital assets, streamlining workflows and driving real business impact. With a legacy of innovation, from launching one of the first DAM solutions to advancing AI Visual Search and unified DAM and product information management capabilities, we continue to shape the future of content management. Backed by best-in-class support and implementation, Canto empowers industries like retail, manufacturing, technology, healthcare and more to manage their growing content libraries and optimize content workflows. Headquartered in Atlanta, with offices in Berlin, Cork and Sydney, Canto supports teams worldwide. For more information, visit www.canto.com.

NAW welcomes two new directors. Daniel Grainger, Director, Advocacy Fundraising. Dan Grainger has joined NAW as Director, Advocacy Fundraising. In this role, he will manage NAW's political action committee, NAW-PAC, and lead fundraising for the Legal Policy Fund, which supports the NAW Legal Policy Center. He'll also help integrate fundraising across NAW's advocacy programs, including the NAW Institute for Distribution Excellence (The Institute), a separate 501(c)(3) and the leading source of research, development, and education for the wholesale distribution industry. It's an expanded role that reflects NAW's growth in political advocacy and litigation. Dan comes to NAW from Cencora, an NAW member, where he managed political programs and operations. He previously worked in PAC operations at Premier Inc. and in government affairs with the British Embassy and UK Civil Service. Dan holds a B.A., American/U.S. Studies from the University of Northampton. Robert Burgee, Director, Digital Marketing. Rob Burgee joins NAW as Director, Digital Marketing. He'll lead digital marketing strategy, including campaigns, brand positioning, and demand generation, to help grow visibility for NAW and the wholesale distribution industry. Rob comes to NAW from Canto, where he was Senior Partner Marketing Manager. Before that, he held marketing leadership roles at MerlinOne, a Canto company, and at Dragonfly Digital Marketing. He brings more than a decade of B2B and B2C marketing experience. Rob holds a Master's Degree, Computer Science (Marketing Algorithm Modeling), and B.A., Marketing, both from Towson University.

How to stay on-brand as your hospitality portfolio grows. Global hospitality groups face a host of content challenges between locations - Canto explains the best practice in keeping your brand consistent. From safari lodges to penthouses, from quinoa to cocktails... difference is what makes the customer experience special. But the one area you definitely don't want to be different is your brand. As any hospitality marketer knows, you can face a wide range of unwelcome guests including poor-quality photos, out-of-date materials, and painfully-slow approvals. The task is hard enough for hotels owned and operated under one group; it's perhaps even harder when you have franchises and independent operators that sit under one brand. That's why in Canto's new two-part Bizibl series for travel and hospitality brands, Bizibl Group is bringing you the latest insights in content management, along with hot-off-the-press examples... including a way to reduce your creative team's workload by 25%! For part one, let's look at how to keep your brands consistent no matter how many air-miles are between your locations. Global brand, centralised content. As a rule of thumb, the more your portfolio grows the more important it is to centralise your content. Having multiple locations across many markets and continents makes the content management process complicated, so hospitality businesses need a simple, reliable way to organise and distribute all their assets. A digital asset management (DAM) platform like industry-leader Canto helps travel and hospitality brands keep consistent by: * Providing a single place for photos, videos, files, brochures and other digital assets * Saving time by making files easier to find with AI-powered search * Automatically organising and tagging content using AI * Letting teams self-serve the content they need * Allowing each location to upload content for central approval * Reducing the risks of outdated content Of course this sounds great, but how does it work in reality? Time to book a stay with luxury hotel group The Set. Case study: The Set hotels. Unlike hotel groups that own and operate properties, The Set curates independently owned hotels under its brand. With 15 luxury properties in the collection - and more added every year - the challenge of reviewing, organising, and distributing content grew too. Kasia Rudnik, Senior Director of Marketing, explains why The Set turned to Canto's DAM solution to scale brand consistency across its growing portfolio: "We're an affiliation brand, so each hotel has its own independence and branding. Our role is to support them with the buying power of the affiliation. We use Canto for all our assets, logos, brand guidelines, SOPs, templates, advertising, presentations - everything lives there. It's our brand Bible." The group now has more than 90,000 assets organised and easily searchable, with the impact felt across the business. New hotels are onboarded faster, press requests are fulfilled immediately, and teams have a single trusted source. Each property can upload their own photography and video files directly into Canto, for the central marketing team to review, refine and approve. Now it only takes 3 to 5 days for new hotels to have their full asset library organised and ready to use. Canto keeps all of The Set's core brand materials in one place, so everyone can quickly find the most current resources and self-serve the assets they need. Teams spend less time searching for files and more time launching campaigns. When it comes to media enquiries, even journalists can instantly access the pre-approved photography, logos and videos they need from The Set's press portal. For the marketing team, having assets centralised in Canto has reduced the need for outside creative support and asset rework by 25%. Wherever the journey takes you. So, as your hospitality brand looks to expand, make sure your software and processes keep up. Wherever the journey takes you, the chances are that a DAM platform is the best way to build a scalable system so your business can keep growing. Coming up in part 2 of this series... Canto looks at how the world's best travel and hospitality brands are creating long-lasting customer relationships through personalised content.