ChatGPT Ads Started Rewriting Your Adverts Yesterday Unless You Opted Out. From Today, Routine Planning Applications in England Skip the Committee. A Government AI Planning Tool Reaches 15 Councils.

On Friday 30 October OpenAI turned on "creative enhancements" by default for ChatGPT Ads. Its Help Centre page is clear about it: "Starting Friday, October 30, 2026, creative enhancements will be enabled automatically for new and existing campaigns."

Here's what the enhancements do. ChatGPT takes your existing advert and your landing page, and it may write new headlines and descriptions to suit the conversation it's showing the advert in. It may also translate your advert into another language, resize your images, and change the destination link so people land on whatever page of your website it judges more relevant.

It can make versions in advance or on the fly, mid-conversation. As for checking them first, the page is blunt: "You do not need to review or approve each enhanced version before it runs. The experience does not provide a preview of every variation."

You can opt out per account or per campaign in Ads Manager, under Manage settings. Campaign settings override the account default. If you opted out before 30 October, that still stands.

OpenAI's advice for living with it: keep the prices, promotions and availability on your landing pages up to date, because that's what the AI draws from. Its own reporting page adds that performance changes "do not, on their own, establish the effect of creative enhancements". In plain terms, the dashboard won't tell you what the rewrites did.

The same product update email, dated 30 October, adds a bit more. It says ChatGPT Ads now runs in 89 countries after an expansion on 21 October, and more than 100,000 advertisers have used it. Multi-image adverts (four to six square images) are in open beta for everyone, and a wider advert card now takes up more of the screen on desktop. Adverts only appear to people on the Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro and Enterprise users never see them.

From today, Saturday 31 October, trained planning officers decide straightforward planning applications in England. No more waiting for a slot at a planning committee. The government calls it the National Scheme of Delegation. Its examples are a loft conversion, an extension, a conservatory and "small businesses improving their premises", and it names shopkeepers and pub landlords.

Alongside the rule change, the government's AI planning tool, PlanAssist, moves from a trial in Camden, Barnet and Dorset to 15 councils for 12 months. It was built with Google DeepMind, Google Cloud, the consultancy Faculty and local authorities. It pulls the application, the local policies and the site constraints into one place, then gives the officer "an evidence-backed initial assessment". In other words, a first read of the case with the evidence attached. The officer still makes the decision.

The claimed effect: early testing "cut time spent on key planning tasks by 58%". The government says that halves processing time for routine householder applications, from eight weeks to four. Householder applications make up nearly 70% of all applications each year. The 12 new councils are Ashford, Lambeth, Newcastle, Nottingham, Bristol, Cumberland, North Lincolnshire, Rochdale, Redbridge, South Gloucestershire, Stoke-on-Trent and Westminster. The aim is every council in England by the end of 2027.

The press release also says 420 new planners have been recruited through government schemes. And key planning documents must be published as open data (free for anyone to use and reuse) by the end of 2027. That matters if you build tools on planning data.

On Thursday 29 October Microsoft announced more than 25 new finance skills and partner plugins for Copilot, "purpose-built for accounting, capital markets, and broader finance work". If you run a small practice or do your own books, three of them matter. Reconcile accounts: it compares balances and transactions, spots discrepancies and prepares the reconciling items for you to review. Draft journal entries: accruals, reclassifications, allocations, reversals and recurring entries, with checks that the entry balances. And reporting: it turns results into a report that explains what changed and why.

The accounting capabilities sit in Copilot in Excel and in Cowork, the mode where you hand Copilot a multi-step job and it works through it. They're only available in Frontier, Microsoft's early-access programme. On 27 October we covered how one admin setting (No access, All users, or specific users) decides who in your firm gets Frontier features. The finance skills in Excel and the Finance and Capital Markets plugins in Cowork are generally available, which means they're out of early access.

In Excel you get an option to start an audit trail when you use an accounting capability. It records in the chat history what Copilot changed and why. Copilot can also summarise who changed what in a workbook, and reverse individual edits.

The partner plugins "beginning to roll out" include Intuit QuickBooks, Xero and Zoho Books for accounting, plus data providers such as Moody's, FactSet, Morningstar, LSEG and S&P Global. Microsoft does warn that third-party services "may require separate licensing, subscriptions, authentication, or administrator enablement". In plain English, you may need extra licences or subscriptions, a login, or your admin to switch them on.

Microsoft's usage evidence: in seven days of limited Insiders availability (its early test group), more than 8,000 people used accounting skills more than 44,000 times. The customers it quotes are EY Ireland and Zurich Insurance North America, both large firms, and EY says it's "still testing the functionality".

On Wednesday 28 October Google announced a change to "Fill with Gemini", the AI function that fills cells in Google Sheets from the web. It now puts the exact web source it used inside each individual cell, so you can "audit, verify, and cross-reference outputs". Google also lifted the limit to 3,000 cells per request, and says the processing is faster and more consistent from one cell to the next.

Google's speed claim is "up to 55 times faster than manual entry" on a 500-cell task. That comes from its own internal study of 95 participants. It's on by default for anyone whose admin has Gemini in Sheets switched on, on Business Standard and Plus, Enterprise Standard and Plus, and Google AI Pro and Ultra. Citations only show in Sheets on the web.

The same weekly recap, dated 30 October, also lists Gemini in Slides editing a whole deck from one prompt, and the Gemini app creating and editing files in chat, which we covered yesterday.