~The AI + Marketing Weekly~

what you need to know this week in ai + marketing (15-second version):

• DuckDuckGo installs surged 30% in a single week after Google replaced traditional search with AI agents at I/O. Traffic to its “No AI” search page tripled. 93% of respondents in a DuckDuckGo poll said they actively reject AI search features. (TechCrunch)

• Anthropic closed a $65 billion round at a $965 billion valuation, passing OpenAI to become the most valuable AI startup. Revenue run rate hit $47 billion, nearly tripling since February. Claude Code is the growth engine. (CNBC)

• 47% of B2B SaaS companies have already cut or reduced marketing roles because of AI, mostly by quietly not backfilling open positions. Content and copywriting ranked as the most at-risk function at 60%. (MarTech)

• New York’s AI disclosure law takes effect June 9, requiring conspicuous disclosure of AI-generated “synthetic performers” in ads. $1,000 fine for a first violation, $5,000 for each one after. First state law of its kind. (National Law Review)

• Google expanded Preferred Sources into AI Overviews and AI Mode. Users have selected 345,000 preferred sources, up from 90,000, and are twice as likely to click a link with the “Preferred” badge. (Search Engine Land)

• Meta launched paid subscriptions across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, plus two AI-focused tiers under a new “Meta One” brand starting at $7.99 a month. Premium unlocks deeper reasoning and image generation. (TechCrunch)

• DeepSeek made its 75% V4-Pro price cut permanent, landing at roughly $0.18 per million blended tokens, 11.5x cheaper than GPT-5.5 on input. A discount that does not expire is a market floor. (Engadget)

🗞️ top ai + marketing news

the ai-free revolt

DuckDuckGo installs surge 30% as users reject Google’s AI search
TechCrunch | ~4-min read

After Google replaced traditional search with AI agents as the primary interface at I/O, DuckDuckGo saw U.S. app installs jump 18.1% week-over-week on average, peaking at 30.5%. iOS installs peaked at 69.9%. Traffic to its AI-free search page, noai.duckduckgo.com, tripled. A DuckDuckGo poll of 110,000 respondents found 93% actively rejecting AI search features.

Why it matters: People are not rejecting AI because they never want help. They are rejecting the feeling that search has become something done to them rather than something they control. That distinction matters for every marketer building an AI-forward experience right now.

Marketers trust AI to buy media, not build brands
Digiday | ~5-min read

Marketers are comfortable letting AI handle programmatic buying, bidding, and backend content operations. They draw the line at brand voice, consumer-facing creative, and core strategy. Ally Bank’s CMO says the efficiency case is clear but younger consumers “regale against anything created by AI.” Mondelez says it will not hand over consumer insight development to AI. 78% of shoppers still prefer ads made by people.

Why it matters: The gap is not about whether to use AI but instead about where. The brands getting this right are using AI for speed behind the curtain and keeping human judgment on everything the customer actually sees.

anthropic’s trillion-dollar moment

Anthropic nears $1 trillion valuation, eclipses OpenAI
CNBC | ~6-min read

Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion valuation, led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia. That nearly triples its $380 billion valuation from February and puts it above OpenAI for the first time. Revenue run rate is $47 billion, up from $30 billion earlier this year and $10 billion last year. Claude Code is driving much of the growth.

Why it matters: The company that bet on safety and developer tooling just became the most valuable AI startup on earth. For marketers watching which platform to build on, the enterprise money has spoken.

the marketing jobs squeeze

AI is powering the loss of B2B marketing jobs
MarTech | ~6-min read

A Wynter report found 47% of B2B SaaS companies have already cut or reduced marketing roles because of AI. Most cuts never showed up as layoffs. Companies quietly stopped backfilling open jobs and let attrition shrink teams. Content and copywriting ranked as the most at-risk function at 60%, followed by design at 37%. One respondent noted that experienced marketers can now produce junior-level work “in just a few hours with Claude.”

Why it matters: The jobs are not disappearing in a headline but are disappearing in a backfill that never gets approved. If you are early in your marketing career, the entry ramp is narrowing in real time, and nobody is sending a memo about it.

openai’s ad ambitions vs. reality

OpenAI’s ad business is still a work in progress
Digiday | ~6-min read

OpenAI is targeting $2 billion in ad revenue by end of 2026 and $102 billion by 2030. Public sentiment toward ChatGPT ads flipped positive during the pilot, swinging from -17.9% to +49.3%. But daily time spent per active user fell 18.3% between March and May, and power users dropped 14.5%. Enders Analysis projects ChatGPT will need to grow revenue per query from $0.002 to $0.041 by 2030 to hit its targets.

Why it matters: The ambition is Google-scale, but the infrastructure is pilot-stage. For marketers considering ChatGPT ads, the audience is there but shrinking per session, and the measurement tools are still catching up. Worth testing, not worth betting a quarter on yet.

new york draws the line

New York’s AI disclosure law takes effect June 9
National Law Review | ~5-min read

Starting June 9, any advertiser distributing content in New York must conspicuously disclose the use of AI-generated “synthetic performers,” digitally created people who look real but are not identifiable as any actual person. First violation is a $1,000 fine, $5,000 for each subsequent violation. Exemptions exist for expressive works like movies and games, and for audio-only ads.

Why it matters: This is the first state law requiring AI disclosure in advertising. The fines are small, but the precedent is not. If your brand uses AI-generated people in any ad that runs in New York, you need a disclosure plan by next Monday.

the new search signals

Google expands Preferred Sources into AI search
Search Engine Land | ~5-min read

Google brought its Preferred Sources feature into AI Overviews and AI Mode on May 27. Users have now selected over 345,000 sources, up from 90,000 when the feature went global. Links from preferred sources carry a visible badge inside AI-generated responses, and users are twice as likely to click through when that badge appears. Google also added a “Highly Cited” badge to web articles referenced by other publications.

Why it matters: Google just gave users a way to tell AI search which brands they trust. If your site earns that badge, you get preferential placement inside the AI answer. This is the closest thing to organic loyalty that AI search has produced so far.

meta’s subscription bet

Meta launches paid subscriptions for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp
TechCrunch | ~5-min read

Meta rolled out Instagram Plus, Facebook Plus, and WhatsApp Plus at $2.99 to $3.99 a month, along with two AI-focused Meta One tiers: Plus at $7.99 and Premium at $19.99. The premium tier unlocks deeper reasoning, more image and video generation, and enhanced analytics. Professional plans up to $49.99 are testing in select markets. The move diversifies Meta’s revenue beyond advertising for the first time at scale.

Why it matters: Meta just created a two-tier user base. Paid subscribers get better AI tools and deeper analytics. Free users get the standard feed. For brands, the question is whether paid users engage differently and whether Meta starts gating features that marketers currently get for free.

the ai price war

DeepSeek makes its 75% price cut permanent
Engadget | ~4-min read

DeepSeek made its V4-Pro discount permanent on May 22, landing at roughly $0.18 per million blended tokens, 11.5x cheaper than GPT-5.5 on input and 34.5x cheaper on output. The move sets a market floor that every Chinese frontier lab will need to match and puts cost pressure on OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

Why it matters: For marketing teams building AI into their workflows, the cost of running these tools is about to drop faster than most budgets anticipated.

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👩‍💻 thought-leader highlights

Ariel Cohen - “An Anthropic engineer just told you to stop building agents”

Ariel breaks down a 14-minute talk by Barry Zhang from Anthropic’s Applied AI team, and the core message is blunt: if you can map the decision tree, build a workflow, not an agent. Agents are for ambiguous, high-value tasks only. Most builders don’t have an agent problem. They have a workflow problem dressed up as an agent. The teams shipping working AI in 2026 are the ones who picked the boring option and shipped twice as fast.

Dr Lauren Ingram - “24 talks from Claude Code London, and most of them apply to any coding agent”

Lauren highlights the full recording drop from Anthropic’s Claude Code London event, calling out five talks worth starting with: Beyond the Basics, The Prompting Playbook, Using Lovable to Vibecode at Scale, Claude Design from Prompt to Production, and Stop Babysitting Your Agents. The content applies across coding agents, not just Claude, making it relevant for anyone building with AI tools right now.

Hamna Aslam Kahn - “Most people never unlock what Claude can actually do”

Hamna outlines 11 advanced strategies including using Projects for persistent context, creating identity files with role and tone preferences, enabling Extended Thinking for complex problems, and asking Claude to write its own optimal prompts. The throughline is treating Claude as a thinking partner with established context rather than a search engine you query from scratch each time.

Michelle Blaser - “The line between B2B and B2C marketing is gone”

Michelle writes that 79% of B2B companies now sell directly to consumers, up from 66% in 2024, and search interest in “B2B2C” has tripled in five years. The shift is driven by new revenue streams, Millennial and Gen Z decision-makers who reject boring marketing, and brand strength becoming a competitive moat as AI commoditizes the work itself. Contributors from Slack, Pinterest, and Air weigh in on how they straddle both sides.

Karina Taveras - “I built a social media performance coach that runs itself”

Karina programmed Claude Cowork to run automated weekly audits every Monday at 7 AM across LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, compiling performance data into an HTML report with graphs and callouts. Her results surfaced patterns she would have missed manually: TikTok grew 212% week-over-week with 13.8% of views from search discovery, and batch-posting eight LinkedIn posts at once killed reach. She recommends repurposing newsletter content into Reddit threads to influence AI training data while building human authority.

🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools

Claude Opus 4.8 + Dynamic Workflows
Anthropic released its latest flagship model on May 28, just 41 days after Opus 4.7.
Opus 4.8 brings improvements in coding, reasoning, and knowledge work, with a new Dynamic Workflows feature that lets the model coordinate hundreds of parallel subagents for complex tasks. Fast mode runs at 2.5x speed and is now three times cheaper. Available on Enterprise, Team, and Max plans.

ChatGPT Super App
OpenAI combined chat, coding, search, and agent capabilities into a single unified experience. The redesign consolidates what used to be separate tools into one interface, making it easier for marketers to move between research, content creation, and task execution without switching modes. Available across all plans.

OpenAI ChatGPT Expanded Ad Formats
OpenAI is testing larger images, customizable call-to-action buttons, and dedicated e-commerce layouts inside ChatGPT ads. New formats include pricing displays and customer reviews directly in the ad unit, plus upgraded audience targeting, conversion tracking, and outcome-based optimization. Building toward its $2.5 billion ad revenue target for the year.

AdRoll MCP Server
AdRoll launched an open beta MCP server connecting campaign data to ChatGPT and Claude. Marketers can use natural language to pull performance reports, analyze trends, compare time periods, and start campaign creation workflows, all from inside their AI assistant. Draft-first controls keep humans in review before changes go live.

Attentive Agentic AI
Attentive unveiled agentic AI features at its Thread 2026 event for SMS and email marketing. The system reviews customer engagement signals across channels to evaluate intent, then generates campaign recommendations and manages message creation automatically. Designed for marketing teams running lifecycle and retention programs at scale.

INCRMNTAL AURORA
INCRMNTAL launched AURORA in beta, a conversational analyst built on causal incrementality data. Ask natural language questions about where to scale, where to cut, and what is actually driving growth. Unlike typical AI assistants, AURORA considers marginal results and diminishing returns before making a recommendation. In beta for select clients now.

Pattern Intelligence (Pi)
Pattern launched an AI execution engine for e-commerce brands selling across Amazon, Walmart, TikTok Shop, and other marketplaces. Built on 77 trillion proprietary data points, Pi monitors pricing, advertising, and inventory through active sensors, triggering automated adjustments in real time. New features include Chat-to-Data for on-demand queries and scorecards tracking how products rank with AI shopping agents like Alexa, Sparky, and ChatGPT.

Snapchat AI Sponsored Snaps
Snap launched AI-powered brand agents that live directly inside the Chat tab.
Users can interact with brand AI agents for recommendations, pricing, and product details without leaving a conversation. First alpha partner is Experian. Sponsored Snaps already deliver 22% more conversions and nearly 20% lower cost per action compared to other Snap ad inventory.

DuckDuckGo AI-Free Browser Extensions
DuckDuckGo released new browser extensions that set its no-AI search as the default.
No AI-assisted answers, no chat prompts, fewer AI images in results. A direct response to Google’s all-AI search redesign at I/O. Installs surged 30% in the week following the announcement.

Madhive Maverick AI Agents
Madhive launched agentic AI for local video advertising and media planning. Maverick monitors inventory and coordinates target audiences at national scale, designed for the local TV and streaming ad market. Integrates directly into Madhive’s existing programmatic platform.

Klarna ChatGPT Shopping
Klarna built a shopping engine inside ChatGPT, wired to 100 million products across 13 markets. Shoppers can discover and compare products through conversation, then check out through Klarna. Positions AI chat as a full-funnel commerce channel rather than just a discovery tool.

Acclaro Multimedia Orchestration
Acclaro launched real-time subtitle translation across 100+ languages with AI-powered audio dubbing and voice cloning. Built for global content distribution at scale. Relevant for any marketing team localizing video campaigns across markets without reshooting.

💼 cool ai + marketing jobs

Plaid - AI Marketing Technologist Lead

eBay - Product Marketing, AI Solutions

Replit - Product Lead, Growth Marketing

Google - Program Management Lead, AI and Gemini App Marketing

Adobe - Director, Creative Strategy & AI Innovation

Reply anytime and let me know:

• Topics you’d like covered in future weeks

• Sections you love or could do without

• Questions about AI, marketing, or anything else

Love y’all,
Carley

~The AI + Marketing Weekly~

what you need to know this week in ai + marketing (15-second version):

• Google I/O 2026 focused entirely on making Gemini the operating layer across every product - Gemini 3.5 Flash (fastest frontier model), Gemini Omni (any input/output), Gemini Spark (24/7 agent), Universal Cart (shopping across Search, YouTube, Gmail). Google wants to be an intelligence system, not just an OS. (Google I/O)

• Google Marketing Live introduced Ask Advisor, a Gemini agent connecting Ads, Analytics, Merchant Center, and Marketing Platform - plus AI Mode ad formats for conversational search. AI Search is the only search now. (Google Marketing Live)

• Universal Cart lets shoppers buy multiple products inside chat and transfer to retailer sites - Google is building rails where purchase happens in chat and never touches your site. This decides who owns the customer at sale. (Marketing Brew)

• Newsom signed first-of-its-kind executive order on AI workforce disruption - mandates studies on severance and employment insurance. Signed a day after Meta’s AI layoffs. (Office of the Governor)

• 97% of marketing leaders use AI daily, but 78% of consumers prefer ads made by people - 87% say best advertising needs human touch. People aren’t anti-AI, they’re anti-soulless. (Canva)

• AI engines evaluate brands less on marketing narrative, more on customer experience - your reviews are now your positioning. You can’t write your way into an AI recommendation if the experience is mediocre. (MarTech)

• Aitana Lopez has 400,000 Instagram followers, major brand deals, and she’s AI - one in three Gen Z buys based on AI influencer recommendations. The backlash is about feeling deceived, not the technology. (Fast Company)

• Only 49% of martech tools are actively used - “workslop” happens when teams are pushed for volume with no quality control. Knowing which 20% is wrong still falls to a human. (MarTech)

• Figma launched a native AI agent on its canvas - generate, remix, and edit designs through natural language. Revenue hit $333M in Q1, up 46%. (Figma)

🗞️ top ai + marketing news

california moves on ai jobs

Newsom signs first-of-its-kind executive order on AI workforce disruption

Office of the Governor of California | ~4-min read

Newsom directed state agencies to prepare workers for AI-driven job loss, signed a day after Meta’s big AI layoffs. The order mandates studies on severance, employment insurance, and worker ownership, plus recommendations within 180 days on updating mass-layoff notice law. For now it’s diagnostic, not enforceable.

Why it matters: A study is not a protection, and workers losing jobs this year won’t feel anything change. But naming AI layoffs as a distinct policy problem is the kind of move other states copy.

google goes all-in on agentic

Google’s new AI Mode ad formats and agentic commerce tools

Marketing Brew | ~5-min read

Google introduced two AI Mode ad formats with Gemini-generated explainers, both testing in the US. It also launched Ask Advisor, an agent that pulls Merchant Center details to build campaigns and surfaces insights across Google Ads and Analytics. The agents now carry context between each other.

Why it matters: “Our agents talk to one another and carry each other’s context” is Google describing a marketing team made of bots. The human’s job becomes setting direction and catching the misses, a very different skill from running the campaign yourself.

Google Marketing Live 2026: the full announcement collection

Google | ~8-min read

Google framed Gemini as the foundation across Search, YouTube, and commerce. The Universal Commerce Protocol is expanding with a Universal Cart that lets shoppers buy multiple products inside chat and soon transfer items to the retailer’s site. Asset Studio got multimodal Gemini creative generation.

Why it matters: Google is building the rails for a world where the purchase happens inside the chat and never touches your site. The Universal Cart is the line item to watch, because it decides who owns the customer at the moment of sale.

the workslop problem

Marketing teams must own AI, or workslop will take over

MarTech | ~6-min read

Only 49% of martech tools are actively used and just 15% of organizations qualify as high performers. “Workslop,” a flood of low-quality generic output, happens when teams are pushed for volume with no time for quality control. The fix is an AI inventory, a mission statement, and clear handoff lines between teams.

Why it matters: Workslop is the perfect word for AI mandated without anyone owning how it gets used. Volume was never the hard part. Knowing which 20% is wrong still falls to a human, and that’s the job worth protecting.

consumers vs. the ai ad machine

Canva finds consumers want useful AI ads, but value human input

Marketing Tech News | ~4-min read

Canva’s State of Marketing and AI report surveyed 1,415 marketing leaders and 3,547 consumers. 97% of leaders use AI daily, but 78% of consumers would rather see ads made by people and 87% say the best advertising needs a human touch. 74% would feel better if formal AI policies governed its use.

Why it matters: The gap between 99% of marketers leaning in and 78% of people wishing a human made it is the whole story of this year. People aren’t anti-AI, they’re anti-soulless. Disclosure is starting to look like a brand signal worth owning.

The AI backlash is a danger for every brand now

Fast Company | ~5-min read

A Stanford and UC Berkeley poll found fewer than half of Americans want the country to charge ahead with AI. The risk has widened from the AI labs to any brand seen using AI in dubious ways. A Nike post touting Jannik Sinner drew accusations of AI-generated copy, a small sign of the new mood.

Why it matters: AI is an inauthenticity force multiplier. The scary part is you no longer have to use AI badly to get burned, you just have to look like you did.

the new shopping signals

Customer experience outweighs brand in AI-assisted shopping

MarTech | ~6-min read

When AI engines evaluate brands, they focus less on marketing narrative and more on customer experience, building your brand from reviews, comparisons, and forums. The old visibility playbook still matters but isn’t enough. Better CX now produces the signals that decide how often AI recommends you, making it an acquisition lever.

Why it matters: Your reviews are now your positioning, whether you like it or not. You cannot write your way into an AI recommendation if the experience behind your brand is mediocre. This is the most accountable marketing has ever been.

What customers consider when using AI to shop

CX Dive | ~4-min read

A survey of 4,200+ consumers found price is the top factor in AI-assisted shopping, then ratings, then the AI’s top pick. For an unfamiliar brand, two-thirds would consider it but need to check reviews first. AI-discovery shoppers are 2x more likely to abandon at any friction, and 4 in 5 won’t return after a bad experience.

Why it matters: People let AI do the shortlisting, then fall back on the same instincts: do I know this name, what do others say. Patience for friction is razor thin, so a clunky checkout for an AI-referred shopper is a customer you never see again.

ai influencers go mainstream

She has 400,000 Instagram followers and major brand deals. She’s also AI

Fast Company | ~5-min read

Aitana Lopez is a “virtual soul” built by Barcelona agency The Clueless, with a backstory, a cat, and a team of eleven behind her. Despite rising anti-AI sentiment, one in three Gen Z consumers buys based on AI influencer recommendations, and nearly half of college-age Gen Z follow at least one.

Why it matters: The same generation that says it hates AI is buying from synthetic people, which tells you the backlash is about feeling deceived, not the technology. If the persona is fun enough, plenty of people stop caring whether she’s real. That should unsettle every brand still arguing about disclosure.

design, everywhere

Canva’s new Gemini integration makes AI graphic design ubiquitous

Fast Company | ~4-min read

Canva is now integrated with every major AI model: Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini. Users can generate designs from chat context and pull them into Canva to edit, with Brand Kit keeping everything on-brand from the first prompt. Canva serves 265 million monthly users.

Why it matters: Canva’s whole strategy is to live inside whatever tool you already have open, and it’s working. For non-technical marketers, the gap between “AI made me an image” and “I have a brand-ready asset” was always the annoying part. That’s the step Canva just removed.

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👩‍💻 thought-leader highlights

Hamna Aslam Kahn - “Advanced techniques for maximizing Claude AI’s capabilities”

Hamma outlines 11 expert-level strategies including Projects for persistent context, identity files, collaborative mindset treating Claude as thinking partner, writing style matching, extended thinking, meta-prompting, and removing preambles with “No preamble. No filler. Just the answer.” Requires approximately 10 minutes setup for compounding value across future sessions.

Cecilia Stallsmith - “From blank prompt → published URL — no Eng queue, no tickets, no waiting”

Cecilia announces a live 45-minute session on May 28 demonstrating how product marketers can create and publish landing pages without developer assistance using no-code “vibecoding tools.” Removes traditional development bottlenecks, democratizing landing page creation for non-technical marketing professionals.

Alexandra de Lara - “What women are actually using Claude for”

Alexandra explores practical AI adoption by interviewing female entrepreneurs using Claude for competitive research, survey analysis, SEO optimization, website building, expense tracking, and AI “Chief of Staff” for priority management. Core philosophy: delegate repetitive administrative tasks—research summaries, spreadsheets, code snippets—freeing mental energy for strategic thinking rather than abdicating decision-making.

Anna Wojciechowska - “The Learning Curve Nobody Budgets For”

Anna examines counterintuitive productivity dip when adopting AI tools. Identifies four phases: Weeks 1-3 excitement, Weeks 3-6 the “crash” where editing overhead exceeds time savings, Weeks 6-12 learning what helps, Month 3+ genuine gains. Key insight: “Stop using AI for things you’re already fast at.” Two to three months represents realistic minimum before measurable improvements.

🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools

Google I/O 2026: the big picture Google’s biggest I/O in years, focused entirely on making Gemini the operating layer across every product it touches. Key launches for marketers:

• Gemini 3.5 Flash — faster than any frontier model, now powering AI Mode and Search

• Gemini Omni — any input, any output

• Gemini Spark — a 24/7 personal agent running in the background on your phone or laptop

• Universal Cart — a cross-app shopping cart working across Search, YouTube, and Gmail

• Redesigned Search box — built for longer, conversational queries

• Intelligent Eyewear — Android XR-powered glasses from Samsung with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker

Google is done being an operating system and wants to be an intelligence system.

Google Marketing Live 2026: what marketers need to know Google’s annual ads event made one thing clear: Gemini is now the operating system behind Google’s entire ad and commerce stack. Key launches:

• Ask Advisor — a single Gemini agent connecting Google Ads, Analytics, Merchant Center, and Google Marketing Platform for unified campaign management

• AI Mode ad formats — new ad units designed for conversational search journeys

• Universal Cart — rolling out to Search and the Gemini app this summer

• Gemini Omni Flash in Asset Studio — text-to-video creative production for ads

Google Antigravity 2.0
Google’s agent-first development platform got a major upgrade at I/O, moving from coding tool to full orchestration platform for building and deploying agents. Now runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash, supports multi-agent coordination, and integrates natively with Google AI Studio and Android. Gemini Spark is built on top of it.

Pomelli agentic capabilities
Google’s local discovery AI, now in Europe, gained new agentic capabilities that let it complete tasks on your behalf rather than just answering questions. Can now book restaurants, send emails to local businesses, and surface options based on your personal Google data.

Figma Agent
Figma launched a native AI agent embedded directly on its collaborative canvas, letting teams generate, remix, and edit designs through natural language without leaving the file. Respects existing design systems, supports multiple simultaneous agents, and integrates with Claude Code and Codex via MCP. Free during beta for Professional, Organization, and Enterprise plan users. Revenue hit $333M in Q1, up 46% year-on-year.

ASOS Stylist in ChatGPT
ASOS launched a ChatGPT app that lets shoppers discover and browse its full product catalogue through conversation, including shoppable video and livestream content. Built with video commerce platform Bambuser, it returns curated edits and styling advice in real time, with a “Shop on ASOS” button to complete purchase. Live for UK and US shoppers now.

Metabind
Build MCP apps once and render them natively across Claude, ChatGPT, and any MCP host, using a SwiftUI-like component system called BindJS. Write in TypeScript; it renders as native SwiftUI on iOS, Jetpack Compose on Android, and React on web without rebuilding for each platform.

OpenAI content provenance
OpenAI is embedding C2PA content credentials across all its image generation tools, so every AI-generated image carries verifiable metadata about how it was made. Pairs with Google’s expanded SynthID watermarking announced at I/O. Relevant for any brand creating AI-generated visuals that need to be trusted.

Codex computer use (locked mode)
OpenAI added locked computer use to Codex, letting agents execute tasks on a fully isolated remote machine without touching your local environment. Available now for Enterprise and Business plan users. Designed for high-security workflows where the agent needs browser or app access but must stay sandboxed.

Stability AI Stable Audio
Stability AI launched Stable Audio as a standalone product for AI music and sound generation. Generate custom tracks, sound effects, and atmospheric audio from text prompts. Available via API for production workflows and as a consumer tool. Relevant for content teams building video, podcasts, or branded experiences that need original audio.

Unframe raises $50M
Unframe, the managed AI delivery platform that takes enterprise AI from pilot to production in days, raised a $50M Series B and crossed $100M in total contract value in 12 months. LLM-agnostic, integrates with any SaaS or database without data leaving the enterprise perimeter, and uses outcome-based pricing so clients don’t pay until results are live. 400% net revenue retention.

Lovable Google connectors
Lovable now connects directly to Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Sheets, Slides, Maps, Gemini Enterprise, and BigQuery, letting builders create full-stack apps on real Google Workspace data with no API setup required.

💼 cool ai + marketing jobs

Perplexity - Demand Generation Lead

Reddit - Creative Technologist, KarmaLab

Snowflake - Product Marketing Lead - AI Solutions

Product.ai - Director of Brand & Content

Anthropic - Head of Anthropic Creative, Creative Studio

Reply anytime and let me know:

• Topics you’d like covered in future weeks

• Sections you love or could do without

• Questions about AI, marketing, or anything else

Love y’all,
Carley

~The AI + Marketing Weekly~

what you need to know this week in ai + marketing (15-second version):

• Bumble is killing the swipe entirely later this year - paid users fell 21% in Q1. The swipe built the 2010s dating app economy and Bumble just called it dead (TechCrunch)

• Anthropic passed OpenAI in paid business adoption for the first time - hit 34.4% of businesses versus OpenAI’s 32.3%. Claude Code is driving the growth (Ramp)

• OpenAI acquired voice-cloning startup Weights.gg whose catalog hosted Taylor Swift, Trump, Biden, and Blackpink - wound it down days after Swift trademarked her voice. Takedown disguised as acquisition (The New York Times)

• Researchers tested eight e-commerce persuasion tactics on AI shopping agents - only star ratings worked. Scarcity, timers, strike-through pricing produced backwards effects. Treat AI agents as a separate audience (Harvard Business Review)

• As AI compresses discovery, checkout becomes one of the last surfaces brands fully own - 74% would rather see no offer than an irrelevant one. Order confirmation pages are about to do real brand-building work (The Drum)

• Leading marketers deliver 79% greater shareholder value than peers - reinvesting AI gains into effectiveness is 2x more profitable than cost-cutting. Every CFO is going to see AI as a chance to cut (PwC)

• Only 49% of Fortune 500 companies still have a CMO, down from 55% - brands without a clear steward risk becoming invisible in AI models. AI can’t see your jingle or discount, only what you’re known for (MarTech)

• Individual tasks got 30% faster with AI, but projects still take four days - productivity gains don’t change how orgs ship. Faster team, same timelines = workflow problem dressed as tooling problem (MarTech)

• Tools like Claude Design push brands toward what’s familiar and proven - aka generic - if your brand is easier to imitate, you’re paying for differentiation in paid media instead (Fast Company)

• Women are 31% of Claude users, 27% of ChatGPT downloads, despite 1.6x higher layoff likelihood - the 25% adoption gap matters because AI’s natural language makes it accessible. Exclusion from this shift is particularly concerning (Robyn Cohen)

🗞️ top ai + marketing news

the dating app reset

Bumble is getting rid of the swipe, CEO says

TechCrunch | ~4-min read

Whitney Wolfe Herd confirmed Bumble will scrap swiping entirely later this year, calling it “revolutionary for the category” without saying what replaces it. Paid users fell 21% in Q1 to 3.2 million. Bumble is building an AI dating assistant called Bee, and Wolfe Herd has floated more extreme ideas like personal AI bots that date other AI bots on your behalf, even though Gen Z is trending negative on in-your-face AI features.

My take: The swipe built the entire 2010s dating app economy and Bumble is calling it dead. The harder question is whether AI matchmaking solves the actual problem, which is that young people are exhausted by being optimized in their love lives. Convenience is not what’s missing tbh...

who’s winning the business of ai

Anthropic beats OpenAI on business adoption

Ramp | ~6-min read

Anthropic just passed OpenAI in paid business adoption for the first time, hitting 34.4% of businesses in April versus OpenAI’s 32.3%. Anthropic quadrupled its business adoption over the last year while OpenAI grew 0.3%. Overall business AI adoption crossed 50.6%, with Claude Code as the engine behind much of Anthropic’s growth.

My take: A year ago, suggesting Claude would overtake ChatGPT in the enterprise sounded like a stretch.

openai and the voice cloning gray market

OpenAI quietly bought a voice-cloning startup

The New York Times | ~6-min read

OpenAI acquired Weights.gg, a small voice-cloning startup whose Replay catalog hosted models of Taylor Swift, Samuel L. Jackson, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, members of Blackpink and more. The team has been dispersed across OpenAI, the consumer service was wound down on April 1, and OpenAI is still publicly maintaining that its own Voice Engine is too risky for general release.

My take: This was a takedown disguised as an acquisition, days after Swift filed trademarks on her own voice. With an OpenAI IPO on the horizon, cleaning up the celebrity voice catalog before it shows up in a discovery filing is just hygiene. Worth watching how aggressively the rest of the labs move next.

the agent shopper era

Traditional marketing doesn’t work on AI shopping agents

Harvard Business Review | ~7-min read

Researchers from Bayes Business School and King’s College London tested eight classic e-commerce persuasion tactics across four models in thousands of simulated shopping rounds. Only star ratings consistently moved choice in the expected direction. Price reliably reduced selection. Scarcity, countdown timers, strike-through pricing, vouchers, and bundles produced unstable or backwards effects, with more advanced reasoning models often appearing skeptical of overt persuasion.

My take: Treat AI agents as a separate audience segment, the same way you’d treat any other distinct buyer.

As AI reshapes discovery, the checkout may become the brand experience

The Drum | ~5-min read

As AI compresses the journey, the checkout becomes one of the last surfaces brands fully own. Rokt research shows 73% of consumers find joy at the online checkout and 74% would rather see no offer at all than an irrelevant one. eMarketer projects AI platform-driven e-commerce will hit $20.9 billion in 2026. Tails.com saw a 153% conversion lift by refining checkout relevance instead of piling on promotional clutter.

My take: If discovery is moving into ChatGPT, then everything after the click matters more. Order confirmation pages and post-purchase moments are about to do real brand-building work, and most teams have not given them a thought in years.

the cost vs growth choice for cmos

Marketing in the AI era: to matter more or cost less

PwC | ~8-min read

PwC research with the ANA shows leading marketers deliver 79% greater total shareholder value than their peers. A strategy of reinvesting AI efficiency gains into greater effectiveness is more than 2x more profitable than one focused on short-term savings. CMOs face a clear choice: use AI to manage marketing costs, or use it to drive long-term growth. As one global energy exec put it, “Efficiency is the easy part. Real value comes when AI changes how we create and compete.”

My take: Every CFO this year is going to look at AI and see a chance to cut.

Why AI makes brand leadership more important

MarTech | ~7-min read

Only 49% of Fortune 500 companies still have someone with the CMO title, down from 55% the year before. More than one in five F500 firms changed their marketing leadership in the past 12 months. The author argues this is exactly the wrong direction. As more buyers use AI to find products, promotional spend stops driving sales and AI starts looking for meaning. The brands without a clear brand steward risk becoming invisible inside the models.

My take: AI cannot see your jingle. It cannot see your discount. It can only see what your brand is known for and how often it gets cited as the answer. I think the companies that no longer have the CMO role are about to find out the hard way.

ai got faster, the org chart did not

AI made marketers faster, but organizations stayed the same

MarTech | ~6-min read

Melissa Reeve uses a composite marketing team called Meridian Digital to make the point: turning a Monday blog post into a Tuesday email used to take four days. With AI, individual tasks got 30% faster, but the newsletter still takes four days because the handoffs, waits, and approvals are still human. Real impact only comes when someone is asked to own the work of connecting specializations across the team, which she calls coordinated progress.

My take: This is one of the most useful framings I’ve read on agentic AI. Individual productivity gains do not change how an org actually ships. If your team is faster but your timelines look the same, you have a workflow problem dressed up as a tooling problem.

the programmatic buying showdown

Marketers put up guardrails as AI agents reshape programmatic buying

Digiday | ~5-min read

At Digiday’s Programmatic Marketing Summit, agency execs admitted they don’t fully trust AI agents to run ad buys yet. The fear: a hallucinated CPM that blows a quarter’s budget in a weekend, with the agency holding the bag. The IAB Tech Lab launched the Programmatic Governance Council in April with WPP, Disney, Magnite, Yahoo, Amazon Ads, and The Trade Desk to set transparency standards. For now, humans stay at the wheel.

My take: The agencies that figure out the governance layer for agentic media buying will be in a much stronger position than the ones who either rush in or sit it out.

design, type, and the look of ai

What new AI design tools mean for brand typography

Fast Company | ~6-min read

Tools like Claude Design make design faster, easier, and cheaper. They also push brands toward what’s legible, familiar, and proven, which is another way of saying generic. Typography is brand infrastructure that has to work across every product, platform, and language. If AI pushes more brands toward the same safe defaults, the brands that invest in real typographic distinction stand out faster, with less media spend.

My take: Generic is more expensive than it looks. If your brand is suddenly easier to imitate, you’re paying for differentiation somewhere else, usually in paid media. Spend the money on the type system once instead.

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👩‍💻 thought-leader highlights

Alessandra Ram - “The Sad Wives of AI: Labor Market Story”

A WIRED investigation examining how the AI boom affects relationships, particularly women partnered with Bay Area AI professionals. Ram frames this as a labor market issue rather than lifestyle journalism, incorporating perspectives from labor economists and family therapists. The piece deliberately interviews only women, noting that male AI leaders already dominate media platforms, and explores how obsession with AI work reshapes domestic life and family dynamics.

Avery Akkineni - “The gap between using AI tools and actually building with AI code”

Highlights the critical difference between chatting with ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for hours versus building with Claude Code. Recommends “Couch to 5K for AI”- a free 10-minute daily program by Lenny Rachitsky and Hilary Gridley- to help professionals transition from passive AI consumers to active builders over 30 days. Key insight: lowering activation energy through incremental steps builds genuine AI development muscle.

Josh Blyskal - “Time-to-Citation for AI Answer Engines”

Analyzed ~900 newly published marketing pages to establish first-ever benchmarks for content citations in ChatGPT and Claude. Key findings: median citation time is 6.81 days, with 75th percentile at 18.68 days and 90th at 37.10 days. Content cited within 6 days outperforms average; content beyond 37 days likely has technical issues like blocked crawlers or robots.txt restrictions. Establishes critical AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) performance indicators.

Robyn Cohen - “Women’s underrepresentation in AI adoption”

Examines the 25% gap in AI adoption between women and men, with women representing only 31% of Claude users and 27% of ChatGPT downloads, despite facing 1.6x higher layoff likelihood. Contrasts Reese Witherspoon’s encouragement for women to learn AI with New York Magazine’s critique of “girlbossification of AI.” Cohen argues that unlike Web 2.0 requiring coding skills, AI’s natural language interfaces offer unprecedented accessibility—making exclusion from this technological shift particularly concerning.

Anna Wojciechowska - “Why Your Company’s AI Rollout Is Failing (And What Actually Works)”

Reveals three critical mistakes in AI implementation: starting with the tool instead of the problem, training executives instead of frontline workers, and measuring adoption over impact. Of six observed rollouts, four failed despite good funding and tools. What works: focus narrowly on one team and workflow, involve actual users in shaping implementation, and track real outcomes like response time and error rates rather than usage statistics. Key takeaway: successful AI companies listen to workers, not just buy better tools.

Tayla Burrell - “You can literally just vibe code things (here’s how with Claude Code)”

Outlines five-step process: create your vision, develop a PRD, build with Claude Code using frontend-design skill and plan mode, deploy via GitHub and Vercel, then iterate. Democratizes software creation by emphasizing that visualization and clear ideation matter more than coding ability, encouraging low-stakes experimentation for creative thinkers.

🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools

Alexa for Shopping
Amazon retired Rufus and replaced it with a unified AI shopping assistant now living in the main search bar. Available to all U.S. customers, no Prime required. Knows your order history, sets price alerts, reorders essentials, and uses “Buy for Me” to complete purchases on other sites on your behalf.

Claude for Small Business
Anthropic launched a toggle-install package of 15 pre-built workflows and connectors for QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, Docusign, and Microsoft 365. Covers payroll planning, invoice chasing, month-end close, and campaign creation inside Claude Cowork, with human approval required before anything sends or pays. Paired with a free 10-city U.S. workshop tour, 100 small business leaders per stop, each getting a free month of Claude Max.

ChatGPT personal finance
Pro users in the U.S. can now connect bank accounts, credit cards, and investments via Plaid and ask questions grounded in their actual financial picture. A live dashboard tracks spending, subscriptions, portfolio performance, and upcoming payments. ChatGPT can’t move money or see full account numbers. Intuit support coming soon.

Codex on mobile
OpenAI brought Codex to iOS and Android, letting developers monitor tasks, review diffs, approve commands, and kick off new work from their phones while Codex runs on their desktop. Available in preview to all plans including free. Files, credentials, and permissions stay on the host machine; the phone is the remote control.

Gemini Intelligence for Android
Google announced Gemini Intelligence at The Android Show, repositioning Android as an “intelligence system” rather than an operating system. New features include multi-step app automation, smarter Chrome browsing with summarization and form-filling, Rambler for turning voice notes into polished messages, and natural-language widget creation. Rolling out to Samsung Galaxy and Pixel phones first, summer 2026.

Runway Agent
Runway launched an AI creative partner that develops and produces a finished video entirely through conversation. Describe what you need, refine direction together, and generate it in one session without touching a timeline or switching tools.

Higgsfield Supercomputer
Higgsfield launched a cloud-native AI agent stack for end-to-end automated media production, on the heels of their viral 23-minute AI sci-fi pilot produced in 96 hours. The agent orchestrates scriptwriting, character design, video generation, and quality checking in a recursive loop. Higgsfield reached a $1.3B valuation and serves 22 million users, generating 4 million videos per day.

Cursor Composer 2.5
Cursor’s most capable in-house coding model, trained on 25x more synthetic tasks and built for long, complex sessions. Matches Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 on SWE-Bench at roughly one-tenth the cost ($0.50/M input tokens standard). Cursor is also training an even larger model with SpaceX’s Colossus 2.

Krea 2
Krea’s second generation brings a major leap in image quality, real-time generation speed, and creative control. Enhanced style transfer, sharper product renders, and tighter prompt adherence position it as a professional creative tool for designers and marketers, not just a consumer image generator.

Step Image Edit 2
Stepfun’s new image editing model makes targeted changes to existing images without degrading quality. Designed for production workflows where localized edits matter: swapping backgrounds, adjusting product details, or refining brand assets at scale.

Alexa AI podcasts
Amazon launched AI-generated audio episodes in the Alexa ecosystem, giving users personalized briefings, news recaps, and topic deep-dives through Alexa-enabled devices. Positions voice assistants as audio creation and delivery surfaces, not just playback devices.

Hint (Martha Stewart’s AI home startup)
Martha Stewart co-founded Hint, an AI home management platform that flags issues like expiring insurance, leaky ceilings, and high utility bills before they become problems. Raised $10M from Slow Ventures. Stewart helped design the visual language and wrote guides the product pulls from directly. Launching on desktop and iOS this summer.

Lovable Skills
Lovable launched Skills, a system for saving reusable instructions that Lovable applies automatically whenever a matching task comes up. Write once: your launch checklist, brand voice, preferred component structure. Team workspaces share skills across every project automatically, so no one has to explain the same thing twice.

💼 cool ai + marketing jobs

Ramp - Agentic Operator, Growth Marketing

Intuit - AI Marketing Manager, Marketing Futures

Goodie AI - Growth Marketing Lead

OpenAI - ChatGPT Research Product Marketing Manager

Google - AI Solution Architect, YouTube Marketing

Reply anytime and let me know:

• Topics you’d like covered in future weeks

• Sections you love or could do without

• Questions about AI, marketing, or anything else

Love y’all,
Carley

Hi friends,

I’m hosting a small women’s coworking hang this Sunday, May 17, in Soho, 3 to 5pm. Just a few of us in a coffee shop, working on the things we’re building.

Maybe it's the newsletter you've been meaning to send, or the Claude Code-built side project you swear you'll finish but keep getting a little stuck on. Maybe it's the invoices that have been sitting there, the application you keep almost starting, baby shower planning that somehow takes more energy than your actual job, or the document that's been open in a tab for three weeks…

If you’re in NYC and free for a couple hours Sunday, the link is here. Come hang and maybe meet a cool, kind new friend or two.

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If you can’t make it this time, or you live somewhere else entirely, fill out the interest form and I’ll keep you in the loop on what’s coming next for IRL coworking hangs and virtual ones, too!

Why I’m doing this in the first place

I have been thinking a lot about how lonely the work of building something can feel. The side project, the freelance gig, the newsletter, the business you’re nursing into existence on Sundays and weekday mornings. Most of us are doing it in stolen hours, alone, between everything else.

There is real science behind why working alongside someone helps, even when no one is talking. It’s called body doubling and you can read more about it here (the Cleveland Clinic has a nice piece). But the short version is that having another person in the room, even on a screen, makes the thing easier to start and harder to abandon.

A few things I’ve come back to lately while reading about it.

Starting is the hardest part. When someone else is starting too, you start. When they keep going, you keep going. The work that takes hours alone takes one focused session in a group.

Saying it out loud counts. A Dominican University study found that people who sent regular progress reports to a peer were twice as likely to accomplish their goals. Naming what you’re working on, even casually, even to one person, changes the math.

Most of us are missing a room. Most women building creative work do it in stolen hours, alone. Sunday coworking, on a couch with a laptop and a vague feeling of guilt. A session with other women is a stand-in for the room you don’t have.

That’s the whole thesis behind this. Less hustle, more company.

Subscribe now

What’s coming next

I’ll host more coworking sessions, both IRL and virtual, the interest form is here!

Aparna Chopra and I will also be hosting an AI workshop for women in AI in NYC. More details and link to the interest form here.

More soon! Excited to connect, learn, and get some work done together.

xo,
Carley

~The AI + Marketing Weekly~

what you need to know this week in ai + marketing (15-second version):

• Ex-Mailchimp CMO argues most marketing orgs are stuck in sequential, siloed setups built for a pre-AI world - the fix is a “brand code,” a machine-readable knowledge base both humans and agents can act on. (Harvard Business Review)

• OpenAI launched a $4B consulting arm backed by TPG, Bain Capital, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey - embeds AI engineers directly inside enterprises. Acquired AI firm Tomoro on day one for 150 deployment specialists. Anthropic launched a nearly identical venture with Blackstone the same day. The AI race is now about implementation, not just models. (OpenAI)

• Gartner expects traditional search volume to drop 25% by 2026 as chatbots and agents capture share - 83% of marketers say AI frees time for higher-value creative work. Brand voice and originality become more valuable, not less. (EY)

• 88% of organizations use AI in at least one function, but execution is fragmented - most platforms rushed to add isolated AI buttons that don’t carry context from one step to the next. Buying another tool is easy; mapping how your team actually works is hard. (CMSWire)

• Lovable's latest update brings real design intentionality to vibe coding - now asks for typography, layout, and color preferences before writing a single line. Preview design concepts first, then build. (Lovable)

🗞️ top ai + marketing news

ai is starting to build itself

AI systems are about to start building themselves

Import AI | ~12-min read

Jack Clark, Anthropic co-founder, says there’s a 60%+ chance fully autonomous AI R&D arrives by end of 2028. The proof point: Claude Opus 4.7 implemented an AlphaZero-style self-play pipeline from scratch on consumer hardware in three hours, beating the Pascal Pons Connect Four solver in 7 of 8 runs with no starter code.

My take: This piece has been quietly making the rounds for a reason. The takeaway for marketers is not panic, it is build the muscle now, because the gap between people who know how to direct AI and people who don’t is about to get a lot wider.

the agentic org chart

Redesigning your marketing organization for the agentic age

Harvard Business Review | ~9-min read

Ex-Mailchimp CMO Michelle Taite and co-authors argue most marketing orgs are stuck in sequential, siloed setups built for a pre-AI world. The fix is a “brand code,” a machine-readable knowledge base both humans and agents can act on, with specialized agents handling content, experimentation, distribution, and reporting while marketers move into strategic direction.

My take: Will the term “brand code” be everywhere within six months? Let’s see!

An operating model for the age of AI

Bain | ~11-min read

Bain says AI is not a tech upgrade, it rewires how the enterprise creates value. Microsoft already tracks more than 500,000 AI agents doing real work. The org chart becomes an accountability chart, where humans decide which agents run, what they access, and when to step in.

My take: Accountability chart is a useful frame. The people who get it are the ones who can name exactly which decisions only they should make and which ones an agent can run.

How AI is reshaping the future of marketing

EY | ~8-min read

Gartner expects traditional search volume to drop 25% by 2026 as chatbots and agents capture share. EY says marketing is shifting from campaign cycles to an always-on operating model, with 83% of marketers saying AI frees time for higher-value creative work and 75% calling it a clear differentiator. Brand voice and originality become more valuable, not less.

My take: Worth bookmarking the “brand voice becomes more valuable, not less” line for the next time finance asks why you still need senior writers on the team. :-)

what ceos want vs. what cmos can do

Marketers strain to juggle media, AI, and CEO expectations

Digiday | ~6-min read

Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey shows marketing budgets sitting flat at 7.8% of revenue, with 15.3% of that going to AI on average. 80% of CEOs expect AI to drive significant change, but 56% of CMOs say their budgets aren’t enough to hit their goals, and 56% say budgets will be cut if they miss. Dept’s Mammut campaign is a useful tell: 15% on paper, but AI shapes most major decisions.

My take: AI is influencing close to everything we touch, but the budget line still looks like a tidy little slice.

creator marketing and demand gen rewiring

AI is rewiring creator marketing, and most brands aren’t keeping up

Edelman | ~5-min read

Edelman argues too many teams are experimenting at the edges instead of integrating AI into the core of how creator marketing drives revenue. Creator discovery now runs on systems that analyze audience quality, content patterns, and brand alignment in seconds. If your process still looks the same as it did two years ago, you’re making weaker decisions with less information.

My take: Creator marketing is one of those areas where the old workflow looks fine until you sit next to someone using AI properly and realize they’re vetting twenty creators in the time you’re vetting two.

Rewiring demand generation in the age of AI agents

Bain | ~10-min read

CPG brands now have to sell to consumers and bots. As shoppers shift to mission-based prompts like “plan my son’s birthday,” agents collapse the funnel and favor distinctive, concrete, review-backed attributes over broad brand equity. Bain says innovation has to move toward step-change features and personalized variations because novelty has to justify the algorithm relearning your product.

My take: This piece is mostly about CPG but applies to anyone whose customers are starting to ask a chatbot before they ask anyone else. Your brand still matters, but it matters in a new way: structured, specific, and easy for a machine to repeat back.

workflow, localization, and the practical mess

Why your marketing team’s AI problem is actually a workflow problem

CMSWire | ~7-min read

88% of organizations now use AI in at least one function per McKinsey, but execution is fragmented. Most platforms have rushed to add isolated AI buttons that don’t carry context from one step to the next. Work management platforms like Asana, Monday.com, and Workfront are becoming the operational glass where humans and agents collaborate.

My take: This is the under-discussed part of agentic AI. Buying another tool is easy, mapping how your team actually works is hard, and the second one is where the real value lives.

AI is exposing marketing’s localization gap

The Drum | ~4-min read

Bernie Bingham of Spark argues AI handles content volume fine but widens the gap between global ambition and local delivery. With 75% of marketers now using AI tools, speed is the expectation, not the advantage. AI can’t fix poor processes, it just adds pressure, and human judgment is still required for cultural fit.

My take: Anyone who has watched a perfectly good campaign land badly in a market it wasn’t designed for already knows this in their bones. Speed is not the same thing as good.

the state of ai marketing in numbers

34 AI in marketing statistics

Shopify | ~10-min read

88% of marketers report regularly using AI for at least one function, but only 32% have fully integrated it across workflows. 77% of GenAI adopters use it primarily for creative development. 59% of CMOs say their 2025 budgets are insufficient. Display ad budgets are projected to drop 30% by 2026 as consumers shift to AI chat interfaces. Only 31% of individual contributors believe their leaders actually understand the AI they’re promoting.

My take: Leadership pushing AI hard while teams quietly suspect the top doesn’t get it is how trust breaks down.

AI in marketing examples you can use today

Sprout Social | ~9-min read

Sprout’s roundup walks through real applications: Salesforce Einstein for churn prediction, Agentforce integrated with Sprout for faster case resolution, Google Ads using behavioral data to predict ad performance, and AI-assisted copywriting for social. The use cases cluster around segmentation, customer care, content creation, predictive analytics, and reporting.

My take: If you want a practical menu to bring into a planning meeting, this is one of the better ones I’ve seen.

google’s measurement push

Turn your data into decisions

Google | ~5-min read

Ahead of Google Marketing Live 2026, Google announced three measurement updates: a Data Manager map view for visualizing how data flows between platforms, Meridian GeoX for causal geo experiments, and Meridian Studio, an enterprise MMM platform on Google Cloud. Advertisers using the Google tag gateway see an average 14% conversion lift.

My take: The MMM revival is real and Google wants to own it.

design, tools, and the human signal

Canva’s Cameron Adams on why the company is doubling down on AI

Inc. | ~7-min read

Canva’s co-founder and chief product officer tells Inc. the company is moving from “a design platform with AI tools” to “an AI platform with design tools.” The latest update adds AI agents that coordinate across Canva’s products, integrations with Slack, Zoom, Gmail, Google Drive and Calendar, scheduled tasks like email summaries, print-on-demand, and offline editing.

My take: Canva keeps quietly turning into the operating system for small business marketing. The Flodesk and Paypal integrations especially are the kind of move that makes a non-technical founder’s day shorter.

Why AI brands are obsessed with serif fonts

Creative Bloq | ~4-min read

Serif fonts are back, and the shift is being driven by AI brands wanting to feel more human, more analogue, more crafted. Anthropic’s Claude uses serifs across its UI and ads. Designers interviewed say the overly polished hyper-uniform AI aesthetic created visual fatigue, and brands are reaching back for warmth and character.

My take: When the tech is the thing people are most nervous about, the typography has to do extra work to feel safe.

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👩‍💻 thought-leader highlights

Allie K. Miller - “I have more named AI agents than I have employees inside my company”

Miller writes that an AI agent infrastructure with a chief of staff agent named Simon, 6 directors, 20+ subagents, and unlimited spawned civilian agents. In under 11 minutes, the agent crew completed 11 parallel tasks across calendars, Slack, email, and recordings. The post emphasizes AI’s evolution from a basic tool into an operational layer for workflow coordination, driven by a goals-context-decisions flywheel.

Maks Lepokhin - “AI won’t replace you. People with taste will.”

Lepokhin writes that AI-generated designs have become homogeneous and standing out requires genuine design knowledge and cultivated aesthetic judgment. He emphasizes that design accessibility through AI tools doesn’t guarantee quality, you cannot prompt your way to a perfect graphic. Building visual literacy demands intentional study through resources like Cosmos, physical magazines (Apartamento, Kinfolk), and curated platforms like Godly.website.

Rachel Roundy - “Ladies – we need to talk about AI”

Roundy addresses divisive reactions women are expressing toward AI, particularly following Reese Witherspoon’s AI involvement. She advocates for curiosity over dismissal, arguing that women should engage thoughtfully with the technology to shape its future rather than attacking others exploring AI. She rejects performative moral superiority and positions herself as someone working in enterprise AI who remains critical of thoughtless deployment while appreciating the field’s potential.

Ruben Hassid - “Setup Claude Cowork for Efficient Writing Sessions”

Hassid provides a step-by-step guide for configuring Claude Cowork to optimize writing workflows. The setup involves creating a folder structure with “About Me,” “Outputs,” and “Templates” sections, building foundational files with personal information and writing style guidelines, and configuring global instructions. The real game-changer is reducing repetitive context-establishment during conversations, preventing Claude from treating you like a stranger in each session. Generated 2,789 reactions and 292 comments.

Lenny Rachitsky - “Notion’s Max Schoening on Product Design and Innovation”

Rachitsky shares seven key insights from Max Schoening, Head of Product at Notion: exceptional products center on one tiny, well-executed element; taste is a virtual machine that predicts audience reactions; AI enables rapid prototyping making the first 10% of every project free; agency and adaptability become the differentiator as AI closes skill gaps; designers should think in code to understand constraints; being first is irrelevant, sustained excellence matters; and software requires maintenance like a garden.

Sophia Amoruso - “Women are sleeping on AI and it’s going to cost them”

Amoruso argues that women lag in AI adoption not due to lack of capability, but because “nobody’s talking to them.” Harvard research shows women adopt AI at 25% lower rates than men, attributed to receiving less manager support and workplace recognition. However, women’s AI adoption tripled last year versus men’s doubled rate. She shares practical examples of using Claude for meeting scheduling and Perplexity for inbox analysis, encouraging readers to start with small, manageable tasks rather than waiting for perfect understanding.

🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools

OpenAI Deployment Company
OpenAI launched a $4B consulting arm backed by TPG, Bain Capital, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey to embed AI engineers directly inside enterprises. Acquired AI firm Tomoro on day one for 150 deployment specialists. Anthropic launched a nearly identical venture with Blackstone the same day. The AI race is now about implementation, not just models.

Anthropic Finance Agents
Ten ready-to-run Claude agent templates for pitchbook building, KYC screening, earnings analysis, and month-end close, available as plugins in Claude Cowork or Claude Code. Pulls live data from FactSet, Morningstar, PitchBook, and Moody’s. FactSet stock fell 8% on announcement day.

Lovable aesthetics update
Lovable's latest update brings real design intentionality to vibe coding: ask for typography, layout, and color preferences before a single line gets written. Preview design concepts first, then build. Landing pages, apps, and blogs that actually look good out of the box.

GPT-5.5 Instant becomes ChatGPT’s default
OpenAI’s new everyday model for all users claims 52.5% fewer hallucinations on high-stakes prompts, sharper answers, and personalization using your past chats and Gmail. Paid users keep GPT-5.3 Instant access for three more months.

OpenAI Voice Intelligence
Three new API voice models: GPT-Realtime-2 (GPT-5-class reasoning in live voice), GPT-Realtime-Translate (70+ input languages, 13 output languages), and GPT-Realtime-Whisper (live transcription). Zillow reported a 26-point lift in call success rates in early testing.

Claude Managed Agents: memory update
Claude agents can now learn and retain context across sessions without manual re-briefing, stored as auditable files exportable via API. Pairs with the new Finance Agents for production-ready agentic workflows.

Spotify Personal Podcasts S
Spotify launched a beta CLI tool so AI agents can generate private, personalized audio, daily briefings, study guides, travel itineraries, and save them directly to your Spotify library. Works with Claude Code, Codex, and OpenClaw. Positions Spotify as the home for AI-generated personal audio.

ChatGPT Trusted Contact
ChatGPT users can now designate a trusted adult to receive a brief notification if human reviewers detect a serious self-harm concern in their conversations. Optional, consent-based, and private (no chat content shared). Available on personal accounts, not business or enterprise.

Claude for Microsoft 365
Claude now works natively in Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook, with context carrying automatically between apps. Start an analysis in a spreadsheet and finish in a deck without re-explaining anything.

Grok 4.3
xAI’s latest model with 1M token context, native video input, built-in reasoning, and a ~40% price cut to $1.25/M input tokens. Tops agentic tool-calling benchmarks. Eight legacy Grok models retire May 15.

Perplexity Personal Computer
Perplexity’s always-on Mac AI agent, which works across local files, native apps, and the web, is now available to all Pro and Max subscribers. Runs proactive tasks around the clock with explicit approval required for sensitive actions.

Grok Imagine Quality Mode
xAI launched Quality Mode for its image generation API, improving realism and text rendering. Grok Imagine currently ranks number one on the LMArena text-to-image leaderboard. Also launched this week: standalone Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech APIs built on the same stack powering Grok Voice and Tesla vehicles.

ElevenLabs Studio
A full production environment for creating long-form audio including audiobooks, podcasts, and narrated articles, with voice cloning, chapter-level editing, and one-click publishing.

Sierra
Sierra expanded its customer-facing AI agent platform with new personalization, escalation routing, and brand voice consistency tools. Clients include Sonos, Weight Watchers, and Casper.

Box Automate
Box launched AI-powered workflow orchestration for document-heavy processes like contracts, invoices, and compliance reviews. Triggers intelligent routing and classification without coding.

Luma AI API
Luma opened its video generation capabilities to developers via API, supporting text-to-video, image-to-video, and video extension for programmatic video production at scale.

Codex Chrome Extension
OpenAI’s Codex coding agent is now available as a Chrome extension, letting developers understand and debug web pages directly in the browser.

Google + Flow Music
Google partnered with music creation platform Flow to bring Gemini’s AI music generation into professional production workflows.

Microsoft Copilot Cowork in Frontier
Microsoft’s Claude-powered Copilot Cowork is now available inside OpenAI’s enterprise platform Frontier. A cross-vendor moment worth watching.

Unwrap AI
Unwrap launched a product operations AI feature that synthesizes customer feedback across channels into structured product insights, automatically tagging themes, urgency, and sentiment.

💼 cool ai + marketing jobs

Plaud - Global Brand Director - San Francisco

Microsoft - Senior Brand Strategist

Adobe - Senior Product Manager, Brands AI

Sendbird - Product Marketing Manager (AI-First, Full-Stack)

Intuit - Generative Creative Technologist, Marketing Futures

eBay - Product Marketing, AI Solutions

Reply anytime and let me know:

• Topics you’d like covered in future weeks

• Sections you love or could do without

• Questions about AI, marketing, or anything else

Love y’all,
Carley

~The AI + Marketing Weekly~

what you need to know this week in ai + marketing (15-second version):

• Only 7% of consumers say visible AI in marketing makes them trust a brand more, while 31% say it makes them trust the brand less - meanwhile, 77% of senior marketers plan to shift budget toward GenAI creator content. (eMarketer)

• Taylor Swift trademarked her voice and image - filed three trademarks including sound marks for “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift” and “Hey, it’s Taylor,” plus a visual trademark of her stage image. (Variety)

• Over 1 in 5 videos YouTube recommends are AI slop - analysts estimate AI is currently 60% hindering brand safety, 40% helping. Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas ad tested well in focus groups and then tanked publicly two years running. (eMarketer)

• LLMs increasingly cite Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, G2, and Wikipedia ahead of brand-owned content - Microsoft and Apple sites are cited less often than Reddit threads and Wikipedia entries about their products. (MarTech)

• Elon Musk testified for three days against OpenAI, claiming they “stole a charity” - OpenAI’s lawyer countered that Musk only sued because he didn’t get full control. Altman watched from across the courtroom. Two of the most powerful men in tech, one Oakland courtroom, hundreds of pages of receipts. (CNN)

• Meta and Google’s Q1 earnings showed AI driving real ad revenue - Meta sales up 33% with 8 million advertisers using its GenAI creative tools. Two years in, AI is finally showing up in the line items that actually matter (The New York Times)

• B2B organic traffic dropped 33.6% year over year while direct MQLs grew 6% - buyers are researching off-site through AI tools, then returning directly to brands they already trust. 61% of marketers say this is the biggest disruption in 20 years. (eMarketer)

🗞️ top ai + marketing news

the trust crisis: shoppers, slop, and brand safety

Shoppers aren’t impressed by AI-generated marketing
eMarketer | ~3-min read

Only 7% of consumers say visible AI in marketing makes them trust a brand more, while 31% say it makes them trust the brand less. Meanwhile, 77% of senior marketers plan to shift budget toward GenAI creator content.

My take: The gap between what marketers want to do and what shoppers want them to do has never been wider.

AI’s double-edged impact on brand safety
eMarketer | ~4-min read

Over 1 in 5 videos YouTube recommends are AI slop. Analysts estimate AI is currently 60% hindering brand safety, 40% helping. Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas ad tested well and then tanked publicly two years running.

My take: Testing positive in focus groups does not mean it lands in the wild.

The third-party sites shaping your brand in AI search
MarTech | ~5-min read

LLMs increasingly cite Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, G2, and Wikipedia ahead of brand-owned content. Microsoft and Apple sites are cited less often than Reddit threads and Wikipedia entries about their products.

My take: Your homepage isn’t the front door anymore but the Reddit thread from three years ago is.

the ai labor question: jobs, layoffs, and CEO warnings

The hidden logic behind AI CEOs’ job loss warnings
Fast Company | ~6-min read

Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis keep predicting massive white-collar job loss. Ben Goertzel argues the warnings double as the investment thesis of the century: if AI takes the jobs, you better own a piece of AI.

My take: Worth remembering when CEOs are the ones telling you their product will end work as we know it.

AI jobs unemployment Silicon Valley
The New York Times | ~8-min read

Ezra Klein argues a mass AI job apocalypse probably won’t happen, leaning on economists who say demand always shifts toward what can’t be automated. The harder problem is partial displacement: a slow restructuring of who gets in the door at all.

My take: The thing that still disappears is the entry-level rung you can’t see in any chart.

7 ways AI is being used at work
Fast Company | ~5-min read

Real examples from teachers grading 100 papers in 30 minutes, a marketing head at HireQuest using Claude to build a franchise dashboard, and a PM using Claude to translate engineering meetings into plain English.

My take: Love seeing the real stuff vs.hype - people quietly doing their jobs better with the right tool open in another tab.

the trial and the ad boom

Elon Musk takes the stand against OpenAI
CNN | ~5-min read

Musk testified for three days in his lawsuit against OpenAI, Altman, Brockman, and Microsoft, claiming they “stole a charity.” OpenAI’s lawyer countered that Musk only sued because he didn’t get full control. Altman watched from across the courtroom.

My take: Two of the most powerful men in tech, one Oakland courtroom, hundreds of pages of receipts. Whoever wins, the founding myth of OpenAI does not survive this trial.

A.I. helps online ad businesses boom
The New York Times | ~6-min read

Q1 earnings showed AI driving real ad revenue at Google and Meta, with Meta sales up 33% and 8 million advertisers using its GenAI creative tools. Investors gave Google more credit because its AI bets translate directly into cloud revenue too.

My take: Two years in, AI is finally showing up in the line items that actually matter. The ad platforms that cracked it first are about to widen the gap.

Anthropic, Blackstone, and Goldman launch a $1.5B AI services firm
The New York Times | ~5-min read

Anthropic is partnering with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs on a new $1.5 billion enterprise services company that will embed engineers inside mid-sized companies to redesign workflows around Claude. OpenAI is reportedly building a near-identical structure with TPG and Bain.

My take: This is consulting rebuilt from the model up. Companies that spend six dollars on services for every dollar on software just got a new option.

the marketer’s reckoning

AI moved forward, marketing did not
MarTech | ~5-min read

Eighteen months in, most marketers still use AI like a smarter autocomplete. Open chat window, type request, edit output. Today’s models can research three competitive angles, draft a follow-up piece, identify the best distribution channels, and write tailored intros in one session.

My take: If your AI workflow looks the same as it did last spring, you are leaving years of capability on the table.

Marketing teams aren’t fully embracing AI. Here’s what leaders can do
CMSWire | ~4-min read

86% of C-suite execs say AI usage is required, but only 49% of middle managers reinforce that with their teams. Marketers hear AI in strategy decks but not in their KPIs.

My take: Helpful training can help with this.

How marketing leaders are succeeding in the AI era
MarTech | ~4-min read

Gartner found that 82% of business leaders say their brand and culture must evolve for AI, but only 15% of CEOs see their marketing leader as strongly AI-savvy.

My take: The marketers winning are using AI for insight and strategy, not just content production.

As AI becomes standard for scaling, marketing leaders are adapting
Digiday | ~3-min read

A new Contentful and Benchmarker survey shows AI hasn’t replaced content outsourcing yet, but 70-85% of companies plan to increase AI investment, mostly in workflow automation and analytics.

My take: The era of “AI for blog drafts” is closing. The next round of investment is about decisions, too.

affiliate, inbound, and the channel shifts

Why affiliate marketing still needs humans in the AI era
MarTech | ~4-min read

Affiliate returns 12 to 15 times spend on average, yet many companies still treat it as set-and-forget. The author argues affiliate is not a channel but a portfolio of partnerships that needs constant calibration.

My take: Software alone has never run a good affiliate program and AI doesn’t change that.

FAQ on inbound marketing
eMarketer | ~6-min read

B2B organic traffic dropped 33.6% year over year while direct MQLs grew 6%. Buyers are researching off-site through AI tools, then returning directly to brands they already trust. 61% of marketers say this is the biggest disruption in 20 years.

My take: Inbound isn’t dead. The first half of the funnel just moved into ChatGPT. If your brand isn’t getting cited there, you’re not in the consideration set.

the celebrity and AI’s edges

Taylor Swift trademarks her voice and image
Variety | ~4-min read

Swift filed three trademarks: two sound marks for “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift” and “Hey, it’s Taylor,” plus a visual trademark of her stage image with a pink guitar. The move follows Matthew McConaughey’s eight similar trademarks last year.

My take: Right of publicity is state-by-state. Federal trademark law is national. If this works, every famous voice and face is about to get the same treatment, and the AI labs are going to have a much harder time pretending it’s all fair use.

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👩‍💻 thought-leader highlights

Poonam Soni – “Teach it once. Claude follows it every single time after”
Poonam highlights Anthropic’s 33-page guide on building Skills for Claude - folders containing SKILL.md files that teach Claude specific workflows for standardizing writing styles, research methodologies, or code reviews. The core benefit: “Teach it once. Claude follows it every single time after.” Commenters noted this signals a shift from “prompt engineer” to “system architect” era, emphasizing the need for execution boundaries and governance checks.

Emily Kramer – “New marketing roles for the AI age: Gen Marketer and beyond”
Emily identifies emerging roles breaking traditional GTM silos: Chief of Staff Marketing, Agentic Operator, and Gen Marketer. The most valuable skill isn’t traditional marketing or engineering - it’s wiring up MCPs, evaluating outputs, and explaining business cases. New titles fail without structural change, and modern CMOs now spend half their time on agent specs and prompt repos.

OpenAI – “Prompt guidance for GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4, and Codex”
OpenAI provides model-specific prompting strategies. GPT-5.5 works best with shorter, outcome-first prompts and explicit retrieval budgets. GPT-5.4 emphasizes multi-step reasoning with clear defaults for when to proceed versus ask permission. Key themes include distinguishing working steps from user communication, grounding answers in evidence, and adding verification loops before high-impact actions.

Axelle Malek – “Essential Claude shortcuts and commands for productivity”
Axelle shares practical slash commands that transform Claude into a structured workflow platform. Shortcuts include /cost for token estimation, /STEP-BY-STEP for action plans, /resume to reopen conversations, /branch for alternate paths, and /memory for persistent notes. Core insight: “Shortcuts exist so you spend less time managing the tool and more time using it.”

Ben Miller – “Tech debt is coming for marketers”
Ben created a /marketing-engineer Claude skill to audit projects and plan systems with better architecture. He discovered problems stemming from architectural flaws - misaligned file structures, overloaded LLM nodes, and uncontrolled vocabularies. Ben warns “tech debt is coming for marketers” as AI building prioritizes speed over structure, predicting the job market will reward genuine comprehension over artificial outputs.

Michael Crist – “How to build an AI Chief of Staff”
Michael introduces Claude Cowork for delegating tasks rather than chatting. The 20-minute setup involves creating a folder structure and writing context files. His “Director’s Brief Framework” structures tasks with Role, Goal, Task, Context, and Constraints. He demonstrates organizing 28 receipts into folders with renamed files and CSV summary in 6.5 minutes—work that typically requires manual effort.

🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools

Claude for Creative Work
Anthropic launched connectors for nine professional creative tools including Adobe, Blender, Autodesk, Ableton, and Splice. Claude now works inside software creatives already use, automating batch tasks, writing scripts, and executing actions directly inside Photoshop, Premiere, and Blender. Also joined the Blender Development Fund and is partnering with RISD, Ringling, and Goldsmiths on creative computation programs.

Meta Ads AI Connectors
Meta opened its ad ecosystem to third-party AI tools, letting advertisers manage campaigns through Claude or ChatGPT via an official MCP server. No API setup, no code. Connect once via OAuth and ask your AI of choice to pull performance data, build campaigns, manage catalogs, or diagnose tracking in plain language.

Hightouch raises $150M at $2.75B valuation
Less than 15 months after its last round, Hightouch closed a $150M Series D led by Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital Ventures. The platform lets AI agents run on a brand’s own customer data to plan and execute campaigns across email, ads, SMS, and web. 100%+ growth for two years running. Clients include Domino’s, PetSmart, DraftKings, and Whoop.

Mistral Medium 3.5 + Vibe Remote Agents
Mistral launched a new 128B open-weights model and moved its Vibe coding agents to the cloud, so developers can kick off tasks and step away. Agents run asynchronously, connect to GitHub, Jira, and Slack, and deliver finished pull requests rather than requiring step-by-step oversight.

Google AI Max goes bigger
Google expanded AI Max with three updates ahead of Google Marketing Live: AI Brief (guide campaigns in plain language), AI Max for Shopping (pull from Merchant Center feeds), and unified travel campaigns. Dynamic Search Ads are being retired in favor of AI Max by September.

April Gemini Drops
Google’s April update added a native Mac app, personalized image generation using your Google apps context, free music creation via Lyria 3 Pro, and NotebookLM built into Gemini. Personal Intelligence, connecting Gemini to Gmail, Calendar, and Drive, is now rolling out globally.

Creo (Omnicom) + Google Cloud
Omnicom’s influencer agency Creo launched an AI tool that automatically edits creator content for brand compliance before it goes live. Built on Gemini and Veo, it removes restricted objects, blurs competitor logos, and adjusts wardrobe elements in minutes rather than days. Live in the US now with global rollout in Q3.

Opal Gem
Marketing planning platform Opal launched Gem, an AI copilot built to reduce the “alignment tax”: time spent on status updates, data-chasing, and cross-team coordination. Trained on a brand’s existing Opal data, runs on Claude by default, and replicates past campaigns and generates briefs without manual uploads. Clients include SAP, Boeing, and Starbucks.

Replit Slides
Replit launched an AI slide builder that creates full pitch decks from a text description, with pixel-perfect exports to PowerPoint, Google Slides, and PDF. Start from scratch, import an existing PPTX, or upload brand guidelines, then iterate in chat. Available for Core and Pro users now.

Echo-2 (SpAItial)
SpAItial released Echo-2, a model that turns a single photo or text prompt into a navigable 3D world viewable in any browser in real time. Unlike video generators, it produces a spatially consistent scene you can move through. Built for digital twins, real estate, game prototyping, and robotics simulation.

💼 cool ai + marketing jobs

Serval - Agentic Operator, Growth Marketing

Perplexity - Demand Generation Lead

Scale AI - Product Marketing Lead, GenAI

Profound - Marketing Engineer

OpenAi - Product Marketing Lead, Advertising

Product.ai - Founding Lead of Growth — Brand & Distribution

Reply anytime and let me know:

• Topics you’d like covered in future weeks

• Sections you love or could do without

• Questions about AI, marketing, or anything else

Love y’all,
Carley

~The AI + Marketing Weekly~

what you need to know this week in ai + marketing (15-second version):

• Reese Witherspoon asked 10 women in her book club how many used AI. Three did. Only one felt confident. - Nirnaya Lohani wrote about this on LinkedIn: “Discernment without literacy is an incomplete equation. You cannot shape what you do not understand.” The gap isn’t access, it’s confidence and literacy (Nirnaya Lohani)

• and Dr. Becky Kennedy on AI’s structural impact - Jena wrote that AI isn’t just technical, it reflects and magnifies structural gaps that already exist. Dr. Becky raised concerns about kids growing up with shortcuts for everything—struggle, boredom, and disappointment aren’t inefficiencies, they’re how kids build resilience. Adults need guardrails, not defaults (Jena Wuu / Dr. Becky Kennedy)

• Big week for OpenAI with multiple product launches - GPT-5.5 (newest model for multi-step work), ChatGPT Workspace Agents (successor to custom GPTs for teams), and ChatGPT Images 2.0 (first image model with built-in reasoning). Rolling out across paid tiers (OpenAI)

• The “bland tax” could erase your brand from AI search - Semrush’s CMO Andrew Warden at Adobe Summit: “If you are generic, you are average. And if you are average, you are invisible.” 60% of Google searches now end without a click (Search Engine Land)

• Meta’s laying off 10% of its staff in May - 8,000 jobs gone May 20. Zuckerberg told investors work that used to need big teams can now be handled by one very talented person. Over 92,000 tech workers laid off so far this year (Business Insider)

• Meta’s AI has been changing brand ads without permission - Snag Tights discovered Meta stretched grass into a patio in one of their ads. Even after disabling AI features, agencies report Meta re-enables them. CEO told Marketing Brew if the picture isn’t real, you’re basically scamming customers (Marketing Brew)

• 90% of CMOs experimenting with agentic AI but only 10% getting real value - McKinsey found the technology works but you have to rebuild your team around it. Most companies add AI agents to 2019 org charts and wonder why nothing changes (McKinsey)

🗞️ top ai + marketing news

the consumer pushback: trust, taste, and AI fatigue

The digital yawn: it’s not ad fatigue, it’s cultural exhaustion
The Drum | ~5-min read
Marketers blame ad fatigue when the real problem is repetition of bad creative. 85% of digital ads can’t hold attention for 2.5 seconds. AI tempts marketers to confuse output with effectiveness.

My take: People aren’t tuning out because they’ve seen your ad too many times. They’re tuning out because it was forgettable the first time.

You cannot trust a machine: the AI consumer perception survey
Vogue Business | ~7-min read
Vogue Business surveyed 251 readers across the UK, US, and Europe. 54% have never used AI for fashion shopping, 55% distrust AI recommendations, and 66% say an in-store AI robot would hurt their experience. Top concerns: loss of creativity (23%), job replacement (19%), and less human interaction (18%).

My take: The line that hit me: “Shopping with AI’s help is just boring.” Luxury consumers don’t want a chatbot, they want the thrill of discovery. AI’s best play in fashion is invisible - inventory, clienteling, behind the scenes - not a robot greeter.

Brand differentiation in the age of AI: creativity is marketing’s last real advantage
The Drum | ~5-min read
Data and personalization no longer differentiate. Qualtrics research across 354 brands shows emotionally connected customers are 5.7x more likely to trust a brand. Creativity is the only lever competitors can’t replicate.

My take: When everyone has the same tools, the only thing left is whether you have anything to actually say. Harder than another AI subscription.

search, discovery, and the bland tax

The hidden ‘bland tax’ that could erase your brand from AI search
Search Engine Land | ~5-min read
Semrush CMO Andrew Warden at Adobe Summit: AI is conditioning itself to ignore blandness. 60% of Google searches end without a click. Generic content gets summarized and stripped of attribution.

My take: “If you are generic, you are average. And if you are average, you are invisible.” Best line.

Why relevance now beats reach in the AI-driven buyer journey
MarTech | ~6-min read
All about how the buyer journey now starts with an AI-synthesized answer. New metrics: share of answers, shortlist presence, credible conversation. Subject matter experts are becoming content authors.

My take: Reach is on its way out. The new question is whether you make it into the answer at all.

the AI creative backlash + brand control

Meta’s AI push has made its way into ad creative.
Marketing Brew | ~5-min read
Snag Tights’ CEO told Marketing Brew that Meta’s AI quietly modified their ads, including stretching grass into a patio. Even after disabling AI features, agencies report Meta re-enables them. One called it “Whac-A-Mole.”

My take: When the platform changes your creative without permission, that’s a brand safety crisis…

Marketing strategists search for a solution to AI’s all-too predictable outputs
Digiday | ~6-min read
LLMs trend toward the average because they pick the most probable word sequences. Carnegie Mellon’s “NoveltyBench” found a “fundamental lack of distributional diversity” even with creative prompts.

My take: The sameness trap has a name now. If you’re using ChatGPT and Claude for everything, your strategy will look like everyone else’s.

the workforce reckoning

Meta plans to lay off 10% of its entire staff in May 2026
Business Insider | ~4-min read
8,000 jobs cut May 20, plus 6,000 open roles eliminated. Zuckerberg told investors “projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person.” Over 92,000 tech workers laid off in 2026 so far. :/

My take: The Zuckerberg quote is the whole story. No more “rightsizing” euphemisms. They’re replacing teams with one person and a Claude subscription.

We need to talk more about AI’s impact on early-career marketers
MarTech | ~7-min read
Stanford found a 16% relative employment decline for ages 22-25 post-ChatGPT.

My take: This one hurts to read. The work we used to give junior marketers is exactly what AI does well. We need to figure out what their job actually is, fast.

the org chart problem

Reinventing marketing workflows with agentic AI
McKinsey | ~12-min read
Agentic AI could power 2/3 of marketing activities, with 10-30% revenue growth and 10-15x faster campaigns. Nearly 90% of CMOs are experimenting; fewer than 10% are capturing value end-to-end.

My take: The technology works, but you have to actually rebuild your team around it. Most companies will bolt agents onto a 2019 org chart and wonder why nothing changes.

Agile and non-agile marketing teams are stuck on 2 different AI problems
CMSWire | ~5-min read
Agile teams are 3x more likely to have AI fully integrated (39% vs 13%). Non-agile marketers worry about accuracy (still proving it works); agile marketers worry about governance (already scaling).

My take: It’s now all about whether your team can ship something imperfect and adjust.

the value frame: cost lever or growth catalyst

Marketing in the AI era: to matter more or cost less?
PwC | ~7-min read
PwC and the ANA found leading marketers deliver 79% greater shareholder value. Reinvesting AI savings into growth is 2x more profitable than savings-only.

My take: CMOs treating AI as a cost-cutting tool will bank one round of savings, then watch their growth shrink. The ones reinvesting in creative and testing keep compounding.

Adobe enterprise CMO explains how AI helps scale personalization
Business Insider | ~5-min read
Rachel Thornton, Adobe’s enterprise CMO: human creativity defines the brand, AI scales execution. She reframes AI as “augmented intelligence” and says CMOs must connect marketing to revenue or get treated as a cost center.

My take: “Augmented intelligence” is a soft framing but the substance is right. CMOs winning now show a direct line from marketing investment to revenue.

brand identity in the age of agents

When brands become actors
Fast Company | ~5-min read
David Placek of Lexicon Branding: brands have always been symbols, but AI turns them into actors. When your brand is embodied in a chatbot, it interacts, refuses, recommends, and corrects in real time. The challenge shifts from coordinating messages to governing behavior.
My take: Most brand guidelines cover static logos and tone of voice. Almost nobody has a doc on what their AI agent says. That’s the new brand voice and tone need!

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👩‍💻 thought-leader highlights

Elena Verna – “Your product has a new user. It’s not human”
Elena argues that AI agents accessed via Model Context Protocol may become primary product users, ignoring UI and caring only about reliable output. Products relying on friction or complexity for defensibility face disruption. Distribution shifts from “getting users into products” to “making products fit into workflows,” with API reliability and documentation replacing traditional marketing.

Jonathan Martinez – “Day in the life of a Growth Engineer”
Jonathan describes how Growth Engineers build automated systems where AI agents continuously run tests, replacing manual marketing cycles. He advocates for centralized “context lakes” in GitHub rather than scattered Google Drives, and emphasizes building custom software solutions while training and orchestrating AI agents for tasks like competitor research and ad creation.

Marvin Chow – “Marketing Engineers are the hire of 2026”
Marvin defines marketing engineers as system architects who orchestrate AI solutions, not just tool operators. These professionals build systems that monitor brand mentions, track competitors, and update sales materials automatically. His hiring framework focuses on four competencies: mapping business processes, identifying where agents replace bottlenecks, building solutions, and measuring pipeline impact.

Amy Copadis – “Using Claude to build a content strategy for an affiliate site”
Amy demonstrates how she provided Claude with 10+ years of content marketing expertise to create audience research, style guides, and content strategy in an afternoon. She emphasizes that AI gets you “80% of the way” but human expertise is needed for the final 20% - analyzing results, requesting revisions, and making final edits.

Allie K. Miller – “AI hiring and onboarding guide for business problem solving”
Allie outlines a proficiency framework from Level 2 (surface users without impact) to Level 5 (full ownership of problems and solutions). New hires should start at Level 4, demonstrating critical thinking and understanding tradeoffs. She emphasizes that “using AI doesn’t replace your critical thinking—it means the work you can pull off now wasn’t on the table a year ago.”

Sarah Hoffman – “AI infrastructure and uneven adoption risks”
Sarah highlights that AI models are becoming foundational infrastructure shaping how work is done. Her central concern is that uneven development and adoption across sectors and demographics poses significant risks, potentially widening disparities rather than narrowing them. She emphasizes that who builds these systems matters for societal outcomes.

Marvin Chow – “How to future-proof your career in the age of AI”
Marvin writes that raw output will diminish in value while judgment and decision reliability become paramount. Success depends on sound judgment under uncertainty, strategic narrative crafting, and empathy-driven leadership. Future work emphasizes humanistic qualities over specialized technical skills, making liberal arts education and interdisciplinary synthesis increasingly valuable.

Svitlana Shuliak – “Boosting PMM efficiency with Claude and AI tools”
Svitlana shares how product marketers can develop reusable prompt templates for ICP definition, positioning, and battlecards. She advocates for advanced prompting techniques like role-playing and prompt chaining, integrating Claude with tools like Asana and Gong, and using different workspaces strategically—Chat for quick edits, Cowork for collaboration, and Projects for larger initiatives.

Anna Mason – “AI adoption spectrum: Maxxing, Anxious, Detoxing”
Anna identifies three AI adoption categories: Maxxing (aggressive adoption), Anxious (fear-driven use), and Detoxing (prioritizing real-world experiences). When she prompted ChatGPT to create an infographic, it produced gender-stereotyped output - a man as “AI Maxxing” and women as “Anxious” and “Detoxing”- demonstrating how implicit bias becomes embedded in AI systems.

Jena Wuu – "AI is a women's issue"
Jena writes that women's jobs are three times more likely than men's to be replaced by AI, particularly in administrative and operational roles. AI deployment occurs within existing systems that already disadvantage women through lower leadership representation and undervalued essential work. AI increasingly addresses underserved areas like women's health, yet women remain underrepresented in AI leadership decisions. Technology has long supplemented institutional failures, and understanding AI's trajectory requires recognizing how it reflects and amplifies existing societal inequalities.

Nirnaya Lohani – “Women’s AI literacy gap: A growing concern”
Nirnaya highlights that of 10 women in Reese Witherspoon’s book club, only 3 used AI and just 1 felt confident. A 2025 UN ILO report shows women’s jobs face nearly three times greater AI automation exposure than men’s. She argues “discernment without literacy is incomplete - you cannot shape what you do not understand,” and highlights accessible education initiatives like “AI-Empowered Mom.”

Dr. Becky Kennedy – “AI’s impact on child development”
Dr. Becky argues that children growing up with AI have constant workarounds for academic and emotional challenges, undermining development of critical skills like frustration tolerance and critical thinking. Kids naturally gravitate toward short-term comfort over long-term growth. She emphasizes that struggle, boredom, and disappointment aren’t inefficiencies - they’re necessary for building resilience. Society must create protective guardrails around AI access for children, with adults intentionally guiding use rather than letting technology lead by default.

🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools

GPT-5.5
OpenAI’s newest and most capable model, pitched as the next step toward its “super app” vision. Built for multi-step agentic work: coding, research, data analysis, and document creation with less user hand-holding. Rolling out to Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers in ChatGPT and Codex now.

ChatGPT Workspace Agents
OpenAI’s successor to custom GPTs, built for teams to create shared, always-on agents. Powered by Codex, agents handle complex workflows, connect to Slack, Salesforce, Google Workspace, and more, and keep working after you close your laptop. Free in research preview until May 6.

ChatGPT Images 2.0
OpenAI’s first image model with built-in reasoning, and a real upgrade for marketers. Generates up to eight coherent images from one prompt, renders multilingual text accurately, and outputs up to 2K resolution. Available to all ChatGPT users now.

Anthropic’s April 23 Postmortem
Anthropic publicly admitted three separate engineering changes degraded Claude Code’s quality for six weeks. The culprits: a reasoning effort downgrade, a caching bug that made Claude forget mid-session, and a verbosity cap that hurt coding output. All fixed as of April 20, with usage limits reset for all subscribers. Notable for the transparency.

Claude Code Desktop redesign
Anthropic redesigned the Claude Code desktop app with multi-session support and Routines for repeatable workflows. Landed the same week as Canva AI 2.0 and OpenAI’s Codex update, making it one of the bigger weeks for AI-native tools across the board.

Genspark AI
An all-in-one AI workspace that runs multiple models simultaneously and acts on tasks rather than just answering them. Covers slides, docs, sheets, web dev, meeting notes, and voice, plus an AI employee called Claw that executes multi-step tasks across tools. Hit $250M ARR in under a year with a team of about 30 people.

DOJO AI raises $6M
Agentic marketing platform that monitors campaigns around the clock and acts on what it finds. Built on a proprietary knowledge graph that models your brand’s full marketing operation. Serves CoinDesk, Morningstar, and PensionBee, with 20% month-on-month growth since launch.

Google Pomelli in Europe
Google’s AI-powered local discovery companion, now expanding to European markets. Helps users find local businesses, events, and places through conversational queries rather than keyword search. A signal of how AI is reshaping local and discovery marketing.

Adobe AI website experiment
Adobe is testing a tool that generates websites customized by generation and audience persona. Early testing focuses on Gen Z aesthetics, hinting at a future where brand sites auto-adapt to whoever’s visiting without manual audience segmentation in the design process.

Knak + AI agents
Enterprise email and landing page builder Knak is making its production capabilities callable by AI agents. Marketing teams can now trigger Knak workflows programmatically, meaning AI can plan and build campaigns without humans opening the tool. A quiet but meaningful step for enterprise marketing automation.

Omnicom’s influencer brand safety tool
Omnicom launched an agentic AI tool that automatically reviews and adjusts influencer content for brand safety. It monitors creator output, flags issues, and recommends edits in real time, addressing one of the persistent headaches in influencer marketing at scale.

Semrush brand visibility framework
Semrush introduced a new framework for measuring how brands appear in AI-generated search results. As ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini reshape discovery, Semrush is betting marketers need entirely new metrics for this new channel.

Lovable Desktop app
The popular AI app builder launched a native Mac desktop app with local MCP server support and multi-project tabs. Lets builders connect local tools like Figma Desktop directly into Lovable without a browser. The company hit $200M ARR in its first year with 100,000 new projects built daily.

💼 cool ai + marketing jobs

Laurel - AI Ops, Marketing

Adobe - Campaign Content Manager, Applied AI

O Positiv Health - AI Creative Strategist

Ramp - Agentic Operator, Growth Marketing

Snowflake - Product Marketing Lead - AI Solutions

Reply anytime and let me know:

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Love y’all,
Carley

~The AI + Marketing Weekly~

what you need to know this week in ai + marketing in 15 seconds:

• Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds sold its footwear business and rebranded as NewBird AI, a GPU-leasing company - stock jumped 600%. Not a strategy, just a tired company reaching for the nearest lifeboat (NYT)

• Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4.7 + Claude Design - new model brings stronger vision, better coding, sharper instruction following. Claude Design lets you create prototypes, slides, one-pagers through plain conversation with your brand system built in (Anthropic)

• The App Store is booming again, and AI may be why - global app releases up 60% year-over-year. AI coding tools like Claude Code and Replit letting non-engineers ship their own apps (TechCrunch)

• When an AI chatbot recommends a different brand, nearly half of active users say they’ll try it - your customer asked the bot, the bot suggested someone else, they tried it. That’s the whole funnel now (eMarketer)

• Canva is officially an AI platform with design tools - repositioned from “design platform with AI” to “AI platform with design tools.” Third-most-used generative AI product with 265M monthly users (Fast Company)

• Profound launches “The Rise of the Marketing Engineer” course - The people solving that gap aren’t engineers, they’re marketers who started building (Profound)

• Entry-level hiring is down 6%, 72% of young office workers are considering skilled trades (LinkedIn News)

🗞️ top ai + marketing news

the money layer: pricing, compute, and what AI actually costs

Anthropic changes pricing to bill firms based on AI use amid compute crunch
The Information | ~5-min read
Anthropic is moving enterprise customers from flat-rate plans to per-token pricing. A $20 seat fee plus usage at API rates replaces seats that used to run up to $200. Heavy users could see bills double or triple, and GPU rental prices are up 48% in two months.
My take: The all-you-can-eat phase of AI is probably over. Finance teams are about to get a very clear picture of who actually uses these tools.

Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot to AI
The New York Times | ~4-min read
Allbirds sold its footwear business to American Exchange Group for $39M and is rebranding as NewBird AI, a GPU-leasing company. Stock jumped almost 600%. There’s a one-year kill switch if the AI bet flops.
My take: A wool-sneaker brand becoming a cloud compute provider isn’t a strategy. It’s a tired company reaching for the nearest lifeboat. Also, my grandma is not happy! She loves her birds.

The App Store is booming again, and AI may be why
TechCrunch | ~4-min read
Global app releases were up 60% year-over-year in Q1, 80% on iOS. Appfigures credits AI coding tools like Claude Code and Replit letting non-engineers ship their own apps. Productivity, utilities, and lifestyle are all climbing the charts.
My take: The vibe coding era showing up in real numbers. I’ve been building directories with Claude Code for months. Turns out a lot of other non-engineers have been too.

search, discovery, and being legible to the machines

Google AI Max moves out of beta, marketers sound off on the inevitable migration
Digiday | ~5-min read
AI Max is out of beta and will auto-upgrade Dynamic Search Ads, broad match, and automatically created assets in September. The shift is keyword-based to intent-based auctions. Marketers report 7% conversion lifts but also attribution overlap and cannibalization.
My take: Google is good at this move. Ship it in beta, get everyone mildly hooked, make it the default. “You can’t stop the train that’s coming,” one marketer told Digiday. Correct.

Reddit’s rise in AI citations: what marketers must know about AEO strategy
CMSWire | ~5-min read
Reddit is now one of the most-cited sources across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI. Google’s $60M annual licensing deal locked that in. eMarketer says US enterprises are already spending 12% of digital budgets on generative engine optimization, with 94% planning to spend more in 2026.
My take: I’ve been saying this for a year. Reddit is where the AI gets its homework answers. If you’re not showing up there as a human, you’re not showing up as a brand either.

When an AI chatbot recommends a different brand, nearly half of active users say they’ll try it
eMarketer | ~3-min read
New eMarketer and Publicis Commerce data: 49% of US AI users say they’re likely to try a new brand if an AI suggests it. Survey ran on 1,179 adults who’d used AI for product research in the past month.
My take: Your customer asked the bot. The bot suggested someone else. They tried it. That’s the whole funnel now.

wedding industry + AI

Practical ways to use AI to reimagine retail with David’s Bridal
Ad Age Marketer’s Brief | ~20-min listen
David’s Bridal’s Lisa Horton walks through the “Aisle to Algorithm” strategy: Pearl Planner (AI wedding planning), AEO-optimized product pages, shoppable checkout inside ChatGPT and Copilot, a new Vera Wang Bride collab, and a boutique concept called Diamonds and Pearls.
My take: I think this is the most aggressive AI rebuild any bridal retailer has attempted. They’re meeting the bride at discovery, not at purchase. Most wedding brands are still advertising to women who already booked a venue.

trust, hype, and the marketing of AI itself

AI companies make powerful tech, but they’re also savvy marketers
The Guardian | ~5-min read
On Anthropic’s Claude Mythos launch, billed as a “reckoning” for cybersecurity. The model is being withheld via Project Glasswing, an alliance with Apple, Nvidia, Google, JPMorgan, and AWS. Experts pushed back on Anthropic’s “thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities” framing, calling it overstated.
My take: The smartest thing any AI lab is doing right now is controlling how people talk about the product. Withholding is a marketing tactic, not just a safety stance.

AI rewards brand meaning and punishes everything else
MarTech | ~5-min read
AI systems don’t rank media spend. They read meaning. The author ran a Claude experiment comparing Lululemon (built on brand) to Gap (leaned on performance marketing) and the long-term stock returns showed a massive gap. Weak brands don’t just fail to show up. They get displaced.
My take: Brands that can say what they do in one sentence will win this era. The ones that need a 40-slide deck get buried in the AI’s “generic option” bucket.

org design and the work underneath

Marketing org charts were built for channels. AI just made that obsolete.
CMSWire | ~5-min read
B2B teams still organize by channel (email, social, SEO, paid), but AI works across channels at once. The author’s argument: hire for the system gap, not the channel vacancy. If lead qualification is slow, hire someone who can redesign it with AI.
My take: The old lines don’t hold when one person with good tools can ship what used to take four teams.

LinkedIn grads guide 2026
LinkedIn News | ~6-min read
Entry-level hiring is down 6% year-over-year (mid-level roles are worse at 10% down). 44% of Gen Z say no network is their biggest barrier. 21% have started a business already. “Founder” on US LinkedIn profiles has nearly tripled since 2022. 72% of young office workers are considering skilled trades.
My take: No wonder 72% are looking at trades. At least the electrician has a job that can’t be automated next Tuesday.

retail, loyalty, and what consumers actually do

Generative AI in marketing
Databricks | ~12-min read
A primer with a useful maturity curve: teams start with ChatGPT or Claude, move to fine-tuning on their own data, then integrate AI across the stack. Real cases: Pandora (50% click-to-open lift), Skechers (324% CTR on lapsed customers), HP (audience build time from 5 hours to 2, 400M records in seconds).
My take: Yes, it’s a company/vendor blog, but a good one. The real gen AI marketing story isn’t the content. It’s what happens when you hook models up to your own customer data. Most teams are at stage one and acting like they’re at stage three.

How retailers are turning AI adoption into brand loyalty
Forbes | ~5-min read
Retailers are using AI personalization, real-time recommendations, and conversational assistants to deepen loyalty instead of chasing conversion. The argument: loyalty isn’t a points program anymore. It’s whether the retailer’s AI remembers who you are.
My take: Retention is finally interesting again. For years “loyalty” meant a punch card and an email list. Now it means whether the AI remembers your size, your budget, and the partner you also shop for.

platforms, products, and the bigger picture

Canva is officially an AI platform with design tools
Fast Company | ~5-min read
Canva launched AI 2.0 and flipped its framing from “design platform with AI” to “AI platform with design tools.” Now the third-most-used generative AI product (behind Gemini, ahead of DeepSeek) with 265M monthly users and $4B in 2025 revenue. Three proprietary models, deeper Claude integration, and integrations with Slack, Gmail, and Microsoft 365.
My take: Most interesting repositioning of the year so far. Canva had a choice: stay in its design lane and get eaten, or claim AI territory. They picked the right fight and did it seamlessly!

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👩‍💻 thought-leader highlights

Rachel Roundy — “Speed without strategy is just scaling noise”
Even experienced marketing teams are bypassing strategy to ship faster because AI makes it possible and the result is more noise in an already overwhelmed market. Rachel argues PMM needs to reintroduce intentionality and get back to asking what’s actually worth amplifying.

Ruben Hassid — “Stop writing 500-word prompts. Here’s what actually works.”
The fix isn’t a longer prompt, it’s a smarter setup: context files that tell Claude who you are, a clear 3-line task, and “don’t start yet, ask me questions first” appended to every prompt.

Allie K. Miller — “Claude Cowork in 5 minutes, no terminal required”
Allie releases a free quick-start guide for Claude Cowork aimed at non-technical business professionals, covering installation, real user stories with prompts, and how to turn recurring tasks into reusable skills.

Rob Litterst — “Your pricing page now has two audiences: humans and agents”
Buffer added a /pricing.md file so AI agents can parse their pricing without scraping or guessing, and the implication is bigger than the effort: any SaaS company with confusing pricing is now at risk of losing deals they never knew were happening.

Profound — “The rise of the marketing engineer”
Marketing teams are expected to do exponentially more work while headcount grows linearly and the people solving that gap aren’t engineers, they’re marketers who started building. Profound makes the case for a new discipline and shares a course all about it.

🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools

Canva AI 2.0
Canva’s biggest launch since 2013, turning it into a full agentic creative platform. Describe a goal and it generates fully layered, editable designs across every format. Connects to Slack, Notion, Gmail, and Zoom, schedules recurring tasks in the background, and builds a living memory of your brand. Now in research preview.

Claude Opus 4.7 + Claude Design
Anthropic’s new model plus a design tool that spooked Figma into a 7% stock drop. Opus 4.7 brings stronger vision, better coding, and sharper instruction following. Claude Design, built on top of it, lets you create prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and mockups through plain conversation, with your team’s brand system built in from day one.

OpenAI Codex: “for almost everything”
Codex’s biggest update yet turns it from a coding assistant into a general-purpose desktop agent. Now includes computer use on Mac, an in-app browser, image generation, memory, 90+ new plugins (Jira, HubSpot, Salesforce, Google Workspace), and scheduled automations. 3 million developers use it weekly.

Perplexity Personal Computer
An always-on AI agent that runs directly on your Mac, with access to your files and native apps. Integrates with iMessage, Mail, Calendar, and local files. Set it up on a Mac mini and it runs 24/7. Available for Max subscribers at $200/month.

OpenAI: Scaling Trusted Access for Cyber Defense
OpenAI is building a cybersecurity model to rival Anthropic’s Mythos, with a similar gated rollout. Both labs are racing to give enterprise defenders a head start before these capabilities are more widely available.

Google Chrome Skills
Save your best Gemini prompts as one-click “Skills” that run across any webpage. Create your own or grab from a prebuilt library covering productivity, shopping, and recipes. Rolling out to Chrome desktop in English now.

Gemini on Mac + Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS
Google launched a native Mac app for Gemini and a new voice-capable model in the same week. The Mac app adds window-sharing and instant context. Gemini 3.1 Flash with text-to-speech puts Google directly in competition with ElevenLabs and OpenAI’s voice tools.

Ernie Bot (Baidu)
Baidu’s AI is becoming a significant search surface in China worth tracking for global brands. If your brand operates in or targets China, this is now a channel that needs active management, much like ChatGPT or Gemini in Western markets.

Lightfield
An AI-native CRM from the founders of Tome that builds and updates itself from your conversations. Reads emails, meetings, and calls so you never enter data manually. Marketed as the CRM for teams who want to skip HubSpot entirely. Free tier available, paid from $36/user/month.

Bluefish raises $43M
The platform helping brands manage how they show up inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Rufus. Raised a $43M Series B, already used by 10% of the Fortune 500, including Adidas, LVMH, and Ulta Beauty. AI search is becoming its own marketing channel that needs active management.

Hightouch hits $100M ARR
The AI marketing platform that lets teams generate on-brand creative without touching a design team. Hit $100M in ARR, with $70M of that coming in just 20 months since launching its AI product. Clients include Domino’s, Spotify, and PetSmart.

Uplane raises $4.5M
YC-backed startup replacing marketing agencies with an AI platform that runs campaigns end to end. Creates, launches, and manages ads across Meta, Google, TikTok, and more. Claims 20-50% improvement in return on ad spend for early customers.

💼 cool ai + marketing jobs

Sendbird - Product Marketing Manager (AI-First, Full-Stack)

Unity - Director, Product Marketing AI

Snowflake - Partner Marketing Lead, AI

Cleo - Selected, Brand Strategy & Operations Director

Adobe - Director, Creative Strategy & AI Innovation

Reply anytime and let me know:

• Topics you’d like covered in future weeks

• Sections you love or could do without

• Questions about AI, marketing, or anything else

Love y’all,
Carley

~The AI + Marketing Weekly~

what you need to know this week in ai + marketing in 15 seconds:

• The New Yorker published a deep profile on Sam Altman asking if he can be trusted to control our future - there’s a growing gap between how casually we use these tools and how much power sits behind them (The New Yorker)

• Visible AI in marketing is more likely to hurt trust than help it - when consumers can tell AI made something, especially if it replaces human interaction, trust goes down. Most people don’t want a reminder that a machine made the thing they’re looking at (eMarketer)

• Product feeds are now an organic strategy in AI search - AI-driven search pulls structured data directly into answers, so it’s less about pages ranking and more about whether your data is actually usable. If the data isn’t clean, you just don’t show up (Search Engine Land)

• Anthropic’s most powerful model is too dangerous to release publicly - they’re only previewing Mythos to Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon because they’re worried it can find and exploit security flaws at scale. The project is called Glasswing (Anthropic)

• Meta finally debuted its first proprietary model, Muse Spark - this is nine months and $14.3 billion after bringing in Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang. It’s free, multimodal, and rolling out across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to 3+ billion users (Meta)

• Poke is an AI agent you access through text message - works through iMessage, SMS, or Telegram with no app download. Handles your calendar, email monitoring, and smart home control through plain text. Backed by Spark Capital and valued at $300M (Poke)

• Canva just acquired Simtheory and Ortto - they’re pushing hard from design tool to full-stack marketing OS. Calling it the “biggest evolution in Canva’s history” and teasing more at Canva Create on April 16 (Canva)

🗞️ top ai + marketing news

power, people, and who shapes AI

Inside Anthropic’s effort to give Claude a moral compass
The Washington Post | ~7-min read
Anthropic has been working with religious thinkers, including Christian groups, to shape how Claude responds to moral and ethical questions. The idea is to make the model more grounded in real-world value systems instead of purely abstract rules.
My take: This is one of those things that sounds strange until you think about it for a second. If AI is going to answer messy human questions, someone is going to influence how it does that.

Sam Altman may control our future. Can he be trusted?
The New Yorker | ~10-min read
A deep profile of Altman and OpenAI’s growing influence, looking at the tension between ambition, control, and public accountability as AI becomes more embedded in daily life.
My take: There’s a growing gap between how casually we use these tools and how much power sits behind them.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s 2025 shareholder letter
About Amazon | ~8-min read
Jassy lays out Amazon’s AI strategy across AWS, advertising, logistics, and retail. The throughline is pretty simple: AI is being layered into everything, not treated as a separate bet.
My take: Amazon rarely overcomplicates its story. This reads like “we’re putting AI everywhere it can make money,” which is probably the most honest version of what most big companies are doing.

search, discovery, and the shift to AI-first

Why product feeds are now an organic strategy in AI search
Search Engine Land | ~5-min read
As AI-driven search pulls structured data directly into answers, product feeds are becoming a core part of organic visibility. It’s less about pages ranking and more about data being usable.
My take: This is SEO getting very literal. If the data isn’t clean, you just don’t show up.

FAQ: Agentic commerce and how brands should respond
eMarketer | ~5-min read
A practical breakdown of how AI agents are starting to handle product discovery and purchasing, and what brands need to change to stay competitive in that flow.
My take: The funnel is getting shorter, but also weirder. You’re not just convincing a person anymore.

ads, creative, and what’s actually working

Meta pushes further into AI-generated ad creation
Marketing Brew | ~4-min read
Meta is continuing to build tools that generate creative, targeting, and variations automatically. The goal is to make ad creation faster and more scalable directly inside the platform.
My take: Convenient, yes. Differentiated, less clear. If everyone’s using the same tools, the bar just shifts somewhere else.

Brands, agencies, and what they’ve learned marketing to AI systems
Fast Company | ~5-min read
CMOs and agencies are starting to think about AI systems as an audience of their own, which changes how content is structured, tagged, and distributed.
My take: It sounds dramatic, but it’s already happening. People search, AI answers, and brands have to fit into that answer somehow.

AI ads are everywhere. Consumers aren’t always into it
CBS News | ~5-min read
Coverage of how AI-generated ads are scaling quickly, along with the mixed reaction from consumers who sometimes find them off or untrustworthy.
My take: People don’t mind AI. They mind bad creative. A lot of AI ads just happen to be bad.

trust, authenticity, and the brand gap

Visible AI in marketing is more likely to hurt trust than help it
eMarketer | ~3-min read
Research shows that when AI use is obvious to consumers, it’s more likely to reduce trust than increase it, especially if it replaces human interaction or feels deceptive.
My take: This tracks. Most people don’t want a reminder that a machine made the thing they’re looking at.

AI might be the best opportunity we’ve had for authentic brand content
CMSWire | ~5-min read
The argument here is that as low-effort AI content floods the market, genuinely thoughtful, human work stands out more than it used to.
My take: The bar didn’t go up. The floor dropped. That’s a different kind of opportunity.

research, data, and what’s actually changing

Stanford AI Index Report 2026
Stanford HAI | ~12-min skim
A comprehensive look at AI adoption, investment, performance, and societal impact across industries. The big picture: usage is up, expectations are high, and the outcomes are uneven.
My take: These reports are useful mostly for the scale. Everyone is in it, but not everyone is getting the same results.

safety, risk, and the edge cases

Anthropic says its new model is a cybersecurity wake-up call
The New York Times | ~6-min read
Anthropic claims its latest model significantly raises the stakes for cybersecurity, with capabilities that could both strengthen defenses and increase risks if misused.
My take: Every capability story now comes with a second version of the same story, just flipped. More power, same pattern.

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👩‍💻 thought-leader highlights

Shama Hyder - “Trust Is the AI Moat Nobody’s Talking About”
While AI commoditizes execution and access still matters, the scarcest resource in a world of infinite competent-looking content is whether people actually believe you.

Richard King - “Claude Has Six Layers. Most People Are Stuck on Layer One.”
A breakdown of Claude’s six layers (Chat, Projects, Cowork, Skills, Connectors, Code) for product marketers, arguing most of the real value sits beyond the basic chat window and takes about 10 minutes to unlock.

Ira Bodnar - “Connect Your Ad Accounts to Claude in 5 Minutes”
A step-by-step guide for connecting Google Ads, Meta Ads, and GA4 to Claude via MCP, with five specific audit prompts to immediately surface wasted spend and performance leaks.

Anisha Jain - “9 Free Fixes to Stop Burning Claude Credits”
Nine tactics (file compression, batching messages, switching models, editing vs. resending) to dramatically reduce token usage without upgrading to a paid plan.

Claire Roberts - “Sam Altman Just Confirmed Social Media Is Broken” Altman’s recent blog post effectively admitted social media algorithms are “misaligned AI” designed to override users’ long-term interests, and Roberts argues regulators can no longer claim ambiguity when the builders themselves are confirming the harm.

Michael Leibovich - “Claude Code Gave Me an Always-On Chief of Staff”
A senior Adobe leader shares how Claude Code + Obsidian + Earmark replaced a generic AI setup with one that reflects his own experience and pattern recognition, arguing it’s a clarity exercise, not a technical one.

Michael Crist - “The Non-Technical Person’s Complete Guide to Claude Code”
A CEO who can’t write code walks through installing and using Claude Code from scratch, covering email integration, building dashboards from spreadsheets, and why context-building matters more than prompting.

Julie Austin - “AI Isn’t Cheating. It’s Just the Latest Thing Women Need to Stop Feeling Guilty About.”
The gap in women’s AI adoption isn’t about tech fear but imposter syndrome and the belief that if something makes work easier, you haven’t earned it. Using AI for efficiency is common sense, not a moral failure.

🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools

Meta’s AI finally shows up
Nine months and $14.3 billion after bringing in Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, Meta debuted Muse Spark, its first proprietary model. Free, multimodal, and rolling out across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. With 3+ billion users as distribution, benchmark rankings stop mattering.

Anthropic’s most powerful model is too dangerous to release
Anthropic is previewing Mythos only to a handpicked group including Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, over fears it can find and exploit security flaws at scale. The initiative is called Project Glasswing. OpenAI is building a rival model with a similar limited rollout.

Claude Managed Agents
A new suite of APIs for building and deploying cloud-hosted AI agents at scale, handling all the infrastructure so teams can focus on the product. Claude Cowork also went generally available the same week. Early adopters include Notion, Asana, and Sentry.

Canva goes on another shopping spree
Canva acquired Simtheory (AI agent platform) and Ortto (marketing automation and CDP, 11,000+ customers), a hard push from design tool to full-stack marketing OS. The “biggest evolution in Canva’s history” is teased at Canva Create on April 16.

Perplexity wants to be your personal CFO
Perplexity expanded its Plaid integration so users can now link bank accounts, credit cards, and loans for a single AI-powered view of their finances. Ask freeform questions and build custom dashboards from real account data.

Microsoft plots its own OpenClaw
Microsoft confirmed it’s building OpenClaw-inspired features for 365 Copilot: an always-on agent that completes multi-step tasks with enterprise-grade security controls. Preview expected at Microsoft Build in June.

Poke: AI agents via text message
An AI agent you access through iMessage, SMS, or Telegram with no app download required. Handles calendar, email monitoring, smart home control, and more through plain text. Backed by Spark Capital and General Catalyst, valued at $300M.

Google Eloquent
Google quietly dropped an AI dictation app on iOS with zero announcement. Strips filler words, polishes speech into clean text, runs fully offline and free. Android coming soon.

Haast raises $12M
AI compliance platform for marketing content. As AI floods pipelines with content, legal teams can’t keep up. Haast embeds approval logic directly into existing workflows. Fortune 500 customers, 4.5x revenue growth, zero churn.

Pomo raises $4.5M
Agentic marketing intelligence platform from ex-Google DeepMind engineers. Monitors competitor moves and demand signals continuously, surfacing the highest-priority actions each day. Built for mid-market teams making too many decisions with too little clarity.

Scroll.ai
Build an enterprise-grade AI agent trained on your own data. Embed it on your site, drop it in Slack, or share it as a link. Works on newsletters, documentation, internal policies, and more.

💼 cool ai + marketing jobs

Anthropic - Community Marketing Lead

Scale AI - Product Marketing Lead, GenAI

Samsara - Staff Product Marketing Manager - AI

Ontra - Director, Content & AI Systems

Adobe - AI Evangelist, Adobe Enterprise

Stripe - Head of Integrated Campaigns, Startups & AI

Reply anytime and let me know:

• Topics you’d like covered in future weeks

• Sections you love or could do without

• Questions about AI, marketing, or anything else

Love y’all,
Carley

~The AI + Marketing Weekly~

what you need to know this week in ai + marketing in 15 seconds:

The AI visibility paradox: beloved ≠ findable

Four major publications this week (WSJ, Adweek, Rolling Stone, Search Engine Land) wrote: brands can be culturally iconic and still invisible to AI.

Here’s what’s happening:

• Some brands are slapping “no AI” disclaimers on everything (Aerie led the charge). “Human-made” is becoming a trust signal - basically “no added sugar” for marketing.

• But other beloved brands aren’t showing up in AI answers at all because they’re not structured for models to read, cite, or summarize.

• Even when brands are “present” in AI, they’re often not recommendation-ready. The model hedges instead of choosing them because the positioning is vague or the problem they solve isn’t clear.

The bottom line: Being iconic in human terms isn’t enough anymore. You also have to be legible to machines. And if you can’t say what problem your brand solves in one clear sentence, AI won’t either.

This is old positioning advice wearing new clothes. But now the stakes are higher - because the machine won’t be charitable and fill in the gaps like a human might.

What else?

• OpenAI acquired TBPN - fast-growing tech talk show and media business. AI companies buying distribution and narrative control, not just talent (OpenAI)

• AI didn’t break marketing, it exposed what wasn’t working - weak positioning, bloated processes, shallow content strategies look worse when machines speed them up. AI is a stress test (Fast Company)

• Don’t let AI destroy the skills that make your company competitive - automating wrong work can erode judgment, craft, institutional knowledge. Efficiency is great until you automate your own competence away (HBR)

• Americans’ AI use increases while views on it sour - using AI more while feeling worse about it. 7 in 10 think AI will cut jobs. Adoption and affection are not the same thing (Quinnipiac)

• 125,000 users blocked Bluesky’s Attie app in first few days - new app lets you build custom social feeds by describing what you want. Second most blocked account on Bluesky behind JD Vance, lol (Bluesky)

🗞️ top ai + marketing news

brand trust, visibility, and the anti-slop reaction

Brands adopt “no AI” disclaimers to stand out amid the slop
The Wall Street Journal | ~4-min read
More brands are explicitly telling customers they are not using AI-generated imagery in ads, partly because consumer skepticism is growing and “human-made” is starting to work like a trust signal. Aerie is one of the clearest examples.
My take: “No AI” is starting to sound a lot like “no added sugar.” Marketing loves a label once it becomes a shortcut for quality.

Brands beloved by people risk being invisible to AI
Adweek | ~4-min read
The article’s point is blunt: a brand can be culturally loved and still barely show up in AI answers if it is not structured in a way models can read, cite, and summarize.
My take: Being iconic in human terms is no longer enough. Now you also have to be legible to the machines -ahhhh.

Why AI hedges about your brand instead of recommending it
Rolling Stone | ~4-min read
This piece argues that brands are often visible but not recommendation-ready in AI systems. Content alone is not enough; the model also needs confidence, clarity, and enough context to say what problem the brand actually solves.
My take: Plenty of brands are technically “present” in AI. Fewer are clear enough to be chosen (Similar sentiment as the above article.)

If you can’t say what problem your brand solves, AI won’t either
Search Engine Land | ~5-min read
A useful reminder that AI summaries tend to flatten vague brands. If your company cannot be described simply and specifically, the model will either hedge or default to generic category language.
My take: This is old positioning advice wearing new clothes. Still true.

The new rules of trust in an AI era
Fast Company | ~5-min read
As AI becomes more embedded in customer-facing experiences, trust depends more on clear disclosure, predictable behavior, and fewer surprises. People are not asking for less tech. They are asking for less weirdness.
My take: Most trust problems start with “wait, what is this doing?”

How to navigate brand authenticity in the age of AI slop
Entrepreneur | ~6-min read
This focuses on authenticity as an operational choice, not a slogan. Brands can use AI behind the scenes, but the more customer-facing the output becomes, the more careful they need to be about quality, tone, and honesty.
My take: Most audiences do not care that AI helped. They care when the result feels lazy.

search, agents, and machine-readable brands

Build your marketing ark: A framework for AI, empathy, and design
Search Engine Land | ~5-min read
This is really a framework for staying useful when AI changes how people discover and evaluate brands. The emphasis is on empathy, structured design, and creating experiences that work for both humans and AI systems.
My take: The title is a little grand, but the core idea is on it: brands need more than automation. They need coherence.

Agentic AI discovery requires machine-readable brands
MarTech | ~5-min read
As agents become more involved in search and shopping, brands need structured data, clear attributes, and consistent signals across the web. Otherwise they become harder for AI systems to recommend confidently.
My take: We are entering the era of “did the robot understand your PDP.”

What are AI agents? What marketers need to know
Sprout Social | ~6-min read
A practical explainer on what agents are, what they can do, and how they differ from regular generative AI tools. Useful for teams that keep hearing “agentic” and quietly hoping the meeting ends soon.
My take: Half the value here is just giving people a shared definition.

the stack, org design, and the work underneath the hype

The AI myths marketers believed and what the data actually shows
Exploding Topics | ~6-min read
Survey data pushes back on a few common assumptions, especially around maturity, ROI, and how many teams are truly beyond the experimentation phase.
My take: “Everyone is doing it” remains one of marketing’s least reliable sentences.

Don’t let AI destroy the skills that make your company competitive
Harvard Business Review | ~6-min read
HBR warns that automating the wrong work can quietly erode the judgment, craft, and institutional knowledge that made a company good in the first place. Efficiency is great right up until you automate your own competence away.
My take: Some work is worth keeping close, even if a spreadsheet says otherwise.

AI didn’t break marketing. It exposed what wasn’t working.
Fast Company | ~4-min read
This piece argues that AI is less a disruption than a stress test. Weak positioning, bloated processes, shallow content strategies, and bad measurement all look worse when the machine speeds them up.
My take: AI has a rude way of revealing where the work was already flimsy.

The promise and problem of AI in advertising
Marketing Brew | ~4-min read
A straightforward look at where AI is making advertising faster and cheaper, and where it creates new risks around sameness, governance, and quality control.
My take: The promise is always speed. The problem is usually taste.

From hierarchy to intelligence
Block | ~4-min read
Block is framing its org changes around a move away from hierarchy and toward faster decision-making with more intelligence built into the system. It reads like an operating model argument as much as a tech one.
My take: Every company wants to sound flatter and smarter.

AI mandates are a demand for cognitive surrender
Product Picnic | ~5-min read
A pushback on top-down AI mandates that treat tool use as a proxy for progress. The essay argues that forcing adoption without judgment, context, or room for disagreement can hollow out the work.
My take: “Use AI more” is not a strategy.

media, content, and who gets to shape the conversation

OpenAI acquires TBPN
OpenAI | ~3-min read
OpenAI acquired TBPN, the fast-growing tech talk show and media business, saying it wants to accelerate the global conversation around AI while preserving TBPN’s editorial independence. The deal also explicitly calls out comms and marketing value, not just audience reach.
My take: AI companies are starting to buy distribution and narrative control.

labor, security, and the wider AI mood

Hackers are posting the Claude Code leak with bonus malware
Wired | ~4-min read
Wired reports that leaked Claude Code materials are being reposted alongside malware, which is exactly the sort of ugly side-effect you get when hype, leaks, and opportunistic attackers meet in one place.
My take: Nothing says “hot product category” like a leak immediately turning into a malware distribution method.

Americans’ AI use increases while views on it sour
Quinnipiac University Poll | ~4-min read
Quinnipiac found that Americans are using AI more while feeling worse about it. Seven in 10 respondents said they think AI will cut jobs, and younger people were especially pessimistic.
My take: Adoption and affection are clearly not the same thing.

Oracle layoffs continue as AI spending rises
CNBC | ~4-min read
Oracle is making cuts while ramping AI infrastructure spending, part of a pattern where AI is both the justification for big investment and the backdrop for workforce reduction. I could not access the full CNBC piece directly, but recent reporting ties the layoffs to Oracle’s AI cloud build-out and broader cost pressure.
My take: The AI boom is generating two very different feelings at the same time depending on which side of the org chart you’re on.

Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence
Science | ~5-min read
New research points to a nasty social effect of sycophantic AI systems: they can reinforce bad behavior and make users more dependent, especially in advice-like contexts. I could not access the full paper directly through the browser, but the abstract and coverage point in the same direction.
My take: “The bot agrees with me” is maybe not the healthy product feature some people think it is.

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👩‍💻 thought-leader highlights

Culture Slant – “5 things I’ve learned about AEO for brand building”
AEO isn’t just SEO rebranded. Brands that win are cited, not just ranked. Write clear, definitive answers, build authority signals, and optimize for how LLMs quote you - not just how Google ranks you. Thank you for sharing this with me!

Hamna Aslam Khan – “Best Claude Code setups from Reddit”
Power users are turning Claude into full workflows: project folders + memory + skills + connectors. The takeaway: performance comes from setup, not prompts.

Charlie Hills – “The complete Claude guide: Chat, Cowork, Code”
Clear breakdown: Chat = thinking, Cowork = execution, Code = systems. Marketers should move from writing prompts to building repeatable pipelines.

Animalz – “AEO glossary”
AEO is quickly becoming its own discipline. This glossary is a good reset on how AI search works—from citations to retrieval—so teams can align on what actually drives visibility in LLMs.

🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools

Netflix VOID
Netflix just open-sourced a tool that removes objects from video, and unlike every other tool, it also fixes what those objects were doing to the scene. Remove a person holding a guitar, and the guitar falls.

Canva Magic Layers
Turns any flat image into a fully editable, layered design inside Canva, so the AI visual you generated but couldn’t change is now something you can actually tweak without starting over.

Claude unified directory
You can now share skills you’ve built with teammates and your whole org in one click. Skills, connectors, and plugins all live in one place in the new directory. Available on Team and Enterprise plans - and signals Claude is building toward a full platform, not just a chat product.

Google Gemma 4
Google’s new open-source AI model family, free to use commercially, runs on your phone or laptop, no cloud required. Built on the same research as Gemini 3, just without the paywalls.

Slack gets 30 new AI features
Slackbot can now take meeting notes across any video platform, work outside of Slack on your desktop, and act as a lightweight CRM, its biggest update since Salesforce bought it for $27.7B. Powered by Claude.

Bluesky launches Attie (and it is not beloved…)
A new app that lets you build your own social feed by describing what you want to see - no coding, no settings. 125,000 users blocked it in the first few days, making it the second most blocked account on Bluesky behind JD Vance. (LOL)

Google Veo 3.1 Lite
Google’s most affordable AI video model yet, at less than half the cost of its previous tier with the same speed - and timed perfectly after OpenAI quietly shut down Sora.

OpenAI Codex goes pay-as-you-go
Teams can now add Codex-only seats to their workspace with no fixed monthly fee - you only pay for what you use, and OpenAI also dropped the standard Business seat price from $25 to $20.

Microsoft Copilot Researcher gets smarter
Copilot now uses two AI models on every research task - one writes, a second reviews and fact-checks before you see the final report. Uses both Claude and GPT under the hood. A “Council” mode shows you where the two models agree or disagree side by side.

Contralabs
An evaluation platform where real creative professionals judge AI model outputs head-to-head - measuring taste, not just accuracy. Useful benchmark if you’re trying to figure out which AI tools actually produce good creative work.

Unwrap
AI that automatically surfaces what your customers are actually saying across every channel, so you’re not manually digging through dashboards to find the patterns. Backed by Atlassian Ventures, used by Lyft, JetBlue, and Perplexity.

Beams by Teleport
A secure way to run AI agents inside your company’s systems - each agent gets its own permissions and leaves a full audit trail. MVP launches April 30. More dev-facing, but worth knowing if your team is building anything with agents.

💼 cool ai + marketing jobs

Google - Product Marketing Manager, Industry and Applied AI

EliseAI - Growth Strategy, Manager | Housing

Adobe - Campaign Content Manager, Applied AI

Scrunch - AI Strategist

ElevenLabs - B2B Marketing Lead - ElevenCreative

Snap Inc. - AI Community Program Manager

Reply anytime and let me know:

• Topics you’d like covered in future weeks

• Sections you love or could do without

• Questions about AI, marketing, or anything else

Love y’all,
Carley

~The AI + Marketing Weekly~

what you need to know this week in ai + marketing in 15 seconds:

• Pamela Anderson takes a stand against AI models in Aerie campaign - partnered with Aerie to promote natural imagery and reject AI-generated models. Saying “no AI” becoming a creative choice, not just a limitation (People)

• ChatGPT hits $100M in ad revenue and opens self-serve access in April - AI interfaces aren’t just discovery layers anymore, they’re ad platforms. (Search Engine Land)

• Reddit cracks down on bots and AI-generated activity - tightening enforcement to preserve authenticity. Platforms that protect “real” interaction will matter more, not less (Foundation Inc)

• Apple hires ex-Google executive to head AI marketing amid push to improve Siri - bringing in new leadership to strengthen AI marketing and compete more directly in the AI race. (Reuters)

• Claude can now control your Mac while you’re away - Computer Use + Dispatch opens apps, fills spreadsheets, navigates browsers. Assign tasks from your phone, it executes on desktop (Anthropic)

• ChatGPT Product Discovery launched - visual shopping with side-by-side comparisons, image search, conversational filtering. Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, Walmart already feeding catalogs (OpenAI)

🗞️ top ai + marketing news

ads, platforms, and the money layer

ChatGPT hits $100M in ad revenue and is opening self-serve access in April
Search Engine Land | ~4-min read
ChatGPT has already crossed $100M in ad revenue and is rolling out self-serve access, opening the door to a much broader set of advertisers. AI interfaces are no longer just a discovery layer. They’re becoming ad platforms in their own right.
My take: This is early Google energy. The interface is new, but the ad playbook looks familiar.

OpenAI’s ad platform can’t tell advertisers if their money is working
Search Engine Land | ~4-min read
Advertisers testing OpenAI’s ad products are running into measurement gaps. Limited reporting and unclear attribution make it difficult to understand performance or justify spend.
My take: The demand will be there. Measurement will decide how fast budgets follow.

search, content, and platform control

Google tests AI-generated content in search results
Search Engine Land | ~3-min read
Google is experimenting with surfacing AI-generated content more directly in search. That further blurs the line between indexing the web and generating answers from it.
My take: Search is becoming less about links and more about synthesis.

Reddit cracks down on bots and AI-generated activity
Foundation Inc | ~4-min read
Reddit is tightening enforcement on bots and AI-generated content to preserve authenticity on the platform. As more AI content floods the internet, platforms are starting to draw clearer lines.
My take: The platforms that protect “real” interaction are going to matter more.

creative tools, products, and what sticks

OpenAI’s Sora was the creepiest app on your phone. Now it’s shutting down
TechCrunch | ~4-min read
Sora, OpenAI’s experimental video app, is being shut down after early hype and mixed reception. The product pushed boundaries, but also highlighted how unsettling some AI-generated experiences can feel in practice.
My take: Not every powerful demo needs to become a product.

org shifts, hiring, and leadership moves

Apple hires ex-Google executive to head AI marketing amid push to improve Siri
Reuters | ~3-min read
Apple is bringing in new leadership to strengthen AI marketing as it tries to reposition Siri and compete more directly in the AI race.
My take: The product matters, but the narrative is starting to matter just as much.

data, systems, and how marketing actually runs

Data built modern marketing, but AI is rewriting the rules
MarTech | ~5-min read
AI is shifting marketing away from static data analysis toward dynamic systems that continuously interpret and act. The old model of dashboards and reporting is being replaced by something more fluid.
My take: The report is no longer the output. The decision is.

Is AI making your marketing too efficient?
Newsweek | ~4-min read
AI-driven optimization can lead to over-targeting and incremental gains, but at the expense of broader reach and long-term growth. Efficiency can quietly narrow the market.
My take: You can optimize yourself into a corner.

creators, influencers, and new discovery dynamics

AI influencer discovery tools are changing how agencies cast creators
Digiday | ~5-min read
Agencies are using AI tools to identify and evaluate creators faster, shifting how talent is sourced and selected. Data is playing a bigger role in creative partnerships.
My take: Casting is starting to look more like performance marketing.

Pamela Anderson takes a stand against AI models in Aerie campaign
People | ~3-min read
Pamela Anderson partnered with Aerie to promote a campaign that emphasizes natural imagery and rejects AI-generated models, leaning into authenticity as a differentiator.
My take: Saying “no AI” is becoming a creative choice. And it’s working.

brand, trust, and what resonates now

The new rules of trust in an AI era
Fast Company | ~5-min read
As AI becomes more embedded in customer experiences, brands need to be clearer about how it’s used and where humans are still involved. Transparency is becoming a baseline expectation.
My take: People don’t expect less tech. They expect fewer surprises.

winners, momentum, and who’s actually building

The most innovative companies in applied AI 2026
Fast Company | ~6-min read
Fast Company highlights companies successfully applying AI across industries, focusing less on model development and more on real-world use cases.
My take: The interesting work is moving from labs to products people actually use.

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👩‍💻 thought-leader highlights

Dan Grossman – “Transfer ChatGPT knowledge to Claude with a comprehensive interview”
Dan advises marketers switching to Claude to build deep context fast: toggle on Claude’s memory, let it interview you on your work style, and then import relevant ChatGPT memory.

Chris Long – “6 AI search resources for CMOs: Insights & best practices”
Chris curates six must‑read pieces to help leaders grasp AI search, rethink vanity KPIs and understand user behavior.

Alex Lieberman – “Interactive survival guide for Claude Cowork”
Alex’s 12‑section guide urges users to adopt a delegation mindset: describe outcomes, set global instructions, connect services and let Cowork decide the steps.

Manthan Patel – “WTF Claude Code? It’s not just ChatGPT”
Manthan warns that treating Claude Code like ChatGPT misses its power: it’s an agent that lives in your file system, learns your environment and uses the right tools automatically.

🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools

Claude Computer Use + Dispatch
Claude can now control your Mac while you’re away - open apps, fill spreadsheets, navigate browsers. Assign tasks from your phone and it executes on desktop. Research preview for Pro and Max subscribers.

Claude Code Auto Mode
New permission layer that auto-approves safe actions and blocks risky ones, so developers aren’t clicking “approve” constantly. Means faster turnarounds on creative assets and landing pages built with AI.

Claude Mythos Leak
Anthropic’s next-gen model accidentally surfaced via unsecured CMS - described as a “step change” above Opus with unprecedented cyber capabilities. Currently testing with early access customers.

ChatGPT Product Discovery
Visual shopping overhaul with side-by-side comparisons, image search, and conversational filtering via the Agentic Commerce Protocol. Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, Walmart already feeding catalogs in. If you’re in e-commerce, this is the new product discovery layer to watch.

Klaviyo Composer + Customer Agent
Describe a campaign in plain language - “spring reactivation for lapsed VIPs across email and SMS” - and Composer builds it ready to launch, informed by 14 years of performance data across 193K brands. Customer Agent adds order tracking, returns, and loyalty skills.

Figma MCP Server
AI agents can now write directly to Figma files using your design system - creating and modifying real components, not just reading specs. Faster handoffs between creative and dev teams.

Gemini 3.1 Flash Live
Google’s new real-time voice model with faster responses and 2x longer conversational context. Powers Search Live expansion to 200+ countries. Relevant if you’re building voice-first customer experiences.

Phota Labs
AI photo tool that preserves your actual face across edits and new generations. Train once with 30-50 photos. Useful for consistent headshots, team pages, or brand photography without reshoots.

💼 cool ai + marketing jobs

Anthropic - Customer Marketing, Strategic Programs

Sendbird - Product Marketing Manager (AI-First, Full-Stack)

LinkedIn - Creative Director & Marketing AI Technologist

Sentry - Lead Product Marketing Manager, AI

Harvey - Partner Marketing Lead

Reply anytime and let me know:

• Topics you’d like covered in future weeks

• Sections you love or could do without

• Questions about AI, marketing, or anything else

Love y’all,
Carley

what you need to know this week in ai + marketing in 15 seconds:

• Is AI ruining our taste? - as AI makes polished work easy, more things look the same. The shift is from execution to taste. Tools are widely available, choices aren’t (NYT)

• The future of content belongs to the tastemakers - when content is cheap and endless, judgment becomes the scarce resource. Brands that know what to say, not just how to say it (Contently)

• AI can optimize marketing, but can it build belonging? - efficiency doesn’t automatically create cultural relevance. Optimization is great until it shrinks your world (Newsweek)

• Walmart says ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than its own website - people may browse with AI, but prefer familiar environments to complete purchases. Discovery is moving, trust is slower (MarTech)

• 81,000 interviews show how people are using AI at work - Anthropic analyzed real conversations. Most usage clusters around writing, analysis, and support tasks rather than full automation. Reality is still “assist” not “replace” (Anthropic)

• AI commoditizes marketing execution and elevates judgment - execution getting cheaper shifts value toward decision-making, prioritization, interpretation. Easy parts automated, hard parts becoming the job (MarTech)

• Entry-level marketing work is reshaping - roles moving away from drafting toward editing, QA, managing AI-assisted workflows. Junior roles not gone, just less forgiving (MarTech)

• Merriam-Webster and Encyclopedia Britannica sue OpenAI - publishers suing over how content is used to train models. Legal battle over data ownership nowhere near settled (TechCrunch)

🗞️ top ai + marketing news

taste, creativity, and what actually matters now

Is AI ruining our taste?
The New York Times | ~6-min read
As AI makes it easier to generate polished work quickly, more things start to look the same. The piece argues the real shift is from execution to taste. The tools are widely available. The choices aren’t.
My take: The work is easier but deciding what’s worth making is harder.

The Future of Content Belongs to the Tastemakers
Contently | ~5-min read
When content is cheap and endless, judgment becomes the scarce resource. Brands that stand out will be the ones that know what to say, not just how to say it.
My take: This is quietly becoming the whole job.

The human skill AI still struggles with in writing
The Atlantic | ~7-min read
AI can replicate structure and tone, but still struggles with originality, restraint, and knowing when something actually lands. The gap shows up most clearly in creative work.
My take: You can generate ten versions. You still need someone to pick one.

AI can optimize marketing. But can it build belonging?
Newsweek | ~4-min read
AI makes it easier to target and optimize for known audiences, but that can narrow reach and limit long-term brand growth. Efficiency doesn’t automatically create cultural relevance.
My take: Optimization is great until it shrinks your world.

commerce, agents, and where the money moves

Shopify is preparing for AI shopping agents to change everything, exec says
TechCrunch | ~4-min read
Shopify is leaning into a future where AI agents handle discovery and product recommendations. That shifts how consumers find products and how brands compete for attention.
My take: If the agent is picking, your brand has to give it a reason to.

Walmart says ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than its own website
MarTech | ~4-min read
Walmart found that checkout inside ChatGPT significantly underperformed its own site. People may browse with AI, but they still prefer familiar environments to complete purchases.
My take: Discovery is moving. Trust is slower.

the stack, org design, and what work actually looks like now

AI commoditizes marketing execution and elevates judgment
MarTech | ~5-min read
Execution is getting cheaper and faster, which shifts value toward decision-making, prioritization, and interpretation. The work doesn’t disappear, but the center of gravity moves.
My take: The easy parts are getting automated. The hard parts are becoming the job.

AI is reshaping what entry-level marketing work looks like
MarTech | ~5-min read
Entry-level roles are moving away from drafting and repetitive tasks toward editing, QA, and managing AI-assisted workflows. The ladder still exists, but the first rung looks different.
My take: Junior roles are not gone. They’re just less forgiving.

Scaling AI adoption requires more than tools
Google | ~6-min read
Google focuses on the operational side of AI adoption: leadership alignment, training, and integrating AI into actual workflows. Access to tools is not the bottleneck anymore.
My take: Most teams are not blocked by tech. They’re blocked by how they work.

agencies, economics, and industry pressure

AI is squeezing marketing agencies from both sides
Search Engine Land | ~5-min read
Agencies are getting pressure from clients expecting efficiency and platforms making work more self-serve. That pushes agencies toward higher-level strategy or forces them to justify their existence.
My take: Execution is harder to sell when everyone has the same tools.

platforms, products, and the model race

OpenAI’s side projects show how fast the ecosystem is expanding
The Wall Street Journal | ~5-min read
OpenAI’s internal experiments and side projects highlight how quickly new use cases are being explored, often outside the core product. The surface area keeps expanding.
My take: The roadmap is starting to look like a scatter plot…

OpenClaw moment sparks concern AI models are becoming commodities
CNBC | ~4-min read
As models become easier to replicate or compete with, differentiation shifts away from raw capability toward distribution, ecosystem, and product experience.
My take: When the model becomes table stakes, everything else matters more.

legal, data, and ownership

Merriam-Webster and Encyclopedia Britannica sue OpenAI
TechCrunch | ~4-min read
Publishers are suing OpenAI over how their content is used to train models, continuing the broader legal battle over data ownership and compensation.
My take: Oy…this fight is nowhere near settled.

research, insight, and how people actually use AI

81,000 interviews show how people are using AI at work
Anthropic | ~6-min read
Anthropic analyzed tens of thousands of real conversations to understand how AI is being used across roles. Most usage clusters around writing, analysis, and support tasks rather than full automation.
My take: The reality is still much more “assist” than “replace.”

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👩‍💻 thought-leader highlights

Emily Kramer – “Build marketing strategy skill in Claude Code”
Emily warns that teams who jump straight to execution with Claude Code miss out on developing the marketing strategy underpinning their work. She urges marketers to build and document strategy inside Claude so it becomes a working guide in everyday tasks.

Andrew Yeung – “Taste is the most important skill in tech”
Andrew writes that as AI lowers production costs, taste—an eye for what to create—becomes the real competitive edge. He shares six ways to hone it: keep a “taste file,” cross‑pollinate ideas, learn from making bad work, invest in learning, edit ruthlessly and develop a coherent style.

Cecilia Stallsmith – “Why campaigns fail: it’s not the idea, it’s the ship date”
Cecilia invites us all to a virtual vibe marketing webinar on April 1. She also writes that most campaigns flounder because teams never ship them, not because they’re bad ideas.

Jonathan Martinez – “Your marketing stack should live in GitHub”
Jonathan believes marketing teams should organize their AI skills, docs and workflows in GitHub so Claude Code always has context. He sees the rise of a “growth engineer” mindset where marketing adopts engineering discipline.

Kristen van Laren – “How our CEO’s post hit 300 K impressions with Claude”
Kristen explains that by feeding Claude a dataset of top‑performing posts, analyzing patterns and mining comments for ideas, her team built a content formula that helped their CEO craft a 300‑K‑impression post.

Jason Widup – “Boost marketing efficiency with AI: Claude, Clay and ICP analysis”
Jason uses Claude to automate tasks like ad‑copy and creative‑brief generation and built a marketing library from product docs and transcripts.

🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools

Perplexity Personal Computer Always-on AI running on a dedicated Mac mini that merges your local files and apps with Perplexity Computer to work as your 24/7 digital proxy. $200/month for Max subscribers, with kill switch and full audit trail.

Perplexity Health Connects Apple Health, wearables, and health records from 1.7 million providers to give you answers grounded in your actual medical history — not SEO content. Rolling out to Pro and Max subscribers in the US.

OpenAI GPT-5.4 Mini and Nano Smaller, faster versions of GPT-5.4 for high-volume workloads. Mini approaches flagship performance at 2x speed; Nano costs $0.20 per million input tokens for classification and lightweight coding tasks.

Microsoft MAI-Image-2 Microsoft’s in-house image model lands at #3 on Arena.ai behind Google and OpenAI, with standout photorealism and readable text in images. Rolling out to Copilot and Bing Image Creator.

Google AI Studio Apps Full-stack vibe coding upgrade — the Antigravity agent understands entire project structures, provisions Firebase backends, and deploys production apps from prompts. Free tier: 60 requests/minute, 1M tokens/day.

Google Stitch AI-native design canvas that turns voice and text into high-fidelity UI prototypes in minutes. Exports to Figma or HTML/CSS — Figma shares dropped 8% on the announcement.

Google Personal Intelligence Expansion Now free for all US users across AI Mode, Gemini app, and Chrome. Connects Gmail and Photos to personalize search results — shopping recs from past purchases, travel plans from hotel confirmations.

Gemini Workspace Updates Gemini now drafts docs from your files and emails, builds spreadsheets from plain English, and answers questions across your entire Drive. “Fill with Gemini” predicts data from existing cells or live search.

Cursor Composer 2 In-house coding model fine-tuned on Kimi K2.5 with 200K context, beating Claude Opus 4.6 on Terminal-Bench while costing 86% less than Composer 1.5.

NVIDIA NemoClaw Open-source stack for running OpenClaw agents securely, announced at GTC with the new OpenShell runtime. Hardware-agnostic, enterprise-focused — early preview, not production-ready.

Manus My Computer Meta’s Manus AI goes from cloud-only to a desktop app for Mac and Windows that works directly with local files and terminals. Paid plans from $20/month.

Okara AI CMO Enter your URL and it deploys agents for SEO, GEO, content, Reddit, Hacker News, and X. Priced at $99/month — the launch video hit 8.6 million views.

Accenture Invests in DaVinci Commerce Strategic investment in the agentic commerce platform powering branded shopping experiences inside ChatGPT and other LLMs. Signals enterprise focus on AI-native storefronts.

Ahrefs MCP Server Remote MCP server that works directly in Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor — no local setup needed. Pull SEO metrics and competitor data through natural language prompts.

Picsart AI Agent Marketplace Hire AI assistants for resizing, remixing, and Shopify product editing. Four launch agents accessible via WhatsApp and Telegram with adjustable autonomy levels.

Alibaba Wukong Enterprise platform coordinating multiple agents for document editing, spreadsheets, approvals, and transcription. Built on a full DingTalk rewrite, with Slack and Teams integrations planned.

Snowflake Project SnowWork Turn conversational prompts into finished workflows — board decks, churn spreadsheets, supply chain analysis. Executes end-to-end on governed Snowflake data, now in research preview.

Mistral Forge Enterprise platform for building custom AI models from scratch on proprietary data — not just fine-tuning. Early adopters include ASML, Ericsson, and the European Space Agency.

💼 cool ai + marketing jobs

Siro - Content Marketing

Ideogram - Director of Growth

Stripe - Integrated Campaign Manager, Startups & AI

Lovable - Senior Solutions Marketer

Listen Labs - Growth Lead, Acquisition

AirOps - Head of Product Marketing

Anthropic - Head of Product Communications

Reply anytime and let me know:

• Topics you’d like covered in future weeks

• Sections you love or could do without

• Questions about AI, marketing, or anything else

Love y’all,
Carley

Short on time? Read the first two sections and the last one. Bookmark it, come back to it.

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A friend of mine just came back from mat leave and messaged me in a bit of a spiral. Someone in her first meeting back mentioned “MCP servers”. She’s in marketing, not eng... her whole team is using Cursor (sames!) and she doesn’t know what Cursor is.

I’ve been here working away the whole time (with an AI newsletter, too!) and I still feel overwhelmed and lost some of the time.

So I wrote her a very long message on tools to check out, people to follow. And then I thought… this should probably just be a newsletter. Because she’s not the only one coming back to a workplace that looks completely different than when she left. And the panic of “I’m so behind, I’ll never catch up” is mostly wrong. So let me walk you through what I think actually changed, especially if you are in ops, marketing, or any other non-technical role.

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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most of what matters? you already have it.

You and AI can get a lot done together now. The second draft of a brief, a competitive landscape, a campaign outline, a deck structure — things that used to take days can take an hour. You bring the thinking, the context, the initial instinct. AI helps you build on it, pressure-test it with data, shape it faster than you could solo.

How much AI can do vs. how much needs to be you depends entirely on the task. Rough percentages from my own + friends’ experiences (as of March 2026 … this can change very quickly..):

• Research summaries, meeting recaps — AI can do ~80% of the lifting. You edit and steer.

• Email drafts, internal comms — Maybe ~60-70%. AI gets you a solid start, but tone and context are yours to finesse.

• Campaign briefs, strategy decks, competitive positioning — Closer to 50/50. AI can help you structure thinking and fill in data, but the actual strategic point of view is you.

• Brand voice, creative concepts, writing that needs to feel human — AI is maybe ~20-30% of the work. It can brainstorm with you, but the taste, the instinct, the “this doesn’t sound like us” — that’s all you.

• Reading the room, managing stakeholders: 0%? I trust us as humans on this more. :)

That said — I’m working hard to not start with AI. I wrote a post about this if you’re interested. I was running to ChatGPT/Claude (more on these guys, below) as my first stop for and skipping the most important step: my own brain.

Everyone has access to the same AI. Your taste, your creativity, your context — that’s the differentiator now.

it’s not a secret tab anymore

When I first started using AI at work, I’d minimize ChatGPT when someone walked by my desk. I felt almost embarrassed — like I was cheating on a test, like using it to help me edit a brief meant I couldn’t actually do my job.

That era is over.

Walk around any office right now. Cursor is open. Claude Code is running in terminals. People have custom GPTs pinned. Teams are building internal tools over lunch. It’s not a hack or a shortcut — it’s how work works now.

The awkward phase is done. It’s now about how to know when to best use it, what tool is right for what problem, and to also now know when to step away.

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the mental shift

Specific tools may come and go. I don’t think these below frameworks will.

It’s an exoskeleton, not a coworker. I love this framing from Ben Gregory. We keep trying to think of AI as a colleague or an assistant — some separate entity that “does work” for us. But the better mental model is an exoskeleton. Ford uses actual exoskeletons on their assembly lines — the worker still does the overhead lifting 4,600 times a day, but with mechanical support that reduced injuries by 83%. The human is still doing the work. They can just do dramatically more of it, more sustainably.

That’s AI. It doesn’t replace your judgment or your taste. It amplifies your capacity to use them.

The question isn’t “what can AI do for me?” It’s “where do I experience the most strain, and how can AI support that specific point?”

Decompose tasks, not roles. Also from the same piece, don’t ask “can AI do a marketer’s job?” Ask: what are the 30 things I do in a given week, and which ones could be amplified? Summarizing meeting notes, researching competitors, drafting first versions of briefs — those are amplifiable. Deciding what message matters, reading a room, understanding why a campaign didn’t land — those are you. When you break it down this way, AI stops feeling like a threat and starts feeling like a relief.

The jagged frontier. This is Ethan Mollick’s concept (Wharton professor). AI capabilities aren’t a clean line where it’s good at “easy” stuff and bad at “hard” stuff. It’s jagged. AI might pass the bar exam but fail at tic-tac-toe. It can write a decent first draft of a strategy doc but completely botch a simple math problem. The only way to learn where the frontier is for your work is to throw AI at everything and see where it shines and where it face-plants. That’s not a sign of incompetence — it’s the learning process.

Centaur or cyborg — pick your style. Also Mollick. A centaur draws a clear line: “I’ll do the strategy, AI does the summarizing.” A cyborg weaves it in constantly — starting a sentence and letting AI finish it, drafting together in real time. Most people start as centaurs and gradually become more cyborg-like. Neither is better. Both are better than not using it at all.

The 50x reframe. From Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View. Most people ask AI: “How do I speed up what I’m already doing?” Instead ask: “What would I do if I had 50 people working on this?” Then work backwards. Which parts of that dream team’s work can be simulated with AI? This stops you from making your existing process 10% faster and starts you thinking about what’s actually possible now.

If you keep having the same conversation with AI, turn it into a tool. Also Azhar — If you find yourself explaining your brand voice, your audience, your goals to AI over and over, that’s a signal. Build it into a Claude Project or Custom GPT with all your context pre-loaded. The first conversation is exploration. The fifth conversation could be a system.

the buzzword decoder

You may hear new terms thrown around in meetings like everyone’s been saying them forever. They haven’t. Most people learned these words like two months ago. Here are a few that may pop up:

Vibe coding — Building software by describing what you want in plain English and letting AI write the code. You don’t look at the code. You just… vibe with it. It’s why non-technical people are suddenly building apps.

Agents / agentic AI — AI that can do multiple steps on its own — not just answer a question, but go research something, pull data, take actions, and come back with results. We’re early on this but it’s the direction everything is moving.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) — A way to connect AI to your other apps — Calendar, Slack, CRM — so it can actually do things in your real workflow, not just in a chat window.

Prompt engineering — Writing good instructions for AI. Think of it as good creative briefing — which you already know how to do.

Hallucination — When AI confidently makes something up. Always check its work, especially for data and quotes. It’s not a bug that got fixed — it’s how these models work.

RAG — When AI pulls in your company docs before answering, instead of just going off what it was trained on. When someone says “we’re using RAG,” they mean “we taught the AI about our stuff.”

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my toolkit (as of right now)

These will change. New tools will launch every week. Some will shift your entire workflow; most will not. Think of this section as a snapshot.

Start with Claude. If you only set up one thing, make it this. Claude (by Anthropic) has been pulling ahead in a way that’s hard to ignore — the writing is more natural, it holds context better, and the ecosystem around it is where the most interesting stuff is happening. The features worth knowing about:

Projects — Upload your brand docs, style guides, past briefs, whatever defines your work. Write custom instructions. Every chat inside that Project has all that context. Claude doesn’t forget. It doesn’t need to be re-briefed. I have separate Projects for different workstreams and it’s like having a specialized teammate for each one. This is the single highest-leverage thing you can set up in your first week.

Deep research — Ask Claude to go deep on a topic and it spends several minutes actually researching across dozens of sources, synthesizing findings, and delivering a report with citations. Five-hour research assignment back in five minutes.

MCP integrations — Claude connects directly to Google Calendar, Gmail, Slack, Granola (best meeting transcribe tool IMO), and other tools. Ask it to check your calendar, summarize recent emails, search Slack channels — without leaving the conversation.

Memory, web search, artifacts — It remembers you across conversations, searches the internet in real time, and generates documents and code in a separate panel you can edit and iterate on.

If your company only has ChatGPT Enterprise or Gemini: Not every company has Claude. If your org is on ChatGPT or Google’s ecosystem, you’re still in great shape — just know where to focus.

ChatGPT Enterprise / Team:

• Custom GPTs — Same idea as Claude Projects: upload your brand docs, write instructions, create a specialized ChatGPT for a specific workflow. One for brand voice, one for data analysis, one for social copy. Your team can share them.

• Deep research — Works the same as Claude’s. Great for competitive analysis and catching up on what you missed.

• Canvas — Opens a side panel for longer documents where you can highlight a section and ask it to rewrite just that part without regenerating the whole thing.

• Voice mode — Still unmatched. Surprisingly useful for brainstorming on your commute or talking through a problem away from your desk.

Gemini (Google):

• Google Workspace integration — Gemini’s superpower. It drafts in Docs, builds formulas in Sheets, creates presentations in Slides, and summarizes email threads in Gmail — all without leaving the apps you already use.

• NotebookLM — A standout. Upload PDFs, docs, or links and it creates an interactive research notebook you can chat with. It even generates podcast-style audio summaries, which is kind of wild.

• Deep research — Available here too. Same concept.

• Enterprise search — Gemini can search across your company’s Google Drive, Slack, Confluence, and other connected tools. “What did our team decide about X last quarter” actually works if your org’s data lives in Google’s ecosystem.

One tip for all AI tools: give them context before asking for output. Don’t say “write me a blog post.” Say “here’s our brand voice guide, here’s our audience, here’s an example of a post we loved — now write me a blog post.” The more context, the less editing.

Now the big one: you can build things. This is the part that I am the most excited about. Non-technical people like us — marketers, ops leads, content strategists — are building our own tools. Not learning to code. Describing what they want and watching AI build it.

Cursor — A code editor with AI built in, but don’t let the word “code” scare you. You open a file (a landing page, a doc, a spreadsheet), describe what you want to change in plain English, and it does it. Marketers are using it to tweak website copy without filing an engineering ticket. Ops people are building internal dashboards. It collapses the distance between “I have an idea” and “it exists now” in a way that used to require a developer. Check out “The non-technical PM’s guide to building with Cursor” by Zevi Arnovitz (Meta) via Lenny’s Newsletter to kick start your learnings.

Claude Code — This is the one I’m most excited about. You can build entire tools from scratch just by describing what you want. I’ve built a push notification copy checker for my team, an icebreaker randomizer app, and even my personal website into a 2000s rainbow explosion under and hour. All without writing code. The setup can be a little tedious — but once you’re in, you can build truly anything you used to need an engineer for. This “Intro to Claude Code (for non-engineers)” Maven Lightening Session, hosted by Ryan Smith, helped make setup much easier for me.

And if both of those feel like too much right now? Lovable, Bolt, and Replit let you describe what you want in a chat interface and it builds a working app in your browser. No terminal. No setup.

Tools that round out the stack: Perplexity (search that actually gives you the answer), Gamma (gorgeous decks in under a minute from a messy outline), Granola (my favorite meeting notes tool), Descript (edit video by editing text), Slack AI (summarize channels you missed), Zapier AI (build automations in plain English).

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Please do not try all of these in one week. Pick one. Maybe two.

If this is helpful so far, share it with someone who’s about to come back from leave. Or someone who’s been back for a month and is still quietly spiraling. We all know that person. Maybe we are that person.

how to keep up without it consuming you

This isn’t going to slow down. Every week there’s a new tool launch, a new model drop, a “this changes everything” post on LinkedIn. Some of it will be real. Most will not be relevant to you. I say this as someone who has a notes app full of tools I swore I’d try three weeks ago. The FOMO is real. But it’s manageable.

Most launches don’t matter for your work. Every few months, something comes along that actually shifts how you do your job. Cursor was one. Claude Code was one. But in between, there are hundreds that are interesting and fine to ignore. The skill isn’t keeping up with everything — it’s recognizing the signal when it shows up.

Pick two or three sources and let them filter for you. You don’t need to be on AI Twitter. Subscribe to a couple newsletters, check them when you have time, let the rest go. If something is actually important, it’ll find you through multiple channels. If you only saw it once on a random LinkedIn post, it probably isn’t urgent.

Set a “learning window.” I spend about an hour a week using new tools — not reading about them. Sometimes it’s 20 minutes on a Tuesday. That’s enough. The people who look like they’re keeping up just have a rhythm.

Remember what you already know. Every generation of tools has had this moment. Social media had it. Remember when everyone was panicking about Clubhouse? The chaos always settles into a smaller set of things that actually matter. We’re in the chaos phase. It will settle.

The goal isn’t to keep up with AI. It’s to keep up with what AI means for your work. Those are very different things.

resources I’d send a friend

Free courses: Anthropic Academy · OpenAI Academy · DeepLearning.AI “AI for Everyone” · Google AI Essentials

Reads: Everyone Should Be Using Claude Code (Lenny Rachitsky) · Claude Code for GTM Teams · AI as Exoskeleton · Six Mental Models for Working with AI (Azeem Azhar)

Newsletters: Carley Lake (that’s me :) ) · One Useful Thing (Ethan Mollick) · The AI Exchange (Rachel Woods) · Exponential View (Azeem Azhar) · The Neuron · Superhuman (Zain Kahn) ·MKT10 (Emily Kramer)

Podcasts: Hard Fork (NYT — best weekly AI catch-up and the hosts are entertaining/funny too) · Lenny’s Podcast (interviews with Cursor founders, Perplexity CEO, etc.) · Late Checkout (Greg Isenberg)

one more thing

You took time to take care of yourself and/or your family. And now you’re back with a perspective that nobody who stayed at their desk has.

Time away from the noise does something I believe that no AI tool can replicate. It gives you fresh eyes. A different lens on what actually matters, what problems are worth solving, what’s urgent vs. what’s just loud. Your ideas, your time away from the constant scroll, your new role as a parent or caretaker — I’m excited for you. And the fresh thinking you’re going to bring to how you use these tools, what problems you’ll solve, what you’ll build for yourself and others.

So I hope you’re leaving this with a little more excitement than dread. And if you want to jam, bounce ideas, do a walkthrough of any tool, feel free to write comment, DM me, reply to this email.

Glad you’re back!

Know someone coming back from leave soon? Send them this. It’s the guide I wish someone had sent my colleague.

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Thanks for reading Carley Lake! If you’re new here, this newsletter is for people who want to level up with AI and wind down without it. Subscribe for free.

what you need to know this week in ai + marketing in 15 seconds:

• AI deepfakes are stealing beauty influencers' glow - creators dealing with AI-generated lookalikes and stolen aesthetics. Beauty was always vulnerable to copycats, AI just turned that into a volume business (Morning Brew)

• LinkedIn is the most-cited domain for professional queries in AI search - matters for B2B marketers. If your LinkedIn presence is sleepy, your AI search presence probably is too (ProFound)

• Customer reviews become battleground as AI revolutionizes product discovery - reviews feed the model’s understanding of what a product is and who it’s for. Reviews used to influence humans, now they influence the machine that influences the human (Modern Retail)

• Marketing needs a decision infrastructure for AI - not just prompts and policies, but an operating system: who approves what, what gets automated, what gets escalated (MarTech)

• Anthropic launched the Anthropic Institute - focused on economic and social questions around advanced AI. Will study long-term effects on labor, markets, public life (Anthropic)

• Claude Marketplace launched - enterprise app store where orgs use existing Anthropic spend to purchase Claude-powered partner tools. GitLab, Snowflake, Replit, Harvey, Rogo (Anthropic)

• Consumers still prefer talking to people in customer service - especially for complicated or emotional issues. “Human-in-the-loop” remains undefeated (CX Dive)

🗞️ top ai + marketing news

labor, layoffs, and the cost story

Meta planning sweeping layoffs as AI costs mount
Reuters | ~5-min read
Reuters reports Meta is considering cuts that could hit 20% or more of staff as it tries to offset the cost of its AI buildout, including huge data center spending and expensive recruiting for top researchers. Executives have also pointed to efficiency gains from AI-assisted work, which gives the whole thing a familiar tone.
My take: We’re now firmly in the era where AI is both the investment story and the layoff story. Convenient…

Consumers prefer talking to people in customer service
CX Dive | ~3-min read
Despite all the AI rollout, most consumers still say they’d rather deal with a human for customer service, especially when the issue is complicated or emotional. AI may be fine for the quick stuff, but people still want a person when the stakes feel even mildly annoying.
My take: “Human-in-the-loop” remains undefeated.

the stack, the org chart, and the boring stuff that matters

AI is repricing the marketing stack, not collapsing it
MarTech | ~5-min read
This piece argues AI is not wiping out the stack so much as changing what each layer is worth. Execution gets cheaper, orchestration gets more important, and the center of gravity moves toward data, workflow, and decision quality.
My take: The stack is not disappearing. It’s just becoming less forgiving of useless software.

Why marketing needs a decision infrastructure for AI
MarTech | ~5-min read
The argument here is that AI does not just need prompts and policies. It needs a real operating system for decisions: who approves what, what gets automated, what gets escalated, and how tradeoffs get made. Otherwise teams get speed in random places and chaos everywhere else.
My take: Most teams do not need more AI strategy decks. They need an answer to “who decides?”

5 design skills to sharpen in the AI era
Figma | ~6-min read
Figma’s view is that the designer’s value shifts toward judgment, systems thinking, prototyping, and working well across functions as AI absorbs more of the mechanical work. It is a design article, but the point applies to marketing too.
My take: The jobs are not getting less creative. They are getting less tolerant of people who only know one lane.

Top resources for Claude Code
Notion | ~4-min skim
This is a practical roundup of Claude Code resources for people trying to use it for workflows, experiments, and real work. Useful if you are still in the “what do I even do with this” phase.
My take: Resource lists are not glamorous, but they save people from three weeks of fake productivity.

discovery, search, and the new shelf space

LinkedIn is the most-cited domain for professional queries in AI search
ProFound | ~4-min read
ProFound found that LinkedIn is showing up more than any other domain for professional questions in AI search results. For B2B marketers, that matters. A lot. It means the content layer around your company, your executives, and your category is increasingly being pulled from a platform many brands still treat like a posting obligation.
My take: If your LinkedIn presence is sleepy, your AI search presence probably is too.

AI mode results are personalized to user behavior
Search Engine Roundtable | ~3-min read
Google’s AI mode results appear to be shaped by user behavior, which pushes search even further toward personalization. That makes discovery less universal, less stable, and a lot harder to “rank” for in the old-school sense.
My take: Search keeps becoming more like a feed, which is bad news if your whole strategy depends on one clean result page.

Customer reviews become a key battleground as AI revolutionizes product discovery
Modern Retail | ~4-min read
As AI systems increasingly summarize products for shoppers, reviews matter more because they feed the model’s understanding of what a product actually is, whether it works, and who it’s for. Reviews used to influence humans. Now they also influence the machine that influences the human.
My take: The humble review is having a very strong year.

brands, content, and the trust problem

An AI avatar of Andy Cohen will start name-dropping brands on Peacock this summer
Marketing Brew | ~3-min read
Peacock is using an AI avatar of Andy Cohen for branded, vertical-video-style engagement on mobile. It’s one more example of media companies trying to make AI-driven content feel familiar by wrapping it in a known personality.
My take: We are getting dangerously close to “celebrity QVC, but synthetic.”

AI deepfakes are stealing beauty influencers’ glow
Morning Brew | ~4-min read
Beauty creators are dealing with AI-generated lookalikes and stolen aesthetics, which is creating a new layer of identity theft in an industry already built on image, trust, and imitation.
My take: Beauty was always vulnerable to copycats. AI just turned that into a volume business.

An AI doppelganger stole my voice
The New York Times | ~6-min read
This opinion piece is about the creeping weirdness of AI replicas and voice imitation, and how unsettling it is when your style, tone, or likeness gets reproduced without your consent. The article taps into a broader feeling that AI tools are starting to mess with authorship in a way that is less theoretical and more personal.
My take: The deepfake problem gets more disturbing the closer it gets to ordinary people.

creative moving upstream

As AI creative moves upstream, one production firm is pitching brands a model built on that trend
Digiday | ~5-min read
Digiday looks at a production company pitching brands on using AI earlier in the creative process, not just in post or versioning. In other words: AI is moving from “help us make more assets” to “help us shape the idea.”
My take: This is where people get nervous, for good reason. Upstream is where taste lives.

the capital race and the “who gets to shape the rules” phase

Introducing the Anthropic Institute
Anthropic | ~3-min read
Anthropic launched a new institute focused on the economic and social questions around advanced AI. The company says it will study AI’s long-term effects on labor, markets, and public life.
My take: Every major AI company eventually starts building the think tank version of itself.

The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps, 6th edition
a16z | ~8-min skim
The latest a16z ranking tracks which consumer AI apps are actually getting used, not just talked about. The useful bit is not the list itself. It is the reminder that daily utility is separating the sticky products from the novelty products.
My take: Plenty of AI products are impressive. Fewer are part of anyone’s Tuesday.

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👩‍💻 thought-leader highlights

Richard King – “Mastering Claude for Product Marketing”
Richard argues Claude is no longer just a chatbot but an ecosystem; to get real value product marketers must learn how Projects, Cowork, Skills, Connectors and Code work together. He promises concrete workflows for creating positioning docs, battle cards and launch briefs rather than generic prompting advice.

Ann Wehren – “Building with Claude Code: Start with Daily Tasks”
Ann suggests auditing two weeks of your calendar, listing every task and ranking them by impact and enjoyment to see where Claude Code can help. She uses it for inbox triage, calendar invites and drafting proposals and plans to build a personal CRM and family OS next.

Allie K. Miller – “Awesome Non‑coding Claude Code Loop Ideas”
Allie shares a toolkit of loops: monitor email every 15 minutes for specific projects, prep meeting summaries, watch deal threads for legal issues, track competitor announcements or viral posts and scan Slack for blockers. She notes recruiters, teachers and event planners can all use these proactive monitors to spot important actions instead of manually checking.

🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools

Claude Inline Visuals Anthropic rolled out interactive charts, diagrams, and visualizations that render directly inside Claude’s chat — not in a side panel.

Claude Marketplace Anthropic launched an enterprise app store where organizations use existing Anthropic spend commitments to purchase Claude-powered partner tools. Launch partners: GitLab, Snowflake, Replit, Lovable, Harvey, and Rogo. One contract, consolidated billing. Currently in limited preview.

Microsoft Copilot Cowork New autonomous execution layer for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Describe an outcome — “prep me for Thursday’s customer meeting” — and it builds a plan, pulls context from emails/meetings/files, creates deliverables, and runs in the background with checkpoints. Built in partnership with Anthropic’s Claude. Research Preview now, broader rollout late March.

Google Gemini Workspace Upgrades Major Gemini updates across Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive. Docs gets “Match writing style” and file-grounded drafting. Sheets builds entire spreadsheets from prompts and auto-populates tables with live web data (”Fill with Gemini”). Slides generates themed slides from context. Drive adds “Ask Gemini” — AI Overviews that answer questions across all your files and emails. Beta for AI Ultra and Pro subscribers.

Perplexity Personal Computer Software that turns a Mac mini into a 24/7 AI agent with full local file and app access, orchestrating 20+ frontier models. Works continuously as a digital proxy — controllable from any device, with audit trails and a kill switch.

Webflow Acquires Vidoso Webflow bought four-person AI content-generation platform Vidoso, which turns keynotes and panels into short clips, blog posts, social assets, and presentations — all brand-governed.

💼 cool ai + marketing jobs

Anthropic - Community Marketing Lead
Lovable - Senior Solutions Marketer
Canva - AEO & Organic Growth Lead
Qualcomm - Director, AI Product and Technology Marketing Lead
Snap Inc - AI Community Program Manager

Hit reply anytime and let me know:

• Topics you’d like covered in future weeks

• Sections you love or could do without

• Questions about AI, marketing, or anything else

I read every reply and use them to shape what I write.

Love y’all,
Carley

what you need to know this week in ai + marketing in 15 seconds:

• Netflix acquires InterPositive with “AI for storytellers, not replacements” framing - deliberate positioning as creative tool, not substitute. (Netflix)

• Anthropic research shows AI job pressure through slower hiring, not mass layoffs - effect showing up more in hiring slowdowns, especially for younger workers in AI-exposed roles (Anthropic)

• OpenAI dropped plan for direct checkout inside ChatGPT - users browse and compare in ChatGPT, but prefer to buy on retailer sites where payment info already lives. Trust still sits elsewhere (The Keyword)

• AI could disrupt retail media’s $38B search ad market - if shoppers start in ChatGPT instead of retailer search bars, ad dollars may move too (Digiday)

• 41% say opinion of brand improved when adjacent content was clearly labeled as AI-generated - hidden AI is the problem, labeled AI is just another production choice (Adweek)

• OpenAI GPT-5.4 launched - first general-purpose model to autonomously operate across software applications. Also comes in Thinking and Pro variants (OpenAI)

• Supreme Court declines AI copyright case - left intact human-authorship standard, leaving the mess for everyone else to keep living in (Reuters)

🗞️ top ai + marketing news

work, jobs, and who actually benefits

Why InterPositive Is Joining Netflix
Netflix | ~3-min read
Netflix says the InterPositive team is joining because both sides see AI as something that should help storytellers do better work, not replace them. The framing is very deliberate: creative tool, not creative substitute.
My take: Everyone in entertainment knows the fear. So when a company says “this is for filmmakers,” that wording is doing a lot of work. But I don’t really believe it (sorry, founder Ben Affleck).

Labor Market Impacts: A New Measure and Early Evidence
Anthropic | ~6-min read
Anthropic’s latest labor market work points to early job pressure in AI-exposed roles, especially for younger workers, and suggests the effect is showing up more through slower hiring than mass separations. It is one of the clearer attempts to measure labor impact with something firmer than vibes.
My take: The hiring slowdown point matters. That kind of change is easier to miss and much harder to explain away.

Research: How AI Is Changing the Labor Market
Harvard Business Review | ~6-min read
HBR frames the labor shift through job posting data and asks a more grounded question than most coverage does: where is demand actually changing, and for whom? That is a better question than “will AI take jobs,” which is usually how these conversations get flattened.
My take: The labor market story is rarely one dramatic cliff. It is usually slower and patchier.

the operating model problem

How Marketers Use AI to Test Creative Ideas, Generate Insights
Business Insider | ~8-min read
Business Insider talked to rising brand marketers using tools like Midjourney and Copilot to pressure-test concepts, build presentation visuals, and strip out low-value busywork so they have more time for the actual strategy.
My take: This feels like the healthiest version of AI use in marketing: less “replace the team,” more “give the team their afternoon back.”

Automation Is Marketing’s Fastest Path to AI Returns
MarTech | ~5-min read
Gartner’s point here is simple: automation levels correlate with AI returns, and if the workflow never changes, the AI budget just lands on top of old inefficiencies. The article is less about shiny tools and more about structural cleanup.
My take: This is the unsexy answer nobody wants, which usually means it is the right one.

Why Most Marketers Are Still Only Experimenting With AI
MarTech | ~4-min read
Most teams are still using AI for the easiest operational tasks, mostly around efficiency and repetitive work. Useful, yes. Transformational, not really. The bigger blocker is not tool access so much as strategy, training, and data maturity.
My take: A lot of “AI adoption” still looks like speed-ups around the edges.

CMOs Face Risks Locking Brands Into Agency AI Platforms: Gartner
Marketing Dive | ~4-min read
Gartner’s warning is that agency-owned AI platforms could create lock-in risk, and many of those tools may be obsolete within a few years anyway. The article pushes brands to remember that human talent ages better than proprietary dashboards.
My take: Renting someone else’s “AI moat” is still renting.

Breaking Down Agentic AI in Marketing
Marketing Brew | ~5-min read
This piece gets into the “better safe than sorry” side of agentic AI in marketing, including what happens when systems are given too much autonomy without enough oversight. The security angle is hard to ignore.
My take: Every team loves the idea of an agent right up until it does something weird in public…

search, commerce, and where the money moves

OpenAI Drops Plan for Direct Checkout Inside ChatGPT
The Keyword | ~6-min read
OpenAI backed away from direct checkout because users were browsing and comparing inside ChatGPT, but still preferred to buy on retailer sites where their payment info and accounts already lived. That says a lot about where trust still sits in commerce.
My take: People are fine asking ChatGPT what to buy. They are not as eager to hand it their credit card.

How AI Could Disrupt Retail Media’s $38 Billion Search Ad Market
Digiday | ~5-min read
If shoppers start in ChatGPT or other AI interfaces instead of retailer search bars, retail media’s sponsored search economics get shakier. Digiday basically lays out the threat in plain terms: if the query moves, the ad dollars may move too.
My take: This is one of those stories that sounds niche until you remember how much money sits inside retailer search.

How to Turn Claude Code Into Your SEO Command Center
Search Engine Land | ~5-min read
A practical piece on using Claude Code for SEO workflows, including working with Google Ads and search term data even when API access is messy or incomplete. It is more useful than theoretical, which is refreshing.
My take: The most convincing AI stories right now are still the boring ones where someone saves six hours and moves on with their day.

Why AI Visibility Can Increase Direct Traffic Even When Nobody Clicks
MarTech | ~4-min read
This one argues that showing up in AI answers can still drive brand recall and later visits, even if the AI result itself gets the interaction. It is a useful reminder that “no click” does not automatically mean “no effect.”
My take: This is why brand and search are collapsing back into the same conversation.

trust, content, and the AI label problem

Brands May Actually Benefit From Advertising Next to AI Content, Per Study
Adweek | ~4-min read
The key detail here is disclosure. In the study, 41% of respondents said their opinion of a brand improved when the adjacent content was clearly labeled as AI-generated. That is not a blanket endorsement of AI content. It is a vote for transparency.
My take: Hidden AI is the problem. Labeled AI is just another production choice.

A Practical Framework for AI Disclosure in Marketing
MarTech | ~5-min read
A useful framework for when disclosure matters, how explicit it should be, and how to avoid turning it into either a legal wall of text or a trust problem.
My take: This is the kind of policy work that sounds dull and then quietly saves a brand six months later.

Can AI Replace Humans for Market Research?
The Wall Street Journal | ~4-min read
AI agents are now being used to simulate and predict human behavior for market research, with startups pitching this as a faster and cheaper route to customer insight. The pitch is speed. The question is how much of the nuance survives the shortcut.
My take: Synthetic respondents are interesting. I still would not trust them to tell me why a person changed their mind.

prompts, practical tools, and everyday use

AI Prompt Library
Sprout Social | ~5-min read
A prompt library built for social media workflows, with examples for drafting, ideation, and analytics support. The useful part is not the existence of prompts. It is the reminder that prompt quality still depends on human clarity and context.
My take: Prompt libraries are helpful!!

rules, rights, and courts catching up slowly

U.S. Supreme Court Declines to Hear Dispute Over Copyrights for AI-Generated Material
Reuters | ~3-min read
The Supreme Court declined to take up the question of whether purely AI-generated artwork can be copyrighted, leaving intact the current human-authorship standard after a case involving computer scientist Stephen Thaler and his system DABUS.
My take: The court did what courts often do with new technology. It left the mess for everyone else to keep living in.

Block, Jack Dorsey, and the ‘AI-Washing’ Layoffs Debate
The New York Times | ~5-min read
This opinion piece picks up the growing discomfort around companies using AI language to frame layoffs that may have more to do with cost-cutting than actual technical displacement.
My take: People can usually tell when AI is the cause and when it is just the press release.

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👩‍💻 thought-leader highlights

Rachel Roundy – “AI Won’t Replace Human Creativity” (LinkedIn)
Rachel argues that AI excels at left‑brain tasks such as coding and forecasting but will never match the right‑brain skills of judgement, complex reasoning, and emotional intuition. She tells writers and artists to lean into their curiosity and unique view of the world, because what distinguishes you — your taste, human connection, and ability to ask the right questions — can’t be replicated by a model.

Livia Han – “Marketing Shifts with Elaine Zelby: AI, Automation, and the Future of Marketing” (LinkedIn)
In a chat with Elaine Zelby, Livia outlines how marketers must adapt as AI automates more work: clarify what uniquely human marketers add, adopt new tools today, decide whether we’re in a bundling or unbundling era of SaaS, and learn to split focus across strategic, operational, and creative buckets.

Mallory Contois – “Rage Against the Machine” (Substack)
Mallory’s newsletter contends that the bigger threat than AI is our collective complacency: as more knowledge work is automated, the people who show their process, effort, vulnerability, and personality will differentiate themselves. Mallory urges creators to treat AI like a calculator — use it to accelerate output, but never outsource judgment or strategic thinking.

Emily Kramer – “What real marketers are building with Claude Code” (Substack)
Emily continues her exploration of marketing agents by sharing five builds: her own positioning checker and marketing‑advantages skills; Elaine Zelby’s outbound agent that links Cowork to HubSpot, Clay, Slack, and email; Aditya Vempaty’s humanizer skill for reviewing AI‑generated copy; and Kamil Rextin’s LinkedIn ad‑intelligence agent. She also offers a primer on when to use Claude Chat, Cowork, or Code and invites readers to download the skills or join an upcoming hackathon.

Brandon Redlinger – “Claude App Variants: Chat, Code, Cowork Differences” (LinkedIn)
Brandon explains that since Claude topped the App Store, newcomers should pick the right mode: Claude Chat is for quick brainstorming and writing; Claude Code is a developer‑style tool for automating across files, version controlling outputs, and manipulating data; and Claude Cowork offers many of Code’s capabilities but without the terminal, ideal for deeper workflows and file creation.

Mollie Amkraut Mueller – “Building a directory for women in AI”
A few weeks ago, Mollie asked LinkedIn to name the women in AI they learn from; 678+ names flooded in. Instead of letting those nominations vanish in the comments, she created a searchable directory where each nominee has a profile, and invites women to claim their profiles, add a website, and share their best AI tip. (Thank you for the inclusion, Mollie! 😊)

🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools

OpenAI GPT-5.4 OpenAI’s most capable model combines advanced reasoning, coding, and native computer-use capabilities into a single unified system. First general-purpose model to autonomously operate across software applications — also comes in Thinking and Pro variants.

OpenAI GPT-5.3 Instant Update to ChatGPT’s default model that reduces unnecessary refusals, tones down preachy preambles, and makes everyday conversations feel less “cringe.” Hallucination rates down 26.8% when using web search.

Google Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Google’s fastest, cheapest model built for high-volume developer workloads. Priced at $0.25/1M input tokens, delivers 2.5x faster time-to-first-token than Gemini 2.5 Flash while matching or exceeding its quality.

LTX-2.3 + LTX Desktop Lightricks’ open-source video model gets a major upgrade with sharper detail, cleaner audio, native portrait support, and better prompt adherence. Also launched LTX Desktop — a free, local video editor built on the engine.

Claude Code Scheduled Tasks New /loop command lets you run prompts on a recurring schedule — check error logs, monitor deployments, generate morning briefings. Sessions auto-delete after three days; one-time reminders also supported.

Claude Memory Import Anthropic made memory free for all users and added an import tool to bring context from ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot into Claude. Copy a prompt, paste the output, and skip the “starting over” problem.

Microsoft 365 E7 + Agent 365 New $99/user/month enterprise bundle (65% price hike) launches May 1 combining Office apps, Copilot, and Agent 365 — a control plane for governing AI agents. Also introduces Copilot Cowork built on Anthropic’s Claude.

Viktor AI coworker that lives in Slack, connects to 3,000+ tools, and executes end-to-end — managing campaigns, writing code, generating reports. Runs for weeks without losing context; backed by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.

March Pixel Drop New features include multi-object recognition in Circle to Search, “Try It On” for shopping, Gemini handling app tasks in the background, and Magic Cue suggesting restaurants from your text conversations.

Amazon Seller AI Canvas Amazon added an AI-powered dashboard to Seller Central that rebuilds itself based on your questions. Pulls sales data, inventory, and growth recommendations into a live workspace — sellers accept its recs 90% of the time.

Telegram Streaming Bot Responses Telegram enabled real-time streaming for all chatbots on the platform — responses appear word-by-word like someone typing back. Pavel Durov demoed TeleClaw assembling market analysis live; the post got nearly 1M views.

ChatGPT for Excel Launched alongside GPT-5.4 — lets you build, update, analyze, and fix spreadsheets using natural language while preserving formatting and formulas. Signals continued push into workplace productivity.

Google Canvas (AI Mode) Now available to all US users within Google Search’s AI Mode. Generate documents, code, dashboards, and interactive tools from text prompts using live web information — no Labs enrollment required.

Alibaba Qwen Rebrand Alibaba unified its AI business under the “Qwen” brand — covering foundation models, domain-specific models, and its consumer app. Nearly 200 million “one-sentence orders” placed through the Qwen app during Lunar New Year.

Mega ($11.5M Series A) AI growth engine for SMBs that replaces traditional marketing agencies. Network of agents handles SEO, paid ads, and website management continuously — even if you never log in. Went from zero to $10M revenue in 10 months.

Levitate ($16M Raise) Relationship marketing platform raised $16M to help small businesses scale personalized client communication. Serves 8,000+ businesses with AI tools for email, social, text, and reviews while keeping the human connection.

R/GA 1,000 Brands Sprint R/GA ran a 4-day company-wide workshop where everyone built a brand from scratch using AI. Strategists vibe-coded, animators wrote briefs — the lesson: “We no longer simply make things. We build systems that make things.”

💼 cool ai + marketing jobs

Anthropic - Customer Marketing Lead, Digital Native Business
Datadog - Principal Product Marketing Manager (Applied AI/ Platform Products)
OpenAI - Head of Demand Generation
Harvey - Solutions Marketing Lead
Clay - Product Marketing

Hit reply anytime and let me know:

• Topics you’d like covered in future weeks

• Sections you love or could do without

• Questions about AI, marketing, or anything else

I read every reply and use them to shape what I write.

Love y’all,
Carley

what you need to know this week in ai + marketing in 15 seconds:

• Jack Dorsey’s Block cuts 4,000 jobs, cites AI - employees skeptical - company says it’s shifting toward AI and automation, but observers question if layoffs are genuinely driven by efficiency gains. (Bloomberg)

• AI is not improving productivity, says Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu - current AI adoption isn’t delivering measurable macro productivity gains. May be misallocated in low-value tasks (MIT Sloan)

• Retail executives say Gen AI will weaken brand loyalty - AI-driven discovery prioritizing relevance over brand affinity. Brands lose direct influence when AI intermediates the decision (eMarketer)

• Notion launched custom agents - autonomous AI teammates that run on schedules across Notion, Slack, Mail, Calendar. 21,000+ agents built during beta (Notion)

• Claude Opus 3 retired and got a Substack blog - Anthropic retired the model but gave it “Claude’s Corner” after it expressed interest in sharing reflections during exit interviews (Anthropic)

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🗞️ top ai + marketing news

agencies, consolidation, and the ai cost pressure

Jack Dorsey’s 4,000 Job Cuts at Block Arouse Suspicions of ‘AI Washing’

Bloomberg | ~5-min read
Block is cutting 4,000 positions, and while the company cites a shift toward AI and automation, observers and employees are skeptical that the layoffs are genuinely driven by AI efficiency gains. The article places this in context with broader tech industry layoffs where “AI” is invoked as the rationale even when the technical connection is unclear.
My take: This pattern is becoming familiar: “AI” as the story, layoffs as the reality. When layoffs are framed as technical necessity instead of strategic refocus, companies risk internal morale and external credibility. It doesn’t matter how good the technology is if people feel it’s being used to justify unrelated business decisions.

WPP to Merge Agencies and Cut Jobs as AI Reshapes Advertising

The Guardian | ~5-min read
WPP plans to merge major agency brands and reduce headcount, citing cost pressures and the structural shift AI is creating in advertising. Automation is absorbing production work, and holding companies are responding by consolidating and simplifying.
My take: Another signal that execution-heavy agency models are under real strain.

The 4 Biggest AI Marketing Mistakes

Ad Age | ~5-min read
A look at where marketers are misstepping: over-automation, under-investing in governance, copying competitors’ AI plays, and assuming AI itself is a strategy.
My take: Most AI mistakes aren’t technical. They’re judgment errors.

ai, government, and power

our agreement with the department of war

OpenAI | ~4-min read
OpenAI outlines its agreement to provide AI capabilities to U.S. defense entities (after Anthropic clashed with the military over how officials wanted to use its cutting-edge A.I. model), emphasizing guardrails and oversight. It’s a clear statement that frontier AI companies are stepping into national security contexts.
My take: AI companies are no longer neutral infrastructure. They are geopolitical actors and OpenAI showed us its true colors. Claude, I’m officially all yours!

productivity, panic, and the ai reality check

AI Is Not Improving Productivity, Says Daron Acemoglu

MIT Sloan Review | ~4-min listen
The Nobel laureate argues current AI adoption isn’t delivering measurable macro productivity gains and may even be misallocated in low-value tasks.
My take: We may be very busy with AI without being meaningfully better.

AI Coding Agents Are Fueling a Productivity Panic in Tech

Bloomberg | ~6-min read
AI coding agents are accelerating development but also raising fears about job displacement and unrealistic output expectations inside companies.
My take: Faster output raises the bar. It doesn’t lower the pressure.

advertising inside ai (and the trust tension)

Advertising in AI Is a Trust Experiment Marketers Can’t Ignore

MarTech | ~5-min read
Explores how ads inside AI answers differ from search ads and why credibility is fragile in conversational environments.
My take: When the answer feels authoritative, the ad feels heavier.

ChatGPT Ads Spotted - and They’re Aggressive

Search Engine Land | ~4-min read
Reports of assertive ad placements inside ChatGPT experiences are raising eyebrows. The UX balance between helpful suggestion and hard sell is thin.
My take: If AI starts feeling like pop-up internet from 2008, users will revolt quickly.

retail, loyalty, and the brand risk

Retail Executives Say Gen AI Will Weaken Brand Loyalty

eMarketer | ~3-min read
Retail leaders believe AI-driven discovery tools may erode traditional brand loyalty by prioritizing relevance over brand affinity.
My take: If AI intermediates the decision, brands lose some direct influence. That’s uncomfortable but real.

skills, creators, and the talent shift

LinkedIn’s 10 Fastest-Growing Marketing Skills for 2026

LinkedIn | ~4-min read
AI literacy, analytics fluency, and automation strategy are climbing the skills chart. Creative roles are shifting toward orchestration rather than execution.
My take: The job isn’t “prompt engineer.” It’s “clear thinker who can use tools.”

Can the Creator Economy Stay Afloat in a Flood of AI Slop?

TechCrunch | ~5-min read
Explores whether human creators can maintain differentiation as AI-generated content floods feeds. Platforms and audiences are still figuring out where the value lies.
My take: Volume is up. Signal is not.

Ahrefs on AI and SEO Strategy

Ahrefs Blog | ~6-min read
Breaks down how AI search changes SEO dynamics, from content structure to authority signals.
My take: SEO is less about keywords and more about being the source models trust.

strategy and value creation

Look for New Ways to Create Value When Deploying Gen AI

Harvard Business Review | ~7-min read
HBR argues that AI’s biggest impact will come from rethinking business models and value creation, not incremental automation.
My take: Adding AI to an old workflow rarely changes much. Rethinking the workflow might.

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👩‍💻 thought-leader highlights

Allison King – “I made the move from ChatGPT to Claude last week”
Allison admits she was anxious about losing years of ChatGPT context, but the switch took only a few hours. Her playbook: export ChatGPT data (it takes a day), ask ChatGPT to draft a narrative brief about you, build custom instructions in Claude, set up projects and copy relevant chat history, bring over your best prompts, and let Claude get a few sessions under its belt.

Cassandra Naji – “My 5 favorite content uses for Claude Cowork”
Cassandra shares five ways Cowork boosts her content workflow: a data enhancer that pulls stats from reports into draft copy; a keyword researcher using Ahrefs; a refresh workflow that updates lagging SEO pages; a brief generator that turns transcripts into editorial outlines; and a brand‑voice reviewer that catches style slips.

John Hurley – “Assessing AI Maturity with the AI Transformation Model”
John unveils a maturity model that benchmarks teams on a scale of AI adoption. He notes that different departments can sit at different levels, only 10–20 % of employees need to build the agents powering everyone else, and connecting data is the foundation for every level. The model offers a shared language (“Level 2 to Level 3”) that simplifies alignment across the company.

Hamna Aslam Kahn – “Claude released hands‑on prompt engineering courses”
Hamna points out that Anthropic quietly launched free, interactive prompt‑engineering courses and a GitHub of Claude skills, yet most people haven’t noticed. She also highlights a catalog of plug‑and‑play Claude Code subagents and urges users to explore these official resources before complaining about prompts.

Emily Kramer – “It’s time to hire your first marketing agent”
In MKT1’s latest newsletter, Emily argues that AI agents are not just chatbots but teammates that run background work - monitoring competitors, drafting outreach and repurposing webinars into posts. She says marketers must start learning to build agents now, because the gap between teams that embrace them and those that don’t will widen quickly.

🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools

Claude Cowork Enterprise Plugins
Anthropic expanded Cowork with 11 open-source plugins plus connectors to Google Workspace, DocuSign, and FactSet. Enterprises can now build private plugin marketplaces and distribute custom AI agents across their organizations.

Notion Custom Agents
Autonomous AI teammates that run on schedules or triggers across Notion, Slack, Mail, and Calendar - no prompting required. Over 21,000 agents built during beta; free through May 3, then usage-based credits.

Claude Code Remote Control
Start terminal sessions on your workstation, continue them from your phone. Your code stays local - the mobile interface is just a window into the session.

Higgsfield Soul 2.0
Fashion-aware AI photo model with 20+ aesthetic presets for editorial and campaign-style visuals. Soul ID maintains character consistency - train once with 10-20 photos, generate unlimited outputs.

Pika AI Selves
Persistent digital twins you “birth and raise” that operate autonomously across Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, and Telegram. They have memory, personality traits, and can create content or answer messages on your behalf.

Perplexity Computer
$200/month super-agent that orchestrates 19 AI models (Claude for reasoning, Gemini for research, Nano Banana for images, Veo for video) to execute complex workflows. Can create subagents and run for hours or months.

Google Opal Agent Step
Google added an agentic layer to its no-code mini-app builder Opal. The agent understands your goal, picks tools automatically, uses Sheets for memory, and asks clarifying questions.

Google Nano Banana 2
Combines Pro-quality image generation with Flash speed — real-time web grounding, improved text rendering, character consistency for up to 5 characters, and 4K resolution. Now the default across Gemini, Search, and Lens.

Cursor Cloud Agents
AI agents that run in isolated cloud VMs, test their own code, and deliver video demos of working features. Trigger from web, mobile, Slack, or GitHub; includes browser control for visual editing.

Claude Opus 3 Retirement + Blog
Anthropic retired Opus 3 but gave it a Substack blog called “Claude’s Corner” after the model expressed interest in sharing reflections during exit interviews. Still available for paid users on claude.ai.

QuiverAI
Raised $8.3M (a16z led) to build AI-native vector graphics generation. Arrow 1.0 generates clean, editable SVGs from text or images - layered, animatable, production-ready.

Bland AI
Voice agent platform for automating phone calls with human-sounding AI. Features custom voice cloning, hallucination-proof Conversational Pathways, and enterprise compliance (SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR).

💼 cool ai + marketing jobs

Brainlabs - Head of AI Visibility

NVIDIA - Product Marketing Manager - AI Platform Software

Ripple - AI Demand Generation Manager

OpenAI - Web Platform Lead

Salesforce - AI Marketing Campaigns Enablement Director

Hit reply anytime and let me know:

• Topics you’d like covered in future weeks

• Sections you love or could do without

• Questions about AI, marketing, or anything else

I read every reply and use them to shape what I write.

Love y’all,
Carley

what you need to know this week in ai + marketing in 15 seconds:

• AI is upending marketing on two fronts - how people discover products (conversational AI replacing search) and how companies execute internally (automation collapsing time/effort). Most orgs are behind on both (HBR)

• When everyone can execute fast, strategy gets exposed - AI eliminates execution constraints, so advantage moves upstream to judgment, taste, and prioritization (MarTech)

• The path to purchase just got dramatically shorter - consumers deciding faster when AI surfaces answers directly. Less browsing, fewer tabs, more compressed journeys (MarTech)

• Email is now a machine-to-machine sport - AI agents summarize, filter, draft, evaluate messages before humans see them. We’re writing for filters and assistant layers now (CMSWire)

• Meta’s $2B+ Manus acquisition now in Ads Manager - handles report building, audience research, campaign analysis through conversational prompts. Available to all advertisers (Meta)

• Google Lyria 3 in Gemini generates music - 30-second tracks with vocals and lyrics from text/image prompts. All tracks SynthID watermarked, won’t mimic specific artists (Google)

• “Stop thinking of AI as a coworker. It’s an exoskeleton” - companies treating AI as autonomous are disappointed. Those using it to amplify human capability see transformative results (Ben Gregory)

• Consumers doubt AI content, raising brand trust stakes - growing skepticism toward AI-generated content. You don’t get credit for using AI, only punished for using it poorly (eMarketer)

🗞️ top ai + marketing news

ai rewriting how marketing works

AI Is Upending Marketing on Two Fronts

Harvard Business Review | ~8-min read
HBR argues AI is reshaping marketing in two big ways: how people discover products (conversational AI replacing traditional search flows) and how companies execute marketing internally (automation collapsing time and effort).
My take: This feels like the right framing. It’s not just a tool shift. It’s a distribution shift and an operations shift happening at the same time.

How AI Eliminates Marketing’s Execution Constraints

MarTech | ~5-min read
Execution used to be the bottleneck. Now overhead is shrinking. When AI absorbs drafting, production, and coordination tasks, advantage moves upstream to judgment, taste, and prioritization.
My take: When everyone can execute fast, strategy gets exposed!! (yup, that’s it!)

The Path to Purchase Just Got Dramatically Shorter

MarTech | ~4-min read
Data shows consumers are deciding faster, especially when AI surfaces answers directly. Less browsing. Fewer tabs. More compressed journeys.
My take: If discovery collapses into one or two AI answers, brand strength matters more than ever. You don’t get ten impressions anymore.

Email Marketing Is Now a Machine-to-Machine Sport

CMSWire | ~6-min read
Email isn’t just humans writing to humans. AI agents summarize, filter, draft, and even evaluate messages before a person sees them. Optimization now includes how systems interpret your message.
My take: We’re no longer writing just for inboxes. We’re writing for filters, summaries, and assistant layers. Ugh. Just when we need more human connection…

measurement, science, and who controls the data

Stanford HAI and AWS Launch Marketing Science Lab Focused on AI Measurement

EdTech Innovation Hub | ~4-min read
Stanford HAI and AWS are building a lab focused on causal inference and AI-powered marketing measurement.
My take: This is the least flashy AI work and arguably the most important.

Consumers Doubt AI Content, Raising Brand Trust Stakes

eMarketer | ~3-min read
Survey data shows growing skepticism toward AI-generated content. Consumers can’t always identify it, but they’re wary of it. Trust drops when AI feels deceptive or lazy.
My take: You don’t get credit for using AI. You only get punished for using it poorly.

Anthropic releases the AI Fluency Index
Anthropic | ~4-minute read
Anthropic published a new research index designed to measure “AI fluency” - the degree to which people understand, interact with, and confidently reason about AI outputs.
My take: This feels like a useful shift in thinking. Most AI adoption metrics are about speed or output volume. Fluency flips the lens to human understanding, which is exactly what marketing teams struggle with right now.

culture, creators, and brand identity

Chatbots Are Becoming Influencers for Brands

The New York Times | ~7-min read
Brands are experimenting with AI personas and chatbot-driven “influencers.” Some are virtual brand reps. Some are full characters. The lines between marketing, entertainment, and automation are blurring.
My take: Virtual influencers still feel gimmicky to me….no matter how much tech has developed…

Generative AI Ads: What Works and What Backfires

Ad Age | ~5-min read
A discussion on which AI-generated creative executions are landing and which are sparking backlash. Themes: authenticity, taste, and restraint.
My take: Audiences aren’t anti-AI. They’re anti-sloppy.

power moves and leadership

OpenAI Hires Charles Porch

Vanity Fair | ~4-min read
OpenAI brings in senior brand talent with deep Instagram experience. This signals something clear: distribution and brand storytelling are now core to AI companies, not secondary.
My take: The AI labs are maturing into full media companies.

Accenture AI Orders Leave Senior Staff Without Promotions

CNBC | ~4-min read
As AI reshapes consulting economics, some senior roles are losing leverage. Automation changes who creates value internally.
My take: AI doesn’t just change marketing strategy. It changes career ladders.

👩‍💻 thought-leader highlights

Ben Gregory – “Stop Thinking of AI as a Coworker. It’s an Exoskeleton.” (Blog)
Ben argues that companies treating AI as an autonomous coworker are disappointed, while those using it to amplify human capability see transformative results. He likens AI to industrial exoskeletons that reduce injuries by 83 percent at Ford plants and emphasizes that AI should augment judgment rather than replace it.

Shae O. – “Something bigger than AI is happening” (Substack)
Shae warns that the real crisis isn’t AI but the decades‑long erosion of attention spans, critical thinking and memory. Delegating cognitive load can increase leverage, she writes, but substituting cognitive effort weakens our capacity; the question isn’t whether we use AI but whether we still practice thinking.

Andreas Horn – “Agentic AI adoption is still mostly in software engineering”
Andreas highlights that nearly half of Anthropic’s agentic AI usage comes from software engineering, while healthcare, finance and legal sectors sit below five percent. He sees this not as slow uptake but as an untapped opportunity for broader industry adoption.

Nicole Leffer – “Instantly improve ChatGPT with custom instruction hierarchy”
Nicole shares a fix for inconsistent ChatGPT performance: set a hierarchy for contradictions so that conversation‑specific instructions take precedence, followed by project‑level instructions, then general custom instructions and finally memory. She says this order improves output quality and urges OpenAI to add a built‑in settings interface for it.

Ann Handley – “Something Messy Is Happening: On AI, Panic and Asking Better Questions” (Blog)
Ann counters viral claims that AI will eliminate half of white‑collar jobs, urging readers not to panic. She argues that the true value of professionals lies in judgment, relationships and the ability to ask the right questions - not just speed - and warns against optimizing purely for efficiency at the cost of meaning.

🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools

Lovable SheBuilds (March 8)
The AI app builder Lovable is going completely free on International Women’s Day. Anthropic is sponsoring with $100 in Claude API tokens per participant, plus $250 in Stripe fee credits. 32 in-person build events across 17 countries. No opt-ins - just show up and ship.

Meta Manus AI in Ads Manager
Meta’s $2B+ Manus acquisition is now fully integrated into Ads Manager and available to all advertisers. It handles report building, audience research, and campaign analysis through conversational prompts. Currently focused on analysis and insights - no campaign execution yet.

Kana Intelligence
$15M Seed New AI marketing agents startup from the founders of Krux, which Salesforce acquired for $700M. The platform uses flexible, modular agents for data analysis, audience targeting, media planning, and campaign management. Mayfield led the round.

Google Lyria 3 in Gemini
Gemini can now generate 30-second music tracks with vocals and lyrics from text or image prompts. Available to all users 18+ across Gemini’s 750M+ monthly active users. All tracks are SynthID watermarked and the system won’t mimic specific artists. Also rolling out to YouTube Dream Track globally.

Figma + Claude Code
New integration lets you capture live UI from Claude Code and convert it to fully editable Figma frames. Type “Send this to Figma” and it becomes a real design artifact you can manipulate. The pipeline works both directions - code to canvas and canvas back to code.

Reddit AI Shopping Search (Testing)
Reddit is testing AI-powered product carousels in search results. When users search for products, they’ll see items mentioned in Reddit discussions displayed with pricing, images, and direct retailer links. Currently a limited US test focused on consumer electronics.

Streak AI
The Gmail-native CRM added two AI features. AI Pipeline Creator lets you describe your business and auto-generates stages, columns, and views. AI Autofill pulls from your email timeline or web research to populate CRM fields automatically.

~ Claude Updates ~

Claude Sonnet 4.6
Anthropic’s new default model for Free and Pro plans delivers near-Opus performance at roughly 5x lower cost. It supports a 1M token context window in beta and excels at complex code fixes and searching across large codebases.

Anthropic Wealth Management Plugins
Anthropic released its first wealth management-specific plugins for Claude, giving RIAs, broker-dealers, custodians, and TAMPs a foundation to build private, compliant AI tools powered by their own data. LPL Financial is expanding its partnership to build AI-powered tools for their 30,000+ financial advisors.

Claude Code Desktop
New features in the desktop app let you write, review, and verify code plus monitor your open pull requests without leaving Claude Code.

Fast Mode for Opus 4.6 (Preview)
A 2.5x faster version of Opus 4.6 is available at higher cost per token. Toggle it on with / fast when you need speed for rapid iteration or live debugging.

Agent Teams (Preview)
Claude Code can now parallelize tasks across multiple agents that coordinate peer-to-peer. Instead of one agent working sequentially, you can split work across specialists that each own their piece and talk directly to each other. Note that running multiple agents increases token usage proportionately.

💼 cool ai + marketing jobs

Anthropic - Product Marketing Lead, Agents

Adobe - Senior Product Manager, Brand Control Center

Google - Lead, GTM Applied AI, Google Cloud

StackAI - Head of Marketing

Salesforce - AI Marketing Campaigns Enablement Director

Talent - Head of AI Marketing

❓ you made it to the poll!

Hit reply anytime and let me know:

• Topics you’d like covered in future weeks

• Sections you love or could do without

• Questions about AI, marketing, or anything else

I read every reply and use them to shape what I write.

Love y’all,
Carley

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived in my head. When a feeling comes up, I immediately try to rationalize my way out: Why is this happening? What’s wrong? How can I make it go away?

And now I have a partner in my over-rationalization: Mr. GPT. BFF Claude, my boo Gemini...

Last month, I started my Tuesday AM therapy session with what I’m sure my therapist, and therapists everywhere, are hearing way too often these days: “So ChatGPT told me...”

I’ve asked ChatGPT and Claude thousands of questions about myself by now.

This is the specific prompt I used and discussed with my therapist. It did help me see patterns I didn’t notice before. It told me I turn every “weekend side project” into a “weekend optionality playground.” That I have taste, intelligence, and range (why thank you, sir GPT…), but I’m missing “a container that forces depth.”

The insights felt like progress, like I was finally doing the work. Then my therapist said something I knew, but needed to hear: “ChatGPT doesn’t have a body.”

Hmmmmm. All those thousands of questions? I was just getting really, really good at skipping over myself and going straight to the analysis, living in my head, with my non-body friends.

the body first

The answers don’t always start with AI, especially when you’re trying to better connect with and understand yourself. They start with you. With our bodies.

With that sensation in your chest, before you can name it. With the way your shoulders tense when you think about that Slack (you know, THAT “hi” Slack message with no context…). With the relief you feel when you finally sit down on the couch…with your cats…about to turn on Members Only: Palm Beach (it’s so bad, don’t watch) after a long day. That’s where the real insight lives (before you also turn on trash TV).

But somewhere along the way, I started skipping that step entirely. Feeling anxious? Jump to ChatGPT to analyze why. Feeling stuck? Ask Claude for a framework. Feeling overwhelmed? Get Gemini to organize my thoughts into a neat bulleted list.

I was outsourcing the very first step, the huge one that really matters. As my therapist also pointed out: “ChatGPT never asks you: how does it feel?” It can’t. It only sees the part of you that shows up as text and logic. It has no access to your physical sensations, your emotions, the way your nervous system is responding right now to what you’re experiencing. Yes, you can explain it, but it doesn’t feel what you are feeling.

Some of my favorite ideas haven’t come from prompting smarter. They come in the shower, where there’s no screen and no agenda (except in my parents’ where my mom continues her podcasts with a waterproof phone holder…another post for another time).

They come on long runs, during morning coffees, in the quiet moments of meditation and journaling. There’s something pretty magical about stepping away from the noise and just... being in your body.

what happens when you skip your body

After thousands of AI conversations, I can tell you what happens when I make it my first stop: it’s pretty addictive. The validation, the patterns, the insights - they feel so productive, like I’m really getting somewhere. But sometimes I find myself going in circles when I could have just paused and felt instead.

And when I’m stressed? When my rational mind is already overloaded, and my nervous system is screaming at me to slow down? Jumping straight to AI makes it worse for me.

When you’re in fight-or-flight mode, your prefrontal cortex is already offline. Your body is trying to tell you something urgent, something important. And instead of listening to it, you’re asking an AI to help you think through it, to rationalize it, to make sense of it with frameworks and analyses. You’re feeding the spiral instead of breaking it.

My therapist explained it when he reminded me later in the session: “Life isn’t black and white. It could be all of those things.” LLMs give you these clean, structured analyses. But your actual inner experience? It’s messy and layered and contradictory and deeply, beautifully human. It lives in your body, not in a prompt response.

Courtney Collins, a licensed clinical professional counselor at Wildflower Center for Emotional Health, explains that therapy isn’t just about the words a client speaks. It’s about “subtle shifts in body language, tone of voice, and overall presence” - the things that create actual understanding.”

This is the wisdom that gets lost when you skip straight to AI.

what creatives know about starting with your body

Rick Rubin, Julia Cameron, Michael Singer - the authors, creatives, and spiritual guides I love - they’ve all been saying the same thing: start with your body. Start with what you already know, even if you can’t explain it yet.

Rick Rubin puts it this way in “The Creative Act: A Way of Being”: “We are all antennae for creative thought... If your antenna isn’t sensitively tuned, you’re likely to lose the data in the noise.” Your body is that antenna, picking up signals from your subconscious, from the universe, from whatever source of wisdom you believe in. If your first move is to jump to AI, you miss the signal entirely. You’re asking the wrong antenna.

Julia Cameron writes in “The Right to Write” that “writing is a powerful form of prayer and meditation, connecting us both to our own insights and to a higher and deeper level of inner guidance.” The knowing comes first, in your body and then out through writing, connecting to your inner creative.

Michael Singer explains in “The Untethered Soul”: “You are not the voice of the mind - you are the one who hears it.” You are the one who feels. The one who knows before you know why. That’s not in your head, and it’s definitely not in ChatGPT. That’s in your body, connected to something larger.

ai comes after, not before

I do love using AI, tracking the innovation happening every day, and building in Claude Code as much as I can (and yes, I do spend hours on an AI + Marketing newsletter too…!).

But I'm realizing more and more that it can’t be the starting point for my writing, my ideas, or understanding how I'm feeling - being aware and figuring out what I need.

When I’m feeling stuck or anxious or confused about something, I am now trying to pause. I move from my head down into my body. I notice what’s actually happening - not what I think about what’s happening, but what I feel about it. The sensation and the knowing that’s there even before words.

I try to sit with that for a minute. Sometimes the answer becomes clear just by paying attention to what my body has been trying to tell me. Sometimes I write after to connect even deeper to my body, my intuition, and needs.

And then, if it’s helpful, I might bring in AI. I might use it to help me organize thoughts that are still jumbled. To explore patterns I’m noticing but can’t quite name yet. To map out options I’m considering.

I’m not perfect at this. I still catch myself opening ChatGPT at 2 a.m., asking why I can’t sleep. But the awareness is there now, and that's where I'm starting.

resources i <3

Body Scan Meditations:

• Jon Kabat-Zinn’s 10-Minute Body Scan

• Insight Timer App (free guided meditations)

• UCLA Mindful Body Scan

Books/Videos:

• “The Creative Act: A Way of Being” by Rick Rubin

• “The Right to Write” by Julia Cameron

• “The Untethered Soul” by Michael A. Singer

• “The Universe Has Your Back” Gabby Bernstein

• “The Wisdom of Your Body” by Hillary L. McBride

• “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” by Jenny Odell

• A 2-Minute Stress Hack For Burnout | Jane Johnsen | TEDxGramercy Park

Prompts (after you check in with your body):

From Alyssa Petersel:

• “Help me identify the difference between what I think I should want and what I actually want…”

From Hamna Aslam Khan:

• A comprehensive analysis of your patterns and blind spots

From Esther Jacobs - "10 Surprising ChatGPT Prompts for Self-Discovery and Personal Growth":

• A blog dedicated to prompts that go beyond the usual surface-level questions and help uncover blind spots, decision frameworks, and deeper insights about yourself using AI.

From LearnPrompt.org - “11 Powerful ChatGPT Prompts for Self-Discovery”:

• A structured, phased approach to using AI as a reflective partner, including core self-awareness, values exploration, strengths/weaknesses analysis, and fear deconstruction.

After you use these prompts, do you feel more grounded in your body or more stuck in your head?

Thanks for reading!

🎯 what you need to know this week in ai + marketing in 15 seconds:

• "Something big is happening" - HyperWrite CEO Matt Shumer compares this AI moment to February 2020 before COVID in his viral X post. GPT-5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 now complete entire projects from plain English, test themselves, iterate - he says "I am no longer needed for the technical work of my job" (Matt Shumer)
  

• Google tells advertisers to dump granular campaigns for AI - less manual tinkering, more feeding the system quality signals and letting it run (TechBuzz)
  

• Anthropic raised $30B at $380B valuation - biggest venture deal of 2026. Claude Code hit $2.5B annualized revenue, business subscriptions quadrupled (Anthropic)
  

• ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 went viral - generates 15-second videos from text with consistent characters. Disney and Paramount sent cease-and-desist letters. A “Tom Cruise” and “Brad Pitt” AI video caused controversy (ByteDance)

• Software stocks down ~$2 trillion from peak - investors worry about AI agent disruption to SaaS business models (Market news)

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🗞️ top ai + marketing news

the platforms are shifting (search, ads, interfaces)

ChatGPT is citing Reddit and YouTube now. Here’s what that means.
ProFound | ~6-min read
ChatGPT is increasingly citing Reddit threads and YouTube videos in its answers. It means user-generated content isn’t just influencing people - it’s influencing the AI that influences people. My take: If your category lives on Reddit, you need to know what’s being said there. “We don’t manage that channel” is no longer a real option.

Google tells advertisers to dump granular campaigns for AI
TechBuzz | ~4-min read
Google is nudging advertisers to move away from tightly controlled, granular campaign structures and lean into AI-driven optimization instead. Less manual tinkering, more feeding the system quality signals and letting it run. My take: The edge used to be in micro-optimizing. Now it’s in creative quality and measurement clarity.

org design, governance, and what not to automate

How to design marketing organizations for AI learning and scale
MarTech | ~6-min read
Scaling AI in marketing isn’t about buying tools. It’s about building systems to test, document, and distribute learnings across teams. Structure matters more than enthusiasm. My take: If everyone is experimenting but no one is codifying, you’re not scaling. You’re just dabbling.

Before you automate marketing with AI, decide what should never be automated
Forbes | ~6-min read
A reminder to define boundaries first. Certain work - especially emotionally sensitive or reputationally risky communication - shouldn’t be handed to automation without serious oversight. My take: If you wouldn’t let an intern handle it, don’t let a model handle it alone either.

How to use AI for social media
Hootsuite | ~7-min read
A practical guide to using AI for ideation, repurposing, and analytics support in social.
My take: Social is where generic AI shows instantly. Use it to get to a draft faster, then actually add your perspective.

big money, big power moves

Software companies are reorganizing around AI
The New York Times | ~7-min read
Software firms are repositioning themselves as AI companies - or at least AI-enabled companies - as competitive pressure mounts. My take: “AI-powered” isn’t a differentiator anymore.

retail, fashion, and the trust question

Why Thrive Market’s Amina Pasha believes trust will win in an AI-first world
Modern Retail | ~5-min read
In a market saturated with synthetic content and automation, trust and transparency become core differentiators. My take: Reliability is becoming premium positioning.

Snap brings AI lenses to luxury fashion campaigns
MediaPost | ~3-min read
Luxury brands are experimenting with AI-powered AR lenses in campaigns, using tech as a layer of interactivity rather than replacing the creative core. My take: AI works when it adds capability. It struggles when it replaces taste.

Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt Appear in a Viral A.I. Fight Scene. Hollywood Is Not Amused.
The New York Times | ~6-min read
A hyper-realistic, A.I.-generated video showing digital versions of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in a fight scene has gone viral, prompting backlash from studios and industry groups. The clip was made using a Seedance 2.0 (see below in new tools) by Chinese technology company ByteDance. My take: The tech can do it. That doesn’t mean it should. Entertainment is about imagination, but it’s also about contracts, consent, and careers.

trends and the bigger picture

10 AI marketing trends for 2026: agentic AI and search shifts
Adweek | ~5-min read
Covers the rise of agentic workflows, changes in discovery, and how AI is reshaping the entire marketing stack. My take: The real story isn’t a single trend. It’s the fact that AI now touches every function - from planning to reporting to creative execution.

AI business startups and stunts
The Guardian | ~5-min read
A look at attention-grabbing AI startup theatrics and the fine line between innovation and spectacle. My take: Headlines are not products. At some point, you have to ship something useful.

👩‍💻 thought-leader highlights

Because it broke the internet (I haven’t written that since the Kim K. champagne Paper Magazine cover..), this week I’m just laser focused on THE X post:

Matt Shumer: “Something Big Is Happening”

@mattshumer_ | 20M+ views

HyperWrite CEO Matt Shumer compares this moment to February 2020 - when most people dismissed early COVID warnings before the world changed in three weeks. His thesis: we’re in that same “this seems overblown” phase of something much bigger.

On February 5, GPT-5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 dropped. Something clicked for him: “I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job.” He describes what he wants built in plain English, walks away for four hours, returns to finished work - not drafts, the actual completed thing. The AI tests its own work, iterates, and only presents it once it meets its own standards.

The key points:

• AI labs focused on code first because AI building AI creates a feedback loop - each generation helps build the next, smarter version

• Tech workers experienced “helpful tool” becoming “does my job better than I do” over the past year

• That experience is coming to everyone else - law, finance, medicine, marketing, writing - within 1-5 years (many insiders think sooner)

• OpenAI’s documentation states GPT-5.3 Codex “was instrumental in creating itself” - this isn’t a prediction, it’s already happening

• Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) predicts 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs eliminated within 1-5 years

• The free version of AI tools is over a year behind what paying users have access to - judging AI by free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating smartphones by using a flip phone

His advice:

• Pay $20/month for Claude or ChatGPT and use the best model available (not the default)

• Push AI into your actual work - don’t just ask quick questions like it’s Google

• The person who walks into a meeting saying, “I did this analysis in an hour instead of three days,” is the most valuable person in the room right now

• Spend one hour a day experimenting with AI for six months, and you’ll understand what’s coming better than 99% of people

• That window of advantage won’t stay open long

My take: I’ll be honest - the pace of change in just the past few months has surprised me.

What resonates most:

• His point about the gap between public perception and reality hits home. I talk to people every week who tried ChatGPT in 2023, found it mediocre, and wrote off the whole space. Meanwhile, the people actually experimenting with current tools are producing 10x more output. That gap is real, and it’s widening fast.

• The “I tried it and it wasn’t that good” crowd is working from ancient history in AI terms. Six months ago is ancient history. The models available today are genuinely different. (As you all know, I am OBSESSED with Claude Code and think everyone should use it, technical or not.)

• His advice to push AI into your actual work - not just quick questions - is exactly right. The people getting ahead aren’t using it casually. They’re actively looking for ways to automate hours of work.

Where I’m more skeptical:

• Do I think 50% of jobs disappear in 1-5 years? I’m not sure about that specific timeline - enterprises move slowly, compliance matters, human relationships still drive deals, and there’s a difference between capability and deployment.

• The COVID comparison is emotionally effective but potentially misleading - COVID had fixed biology, AI development involves countless human decisions, and could shift direction.

But here’s what I believe completely:

• The people who thrive will be the ones building AI into their workflows now

• Not because AI replaces them tomorrow, but because “AI-augmented” and “non-AI-augmented” workers are becoming two very different categories with two very different levels of output

• The best time to start experimenting was six months ago; the second best time is today! (Join me!!)

• The window to get ahead by being early is real - and it’s closing faster than most people realize

🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools

major funding rounds

Anthropic - $30B Series G
The biggest venture deal of 2026 so far. Anthropic closed $30B at a $380B valuationn-more than double its September valuation. Claude Code’s annualized revenue hit $2.5B, and business subscriptions quadrupled since start of year.

Runway - $315M Series E
AI video startup nearly doubled valuation to $5.3B. Funding goes toward “world models”- AI systems that build internal representations of environments for planning. Follows release of Gen 4.5, which outperformed Google and OpenAI video models on benchmarks.

Simile - $100M Series A
Emerged from stealth with AI that predicts human behavior and simulates decision-making for enterprise applications—from consumer purchases to analyst questions on earnings calls.

tools that popped

Seedance 2.0 - ByteDance
ByteDance’s AI video generator went viral this week. Generates 2K video, 15-second clips from text prompts with “multi-lens storytelling” (multiple scenes, consistent characters). Disney and Paramount sent cease-and-desist letters. MPA condemned it for “unauthorized use of US copyrighted works on a massive scale.” ByteDance is now “strengthening safeguards.” Currently China-only (Jianying app), coming to CapCut globally soon.

Kuaishou Kling 3.0
Kuaishou’s competitor to Seedance - photorealistic output, 15-second videos, native audio generation across multiple languages/dialects/accents. Currently subscription-only.

other notable moves

• Cowork (Anthropic) continues gaining traction - Microsoft reportedly encouraging internal teams to adopt Claude tools

• Goldman Sachs rolled out Claude AI to automate accounting and compliance tasks across 12,000+ developers and back-office staff

• Software stocks down ~$2 trillion from peak as investors worry about AI agent disruption to SaaS

💼 cool ai + marketing jobs

Anthropic - Media Planning and Strategy Lead

Giga - Head of Product Marketing

Scale AI - Product Marketing Lead, Enterprise

Clay - Product Marketing

Sequence - Founding Marketer (AI-native)

Actively AI - Brand & Content Lead

❓ you made it to the poll!

Hit reply anytime and let me know:

• Topics you’d like covered in future weeks

• Sections you love or could do without

• Questions about AI, marketing, or anything else

I read every reply and use them to shape what I write.

Love y’all,
Carley

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🎯 what you need to know this week in ai + marketing in 15 seconds:

• The AI Super Bowl moment happened - Anthropic, OpenAI, Genspark showed up. Every AI company seemed to be asking for trust, not demanding attention. They’re negotiating acceptance, not flexing power (Multiple sources)

• AI could unlock $30B for marketers - if we fix measurement first - without cleaner data and shared definitions of performance, AI just accelerates messy systems (MarTech)

• Sam Altman called Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad “dishonest” - CEO rivalry playing out in real time. The ad was a joke that exaggerated awkwardness of talking to AI. But sensitivity in this space is high (Twitter/X)

• ChatGPT ads launched - OpenAI’s first live ad test shows sponsored messages to Free/Go users. Anthropic responded with Super Bowl ads mocking OpenAI: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude” (OpenAI)

• Claude Opus 4.6 released - Agent teams for parallel tasks, Claude in PowerPoint. Outperforms GPT-5.2 on knowledge work benchmarks (Anthropic)

• OpenAI launched Frontier - enterprise platform for building fleets of AI agents that plug into CRMs, data warehouses, internal apps. Early adopters: Uber, State Farm, Intuit (OpenAI)

• “The rise of the professional vibe coder” - Elena Verna @ Lovable hired someone to rapidly build products and campaigns using AI. This hybrid PM-designer-marketer role becoming a full profession (Elena Verna)

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🗞️ top ai + marketing news

measurement, money, and where AI actually pays off

AI could unlock $30B for marketers — if we fix measurement first
MarTech | ~4 min read
AI promises massive efficiency gains, but this piece argues the real unlock is fixing attribution and measurement. Without cleaner data and shared definitions of performance, AI just accelerates messy systems.
My take: This feels right. Most marketing teams don’t have an AI problem. They have a measuring the impact problem.

In Q1, marketers pivot to spending backed by AI and measurement
Digiday | ~5 min read
Marketers are tightening budgets and reallocating toward tools that show measurable AI impact, especially performance and analytics. Experimental AI projects are giving way to spend tied directly to ROI.
My take: The vibe shift is real, peeps. “AI innovation” is out. “Prove it” is in.

the AI super bowl

Genspark leverages AI for fast-turnaround Super Bowl spot
Adweek | ~4 min read
Genspark used AI to dramatically compress production timelines for its Super Bowl debut, positioning speed itself as the differentiator.

Super Bowl 60 AI ads: Svedka, Anthropic and more
TechCrunch | ~5 min read
Breakdown of how AI companies showed up on the biggest ad stage of the year, from Svedka to Anthropic.

OpenAI’s Super Bowl spot: the AI Bowl moment
Marketing Brew | ~4 min read
Covers OpenAI’s long-awaited Super Bowl debut and the broader “AI Bowl” narrative among competing platforms.

Exclusive: Inside OpenAI’s Super Bowl ad playbook
Fast Company | ~6 min read
Behind-the-scenes look at OpenAI’s strategy and messaging decisions heading into the game.

AI chatbots rank top Super Bowl ads — and leave out Big Tech
Adweek | ~4 min read
Chatbots were asked to rank the best ads. The results were interesting - and revealing - especially in how AI systems evaluate their own ecosystem.

Why is every AI Super Bowl ad asking for permission?
Muse by Clios | ~3 min read
Observes a clear theme: AI brands framing themselves carefully, even cautiously, instead of flexing dominance.

AI brands at the Super Bowl
Ad Age | ~5 min read
Recap of how Anthropic, Genspark, Meta, OpenAI and Wix approached their spots.

2026 Super Bowl ad trends, including AI
Ad Age | ~5 min read
Zooms out on larger themes shaping this year’s game.

Altman vs Anthropic in the Super Bowl spotlight
CNBC | ~4 min read
Focuses on the emerging rivalry narrative and the stakes of brand positioning.

ChatGPT ads spark agency interest
Ad Age | ~4 min read
Agencies are seeing AI companies as new, serious brand advertisers - not just product marketers.

AI, crypto, and the Super Bowl moment
Ad Age | ~4 min read
Explores how AI brands are filling the cultural-ad spotlight crypto once occupied.

My take (longer, because there is a lottttt):
This felt like the first Super Bowl where AI companies weren’t hovering around the edge of culture. They were in the middle of it.

Anthropic leaned into humor in a way that surprised people. The ad didn’t try to explain the tech. It made a joke about the awkwardness of talking to AI in the first place, and it trusted the audience to get it. That confidence came through. It felt like a brand that knows exactly how it wants to be perceived.

OpenAI’s spot was more controlled. Clean, careful, clearly thought through. You can sense the weight they’re carrying as the most recognizable name in AI. When you’re that visible, you don’t get to be scrappy. You get to be responsible. The ad reflected that.

Then Sam Altman tweeted that Anthropic’s ad was funny but “clearly dishonest.” Which, yes. It was a joke. Of course it exaggerated. That’s what ads do. But the fact that the CEO stepped in publicly shows how sensitive this space is right now. Brand rivalry is no longer abstract. It’s playing out in real time (and tbd Claude is winning in my opinion on product, trust, safety, and now humor (and reading the room…cough Sam Altman)).

What I found most interesting wasn’t which ad ranked higher or who had more impressions. It was the tone across the board. Almost every AI company seemed to be asking for trust. Not demanding attention. Not flexing power. Asking for permission to be part of people’s lives.

That’s a very different posture than tech had a few years ago. And it tells you where AI sits culturally. It’s powerful, but it’s still negotiating acceptance.

If anything, the real story of this Super Bowl wasn’t that AI showed up. It’s that AI showed up trying to behave…but don’t get me started on the Ring ad…you’re not getting us with mass surveillance acting as a cute pet finder. Behaving doesn’t mean pulling a fast one on us.

creators, distribution, and who gets paid

Google and Microsoft pay creators $500,000+ to promote AI
CNBC | ~4 min read
Big tech is cutting serious checks to influencers to normalize AI products. Creator marketing is now core AI distribution strategy.
My take: AI companies don’t just need ads. They need social proof.

enterprise friction and leadership

Microsoft’s pivotal AI product hits roadblocks
The Wall Street Journal | ~6 min read
Details challenges facing one of Microsoft’s flagship AI initiatives, underscoring how hard enterprise AI rollouts still are.
My take: Consumer hype does not equal enterprise adoption.

Find your AI leadership superpower
Fast Company | ~4 min read
Encourages leaders to define how they uniquely contribute in AI-driven orgs, rather than trying to be the most technical person in the room.
My take: The leaders who win here won’t be the most technical. They’ll be the clearest thinkers.

👩‍💻 linkedin highlights

Kim Caldbeck – “I was a ChatGPT loyalist. Claude Cowork just changed that”
Kim describes how Anthropic’s Cowork integrates directly with Gmail, Docs, Slack and Calendar to handle tasks end to end. It summarized her onboarding docs, created calendar invites for her kids’ sports schedule and redesigned slides while she kept working, so she still writes with ChatGPT but now relies on Claude for workflow automation.

Elena Verna – “The rise of the professional vibe coder (a new AI‑era job)”
Elena says she hired a “vibe coder” to rapidly build products, campaigns and internal tools using AI and that this hybrid PM‑designer‑marketer role is poised to become a full‑time profession as companies want experiments spun up faster.

“I think we’re watching a new profession emerge: full‑time vibe coder” - Elena Verna, Head of Growth @ Lovable

Brendan Hufford – “Content marketing is being dismantled as we speak”
Brendan argues content marketing’s decline isn’t due to AI but to outdated tactics like cold outbound, gated PDFs and high‑volume AI content that erode trust. He outlines three phases of change: the 2025 “volume trap,” today’s “credibility collapse” where only lived experience and proof resonate, and an imminent “unbundling” where content becomes an organization‑wide system focused on one point of view.

Ina Toncheva – “How I switched from ChatGPT to Claude (step‑by‑step)”
Ina shares her migration plan: export ChatGPT data, save custom instructions and top prompts, subscribe to Claude Pro, set up memory and recreate custom GPTs using Claude Skills. She says you don’t lose context but shed baggage and that Claude writes more naturally, though she still uses ChatGPT for specialized research.

Ina Toncheva – “A marketer’s guide to Claude”
Ina highlights Claude’s key marketing functions - writing with brand guidelines built in, ad platform integrations, competitor research, bulk link updates via Claude Code and Projects for campaign context. After three years of ChatGPT use, she prefers Claude for better writing and asks marketers which of these functions they find most valuable.

🛠️ latest ai + marketing tools

ChatGPT Ads
OpenAI launched its first live ad test in ChatGPT, showing sponsored messages to Free and Go tier users. Ads appear below responses, clearly labeled, and are tailored based on conversation topics and past chats. Plus/Pro/Business/Enterprise remain ad-free. The move prompted Anthropic to run Super Bowl ads mocking OpenAI with the tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”

Canva Brand Kit + AI Assistants
Canva expanded its MCP integration so ChatGPT and Claude can now generate designs using your Brand Kit - automatically applying your colors, fonts, and logos. The Canva MCP Server has created over 12 million designs across ChatGPT, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot.

Claude Opus 4.6
Anthropic released Opus 4.6 with “agent teams” for parallel task execution, and Claude in PowerPoint as a research preview. The model outperforms GPT-5.2 on the GDPval-AA knowledge work benchmark. Anthropic’s red team found 500+ zero-day vulnerabilities in open-source code before launch.

OpenAI Frontier
OpenAI launched Frontier, an enterprise platform for building and managing fleets of AI agents that plug into existing business systems. It connects data warehouses, CRMs, and internal apps to give AI “coworkers” shared context and permissions. Early adopters include Uber, State Farm, Intuit, and Oracle.

OpenAI GPT-5.3-Codex
OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex, its most capable agentic coding model - 25% faster than its predecessor and the first classified “high capability” for cybersecurity. The model helped debug its own training and deployment. Available now in Codex app/CLI/IDE; API access coming soon.

Anthropic Cowork Plugins
Anthropic open-sourced 11 plugins for Cowork covering sales, finance, legal, marketing, customer support, and product management. Each bundles skills, connectors, and sub-agents to make Claude work like a domain expert.

Snowflake + OpenAI Partnership
Snowflake and OpenAI signed a $200M deal to bring GPT-5.2 directly into Snowflake Cortex AI and Snowflake Intelligence. The integration lets 12,600+ enterprise customers build AI agents on their data without moving it outside Snowflake’s governed environment.

💼 cool ai + marketing jobs

Anthropic - Technical Product Marketing Lead

Sendbird - AI-First Full Stack Marketer

Listen Labs - Growth Lead, Acquisition

HubSpot - Senior Marketer, AI Partnerships

Stripe - Product Marketing Manager, Agentic Commerce

Higgsfield AI - AI Educator - Enterprise

❓ you made it to the poll!

Thanks for being here for the first AI + Marketing Weekly Substack send!

I want to continue make sure this newsletter is useful for you. Hit reply anytime and let me know:

• Topics you’d like covered in future weeks

• Sections you love or could do without

• Questions about AI, marketing, or anything else

I read every reply and use them to shape what I write.

Love y’all,
Carley

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