My grandma is not happy 👟
Plus: Claude's new design tool, Canva's now an AI platform, and 72% considering skilled trades instead.
~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!
👩💻 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
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Love y’all,
Carley