Stanley sold a decade of cups on a vibe. Vibes do not survive translation.

The brand is rebuilding its marketing for a reader who can't infer anything from a photograph, treating that as a structural problem rather than a hacking one. Product-level FAQs. Care instructions. Usage guides written around gifting, hydration, fitness, travel and hosting. Written links between a feature and the benefit it delivers.

The infrastructure half is further along than most. It is testing Shopify and Google's Universal Commerce Protocol to get the catalog into chat, using structured data so both kinds of search read the same product, and working with Yotpo's Discovery to baseline how often it comes up in LLM conversations. It tracks which third-party
sources the agentic tools treat as authorities and aims effort there.

Look at who owns it. Content, SEO, e-commerce, technology, PR and marketing, all at once. That is the part most teams get wrong, because a cross-functional program does not fit inside one person's objectives.

Stanley's site took 6.6 million visits in July, up 35.5% on last year, per Similarweb. So this is not a rescue. It is the strongest brand in its category writing down what it means, ten years late, because the new reader cannot see.

TALK ON THE MARKET

Kate Ridley, chief brand officer at Stanley, on the gap that showed up around occasions:

Mother's Day, Teacher Appreciation, Nurse Appreciation. Piles of imagery, no sentence saying why the thing was a good gift. Open your own product page with the images turned off and see what is left of the argument.

NUMBERS MATTER

25,000. Posts a day Reddit says it now catches from brands seeding fake opinions for chatbots to repeat, reported by TheNextWeb. Reddit is the second most cited source across AI software answers, behind TechRadar.

The fight over the sources that decide your category is already running at five figures a day, and people are willing to get banned to win it.

DAILY PROMPT

Run it on your best seller first, then read what comes back as if you had never seen the packaging. The distance between what you know about that product and what is written down is what the assistants are working from.

Every marketing team has a queue of small builds nobody will ever prioritize — the ROI calculator, the internal brief generator, the assessment quiz that would actually pull leads — because they're too minor for the engineering roadmap and too custom for a template.

Anything takes a description and builds the real thing: mobile apps, sites, and internal tools shipped as actual code, with GPT-5 and 40+ integrations wired in from the start.

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CMO CORNER

Replace workflows that depend on energy with ones that run on structure.

Stanley's occasion copy didn't exist because writing it depended on somebody caring enough that week. The photography always got done, because a shoot was on the calendar with a crew and a cost attached. Put the unglamorous layer on the calendar the same way, with an owner and a date, or accept that it happens when somebody has a quiet Thursday.

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TOOL UPGRADE

Stanley is testing whether its catalog can live inside a chat window. Three for owning the layers you still control:

Shopify — best for keeping product data clean in the place the new
commerce protocols are being built against. Try Shopify here →

Klaviyo — best for turning a first purchase into a list you own, for
when discovery moves somewhere you do not. Try Klaviyo here →

Omnisend — best for smaller teams who need email and SMS running
properly without starting a CRM project. Try Omnisend here →

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LEARN THIS

Stanley's version of this pulled in content, SEO, e-commerce, technology, PR and marketing. Here is the map for running that: the AI Content Operations Framework.

It covers architecting content operations that scale output without losing brand voice or editorial standards, which is the exact tension in writing four hundred product FAQs nobody reads for pleasure. For the leader who has to get six functions working off one plan.

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That’s it for today!

See you next time,

— Peter & Torsten

The disagreement is the headline. What sits under it is worse. Saying who you are moves the answer: in some categories a brand goes from winning 34% of answers to 90%, and the only change is whether the buyer says "I'm a freelancer" or "we're an enterprise". Phrasing it as a British buyer flips the number one in about half the categories they could measure. Showing up is not winning either. HubSpot appears on 19 leaderboards and wins three. Salesforce appears on 13 and wins none.

Caveats, because they matter here. One day of data, two engines, no error bars, no peer review, and "top pick" only means the first brand named. GetIntel sells AI visibility software, so the conclusion is also the pitch. TheNextWeb said so, and so do we.

Your category has a leaderboard now, and four different buyers are reading four different versions.

TALK ON THE MARKET

Debra Aho Williamson, founder and chief analyst at Sonata Insights, on what changed for Stanley:

The same roles human influencers play, in her words. There is a budget line implied in that sentence, and nobody wants to be the first to say it in front of the influencer team.

NUMBERS MATTER

303%. Growth in ChatGPT referral visits to B2B websites, from roughly 645,000 a month in June 2025 to 2.6 million in June 2026, measured across 11 billion visits by Demandbase Labs through 31 July. Perplexity referrals fell over the same period. Gemini and Claude were flat.

"AI traffic" is one company's traffic. Build the plan on that, not on the category.

DAILY PROMPT

Use it before you renew a visibility subscription. Twenty minutes of asking it yourself gets you the thing the dashboard will not: the handful of sites your category is actually being decided on.

The work that quietly kills a lean marketing team isn’t strategy — it’s the inbox triage, the follow-up nobody sent, the LinkedIn post that didn’t go out because Tuesday happened.

Marblism gives you named AI employees for each of those jobs: Eva on email, Penny on content and SEO, Sonny on social, Stan on outbound, Rachel on calls — described once, then running in the background without prompts or setup work.

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CMO CORNER

When in doubt, simplify the system before adding supervision.

After a study like this, the instinct is to buy a fourth monitoring tool. The cheaper move is to cut the number of places your product information lives. Most brands have four versions of the same spec across a product page, a sales sheet, a partner portal and a help center, each out of date in a different direction. The assistants read all four and average you.

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Today's finding is that the question changes the answer. Three for working the question rather than the brand:

Also Asked — best for mapping the real follow-up questions that
cluster around a category, in the order people ask them. Try Also Asked here →

SE Ranking AI — best for tracking how you turn up in AI search next
to your ordinary rankings, without a second contract. Try SE Ranking AI here →

AI SEO — best for turning one buyer question into the page that
answers it properly, at the volume this needs. Try AI SEO here →

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LEARN THIS

If today landed, the follow-on is the course: AI SEO Mastery: Get CITED.

It works the citation problem specifically, getting named and linked inside an AI answer rather than ranking a page and hoping the summary is kind. It takes longer than a subscription, and it is the half of this you can control. Free.

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BRAND SLOP

Kinney Drugs named its AI phone assistant Burt, after the pharmacy's founder. Nice touch. From May, it handled patient calls about prescriptions and refills, and customers reported incoherent calls, wrong dosages, and missed prescription notifications.

The consent mechanism is the part to sit with. Anyone who had ever given the pharmacy a phone number was automatically consented into the AI under its terms. One customer described approving the refills it called about by reflex, then receiving medication she did not need.

Inbound calls are back on touch-tone. Burt keeps the outbound refill texts, opt-in now. Dave Bellini, customer: "They should have never gone to robots. Most
of their customers are old, or they got an illness."

President John Marraffa defended the tool's HIPAA compliance, then said the sentence almost nobody says: getting privacy and security right does not mean they got the experience right, and they own that.

Go and read what your own terms consented your customers to. Somebody wrote that paragraph years ago for a mailing list, and it is now the legal basis for a robot phoning your most fragile segment at dinner time.

That’s it for today!

See you next time,

— Peter & Torsten

Digiday put that to the people running these programs, and nobody
can connect the two. Scrunch, Profound, and Semrush will estimate how a model presents you and which sources it read. None of them link that to a sale.

So the teams that care build the bridge by hand. Rippling triangulates visibility scores from Profound and AirOps, conversion data from its paid ChatGPT ads, branded versus unbranded search traffic, and a media mix model it built on Google's open-source Meridian. Roast uses Google's Causal Impact, a Bayesian tool, to infer lift.

A payroll company and a media agency, doing statistics, because the dashboard cannot answer the question it was sold on.

Others skipped the modeling. Dating app Seeking.com hired an agency to get into high-traffic Reddit threads before they get scraped.

Your version is whether you fund a data scientist or a comment section. One of those survives being said out loud in a board meeting.

TALK ON THE MARKET

John Barham, managing partner at performance media agency Roast, on
the last eighteen months:

Eighteen months of that pressure, and the honest answer from the agency doing the work is still: go and build the model yourself.

NUMBERS MATTER

5%. Share of all citations going to G2, Capterra and TrustRadius combined, across 9,978 ChatGPT and Gemini answers in GetIntel's AI Software Index, collected 6 August. TechRadar led on 1,114 citations, Reddit came second on 807, and Gartner managed 238, fewer than Zapier.

A decade of category budget has gone to a reference layer the assistants are routing around.

DAILY PROMPT

Use it before the next budget conversation. That last instruction earns its keep, because the honest slide is the one you are going to need.

You think at 150 words a minute and type at 60, which is why your best ideas arrive already flattened by the keyboard.

Wispr Flow sits behind a hotkey in every app you use — Gmail, Slack, Notion, Claude — and turns rambling speech into clean, formatted text without the filler words, false starts, or self-corrections you'd normally clean up by hand.

Dictate the strategy memo on the walk back from the meeting, and it's ready before you sit down.

Try Wispr Flow AI

CMO CORNER

Leaders who rely on visibility often lack alignment.

The pun is free, so take it. Every team in this story measures how visible it is, because visibility is the thing that can be measured. The duller question is what you would do differently on Monday if the score rose ten points. If nobody in the room can answer that, the subscription is a comfort purchase and the renewal is in ninety days.

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TOOL UPGRADE

You cannot connect visibility to sales yet. You can stop guessing at the visibility half:

Peec AI — best for seeing how often you appear in AI answers, where
you rank, and how you get described. Try Peec AI here →

Semrush — best for holding the AI picture next to the search data
you already report, in a tab your team opens anyway. Try Semrush here →

Surfer SEO — best for the unglamorous half, turning what you find
into briefs and pages that get cited. Try Surfer SEO here →

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LEARN THIS

Roast and Rippling are building this from scratch. You do not have to: the AI-Powered Attribution Modeling Framework.

Step by step on multi-touch attribution that survives a CFO's questions, including which model fits which sales cycle and how to treat the touchpoints you genuinely cannot see. For the marketer whose board asked for the AI number in July and will ask again in October.

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BRAND SLOP

D'Addario makes guitar strings. Its promo for the new NYXL HD set included music that keen ears thought was generated, and the company flatly denied it, saying it desperately wants to preserve human expression through music. It deleted the comments.

Then on 11 August it edited that denial and admitted it. Suno Studio used it to regenerate the original recorded track. "We got this wrong," the new statement reads. "We shared inaccurate information, and we're truly sorry." Nobody gets named, which is its own tell about how the track got there.

The remedy is the part to steal. Employees and creative partners must now disclose any use of generative AI. That policy costs an email to write. D'Addario paid for it with a retraction.

Telling guitarists you hate AI music while shipping AI music is the specific failure. The bigger one is that you don't know what your agency put in the last thing you signed off on.

That’s it for today!

See you next time,

— Peter & Torsten

Nobody owns this line in the P&L, which is exactly why it keeps getting approved.

Rival Technologies asked 901 Gen Z participants across the US and Canada how they react when they learn a brand's marketing was made with AI. Fielded in July, published 13 August. 74% react negatively. 8% react positively.

Then it stops being sentiment. 72% have already acted: 50% unfollowed, 49% complained, 48% unsubscribed, 43% stopped buying altogether. Their words, not the researchers'. Soulless. Lazy. One participant called it "a cheap way out for companies to cut employees."

Two carve-outs. This is claimed behavior on a survey, not till receipts, and Rival sells research, ran the study with its own AI tooling, and says so. It also says the answer is not to stop using AI. Cleaning up a chart barely registers. Handing over your voice and your storytelling is where the trust goes.

Canadians punish harder than Americans. Older Gen Z harder than younger.

TALK ON THE MARKET

Kelvin Claveria, who runs demand generation and content at Rival Technologies, on the trap:

Your efficiency announcement and your restructuring memo have the same author and different audiences, and the audiences talk. Those two conversations almost never happen in the same room.

NUMBERS MATTER

69%. Share of Americans open to letting AI purchase on their behalf, in Croud's Consumer Index with ImpactSense, a nationally representative survey of 2,000 US consumers published 11 August. Among those already shopping with AI, 39% check four or more sources first.

They will let a machine pick, then go check its work. Both halves are a media placement now.

DAILY PROMPT

Use it in the first hour, not the next morning. The draft your agency sends will contain a confident denial nobody has actually verified.

Aloudable turns your written content into a finished podcast episode in your own voice, without studio time.

• Record one short voice sample. We use it to build your voice profile.

• Share a document, article, or link. That is the only input we need.

• You receive a finished episode and transcript. Review it, request changes, or approve it. Nothing goes live without your sign-off.

Your team provides the source material. Aloudable turns it into professional podcast episodes in your organization’s voice, handling scripting, voice-led production, audio editing, editorial review, and publishing support.

Request a sample episode for free

CMO CORNER

Shared standards beat constant supervision.

You cannot review every asset, and the people who need the rule are the ones you never see: a freelancer, an agency editor, somebody's contractor. So make one line true for everyone who touches your brand. If a model made any part of this, it says so on the ticket before it reaches me. One email, written once.

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TOOL UPGRADE

Gen Z will tell you where their line is. Almost nobody asks. Three for finding out before the comments do:

Bright Data — best for pulling what your whole category says at scale, not the twelve replies that reached you. Try Bright Data here →

Browse AI — best for watching specific review pages, forums, and threads for your brand with no engineer involved. Try Browse AI here →

Testimonial — best for banking real customer video, the one asset an accusation of AI cannot touch. Try Testimonial here →

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LEARN THIS

If three-quarters of a generation can tell, the question is what your standard actually is: the AI Content Quality Assurance Framework.

It is the systematic version of what most teams do by taste, covering how to hold brand integrity as volume climbs and where a named human has to be accountable, not merely present. For the leader who scaled output and now needs an answer to "who checked this".

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That’s it for today!

See you next time,

— Peter & Torsten

The gap between companies that are good at this and those that bought licenses has tripled since January. OpenAI published two studies together on 12 August. Frontier firms, the top 10% by usage in a given month, generate 8.3 times as many output tokens per active user as typical firms. In January, that gap was 2.6 times.

Tokens are a crude proxy for depth of use, and OpenAI is measuring its own customers against its own metric. Say that out loud before the number goes in a deck.

What sits underneath is less crude. Among weekly active users, 21% at frontier firms use Plugins and 19% use skills, against 9% and 3% at typical firms. At OpenAI itself, 95% use Plugins weekly. That is the difference between typing into a chat box and agents wired to company data, tools, and a repeatable workflow.

Then the finding your leadership team will not enjoy. Usage is highest among early-career employees and falls as seniority rises. The people writing the AI strategy are using it least.

Marketing is not the laggard for once. Weekly active enterprise Codex
users are up 26 times in marketing since February, against 5 times in
engineering.

TALK ON THE MARKET

Marcio Arnecke, CMO of Apollo, on his own survey:

He is right about the hurdle. In the same survey, 84% use AI for prospecting and research, the easiest thing in the funnel to hand over. Adoption stopped being the interesting question a year ago, and most teams have not replaced it with a better one.

NUMBERS MATTER

97% and 17% . Share of revenue leaders who have adopted AI, and the share who describe theirs as fully operational and measured, in Apollo's 2026 AI in Sales and Go-to-Market Survey of 328 GTM professionals, fielded in June. 74% run between two and five GTM platforms.

Near-universal adoption, one in six measuring it. The gap between those two numbers is the job.

DAILY PROMPT

Use this when your license count is high, and your output hasn't moved. The seats were the cheap part, and they were never the constraint.

Kick is self-driving bookkeeping — transactions get categorized in real time, the home office and travel deductions stop slipping through, and the P&L sits tax-ready instead of being reconstructed in a panic every April.

It runs across unlimited entities, so the consulting arm, the side product, and the rental all reconcile in one place, with rules you can shape to how your money actually moves.

New users get 10% off for 12 months through our link.

Try Kick — 10% off for 12 months

CMO CORNER

Leaders who do the work are efficient. Leaders who design the work are effective.

The frontier gap is not a talent gap. It is the difference between forty people who each have a good private workflow, and a team where one of those workflows became the way everybody works. Nobody will ever put the second thing in your objectives, and it is the only part of this that compounds.

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TOOL UPGRADE

The frontier firms are winning on plumbing. Three ways to lay some without a headcount request:

Gumloop — best for wiring your existing marketing tools to agents
when nobody on the team writes code. Try Gumloop here →

Stilla — best for one permission-aware teammate working across the
company rather than a separate bot per tool. Try Stilla here →

Viktor — best for the recurring recap that lands in Slack with the
numbers pulled, before anyone asks. Try Viktor here →

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LEARN THIS

If the frontier gap is an operating-model gap, start by being honest about where you sit: the AI Marketing Maturity Model Framework.

A structured assessment plus the roadmap out, built to move a marketing organization from experimentation to systems that show up in revenue. It earns its place by forcing you to write your current stage down, which is the argument you have been having sideways all year.

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BRAND SLOP

Cliff Tan makes interior design videos for 2.4 million YouTube subscribers as Dear Modern. He ran a paid ad for Dreamina, ByteDance's AI creative tool, and tried to inoculate himself inside the ad, saying he does not "like AI" because "it makes you forget to use your brain."

It made no difference. The loudest objection in the comments collected 1,700 likes: "No, Mr. Cliff. Please. Don't sell yourself to AI." He published an apology video on Monday. "Yesterday I made a video on AI, and it disappointed many of you," he said. "I'm really sorry about that."

Second one that week. Hank Green, 3.2 million subscribers, apologized on 4 August for using ChatGPT to find papers and sources, then published a personal AI policy ruling out letting a model write, edit, or outline anything.

Neither of them generated anything wholesale. Both were punished for standing next to it.

So if you are buying creator distribution for an AI product, look at what you are asking someone to spend. The rate card prices their audience. It does not price their standing with that audience, and the creator settles that bill before you do.

That’s it for today!

See you next time,

— Peter & Torsten

In April the biggest advertisers on ChatGPT were Speechify and Jotform. Time to stop treating it as a curiosity.

Sensor Tower’s US data says advertisers on ChatGPT went from around 300 in April to more than 820 in July, roughly 160 of them joining in July alone, while mobile users saw about twice as many ads per hour. The April top ten has been replaced by Booking Holdings, Intuit, Home Depot and L.L.Bean. Financial services went from 2% of platform ad spend to 12%.

These are panel estimates, not OpenAI’s books, and the base is tiny: $100 million in annual recurring ad revenue reported in May, against Google’s $81.6 billion quarter. So watch the advertiser count instead. Three hundred to 820 in a single quarter, while the ad load doubled and nobody left. That’s a marketplace forming, and marketplaces are cheapest while everyone is still arguing about whether they’re real.

The honest position for most of you is a small test with a clear kill criterion, run this quarter rather than next. Not because it will work. Because in six months the same answer costs four times as much.

TALK ON THE MARKET

Marisa Jones, analyst at eMarketer, on Pinterest’s quarter:

Pinterest guided to 13–15% growth against 18% last quarter and the stock fell 9%. Shipping AI ad features stopped being a differentiator this year, and the platforms are finding that out on earnings calls.

NUMBERS MATTER

55% and 63%. Share of US consumers who expect to spend more this holiday than last year, and the share who may hold out for Black Friday or Cyber Monday before starting, in Optimove Insights’ 2026 report of 648 US consumers. The money is there and it’s arriving late, which is precisely the shape of quarter that punishes a channel test you started in November.

DAILY PROMPT

Use this while you’re building the Q4 plan, before the budget hardens. The kill criteria are the point. A test without one quietly becomes a subscription.

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CMO CORNER

Good leadership makes fewer decisions by making better ones earlier.

There will be a meeting about advertising inside assistants. Have it now, while it costs a small test budget and one person’s attention, or have it in nine months when a competitor’s name keeps coming up and the decision arrives with a deadline attached. Same decision, wildly different price.

We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.

Learn more about Teamless →

We run an interview series with marketing leaders about how AI actually changes their work. Real use cases, not predictions.

Read the previous editions →

If you’re doing something worth talking about, the opportunity is free and available for anyone. Simply reply to this email with your pitch.

TOOL UPGRADE

A new channel is only worth testing if you can see what it did:

Replo best for shipping a landing page per test without waiting on an engineering sprint. Try Replo here →

Amplitude best for following what the traffic did after the click, rather than stopping at the session. Try Amplitude here →

Anara best for asking the data plain questions when whoever writes your SQL is on holiday. Try Anara here →

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Get 10% off forever

LEARN THIS

If the channel test isn’t the right first pilot, here are the alternatives with the maths done: the AI Pilot Use Case Library. Forty-plus use cases scored by effort, impact and pilot fit, from bulk meta descriptions to turning competitor G2 reviews into battlecards. For the leader who wants a shortlist rather than a brainstorm.

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BRAND SLOP

Google shipped an AI image generator inside Google Earth on a Thursday and pulled it on the Friday. One day. It let anyone zoom to real coordinates, type a sentence, and lay a photorealistic aerial scene over genuine satellite imagery.

Dutch researcher Henk van Ess published a post called “How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran” and did exactly that, plus refugees near the Mexican border and a bomb crater beside a hospital in Gaza. BBC Verify made a toppled Eiffel Tower and Russian tanks in Kyiv. AFP produced explosions in Paris.

Google says the images never entered the main Earth platform and that it’s rolling back to build guardrails. They did carry SynthID watermarks, which is the detail worth taking with you. Watermarking is forensics. It tells you what happened after somebody already believed it.

Van Ess made the sharpest point in the story: it takes a government request to remove a real building from Google Earth, and one sentence to add a fake one.

So before you ship anything with a generate button in it, work out what your product implicitly promises and whether generation quietly breaks that promise. Google Earth’s whole promise was that it shows you what is there.

That’s it for today!

See you next time,

— Peter & Torsten

Every AI creative conversation this year has been vibes and screenshots. Here is an actual test.

Cuisinart, through parent company Conair, beta-tested Amazon’s video creative agent and then did the obvious thing almost nobody does: equal spend behind an in-house-produced video and an AI-generated one, identical campaigns running concurrently for a month. The AI video won on click-through and on-site conversion.

AdExchanger doesn’t publish the size of the lift, so neither will we. “Won on both” is what’s known.

The winning ad is not impressive. Two adults and a kid in a kitchen, a narrator talking about last-minute dinner prep, some near-still product shots of a 14-cup food processor. The text on the appliance buttons is still slightly wrong, which is the tell that has been the tell for two years.

The reason it won is the part worth your time, and it isn’t creativity. Amazon’s agent ingests everything the brand has run before, plus which of those performed, then produces something adjacent to the winners. New enough to escape ad blindness. Familiar enough to keep working. It is a variation engine wearing a creative director’s coat.

Which tells you what the job is now. Feed it a catalog of proven work and clear brand constraints, and it will farm the space between them forever. Feed it nothing, and it will produce the average of your category, and the platform will show that to people who have already scrolled past it eleven times.

TALK ON THE MARKET

Nikhil Nanivadekar, principal engineer for generative and agentic AI at Amazon Ads, on what the agent is doing: the tool is “grounded in the signals” a brand provides, so it reflects the company’s video catalog rather than “producing something bold or outlandish.”

An Amazon engineer saying out loud that the creative agent is not creative. Keep that quote for the next time someone in your building says AI is coming for the agency. It’s coming for the fourteenth cutdown, which the agency also hated making.

NUMBERS MATTER

120%. Year-over-year growth in unique contributors to Snapchat’s Spotlight feed, cited by Snap as evidence its authenticity push is working. Platforms have started publishing human-supply metrics, which is a strange new thing to be proud of and a fairly clear signal about which way the incentives are pointing.

DAILY PROMPT

Use this before you brief anything new. Generative tools reward you for knowing which of your old ads actually earned their keep, and most teams brief from taste and calendar instead.

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CMO CORNER

The best way to speed up your team is to slow down your instructions.

The Cuisinart result is a brief result. The agent was given a catalogue, performance signals and brand constraints, and it produced something usable. Vague in, average out, and average now gets buried. Whatever you’re about to hand a model, spend the extra twenty minutes on the input. It’s the highest-leverage twenty minutes in the workflow.

We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.

Learn more about Teamless →

We run an interview series with marketing leaders about how AI actually changes their work. Real use cases, not predictions.

Read the previous editions →

If you’re doing something worth talking about, the opportunity is free and available for anyone. Simply reply to this email with your pitch.

TOOL UPGRADE

Amazon’s agent only makes ads for Amazon. If you want the same volume everywhere else, you build it. Three for generating video at production scale:

Synthesia best for on-brand explainer and product video in many languages without booking a studio. Try Synthesia here →

Fliki best for turning an approved script straight into a branded cut with voiceover, in an afternoon. Try Fliki here →

Zebracat best for spinning existing static assets into the volume of short-form variants that paid social eats. Try Zebracat here →

We have 300+ curated, filtered, and categorized AI tools in our directory. Browse to find the best ones that help your marketing team.

We negotiated discounts, bonuses, or extended trials on AI marketing tools.

For $10/month, you save $1,724/month on tools. Plus, you can access all our content archive & chat as a bonus.

We even have a 10% OFF on all paid plans bonus for free subscribers.

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LEARN THIS

If the brief is the variable, get better at briefs: The Prompt Playbook for Modern Marketers. Twenty-five pages built around P.A.C.T. — persona, ask, context, template — which is the structured version of what Amazon’s agent gets fed automatically and your team mostly doesn’t. Useful as a standard for new hires so prompting stops being a personal talent.

We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more about AI marketing for free for everyone. Browse our learning resources for free.

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That’s it for today!

See you next time,

— Peter & Torsten

LinkedIn added a reporting option that reads “Seems like AI slop”, on the three-dot menu of every post. Flagged content gets hidden from that reader, loses reach beyond your own network, and trains a classifier to find more of it. Repeat offenders are told so privately in their analytics.

It also deleted its own “enhance your post” AI writer, replacing it with a proofreader that leaves your voice alone. The tool that got you here is the tool they just removed.

A day later, Snapchat stopped recommending fully AI-generated video in Spotlight, even when the creator honestly discloses the AI. Disclosure does not buy back the reach. YouTube has already cut payouts for template-made AI video.

For two years, AI made publishing cheaper while distribution stayed neutral. Distribution just stopped being neutral, and the cost of generic went from zero to negative. That lands hardest on B2B teams whose whole playbook is a daily post with a little help.

Keep the tools. Stop shipping their first pass.

TALK ON THE MARKET

Hari Srinivasan, chief product officer at LinkedIn, announcing it:

He added that the platform blocks hundreds of thousands of automated slop comments a day, and has stopped “billions of other automation attempts” in recent months.

Billions, on a professional network. Whatever growth hack you were considering, a few hundred thousand people ran it this morning, and the platform is now built to catch it.

NUMBERS MATTER

81% versus 70%. Share of consumers naming quality as a top factor in holiday purchase decisions, against price, in Optimove Insights’ 2026 report. To persuade someone to try a brand they’ve never bought, quality moves 85% of them. Cheap and plentiful was always the weaker half of the offer.

DAILY PROMPT

Use this on your own back catalogue before you touch this week’s drafts. Forget whether a detector flags it. Ask whether anything in the post could only have come from you.

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CMO CORNER

Don’t be the loudest in the room. Be the clearest.

Volume worked while distribution was indifferent. The teams about to look smart are the ones already publishing less. Halve your posting cadence and spend the recovered hours getting one thing to say that nobody else can.

We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.

Learn more about Teamless →

We run an interview series with marketing leaders about how AI actually changes their work. Real use cases, not predictions.

Read the previous editions →

If you’re doing something worth talking about, the opportunity is free and available for anyone. Simply reply to this email with your pitch.

TOOL UPGRADE

If generic gets demoted, the advantage moves to formats that are hard to fake:

Taplio best for building LinkedIn posts out of your own material and performance data instead of a blank prompt. Try Taplio here →

Riverside best for recording real conversations with real customers, then cutting them into weeks of content. Try Riverside here →

Cap best for showing your actual screen and your actual product, which no model can generate on your behalf. Try Cap here →

We have 300+ curated, filtered, and categorized AI tools in our directory. Browse to find the best ones that help your marketing team.

We negotiated discounts, bonuses, or extended trials on AI marketing tools.

For $10/month, you save $1,724/month on tools. Plus, you can access all our content archive & chat as a bonus.

We even have a 10% OFF on all paid plans bonus for free subscribers.

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LEARN THIS

The defensible version of using AI is having something specific for it to sound like: the AI Brand Voice Guide Template. Six steps, including a tone spectrum precise enough to be useful (”70% casual” with an example sentence, rather than “we’re casual”). Give it to a model, an agency and a new hire, and all three stop producing the average of the internet.

We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more about AI marketing for free for everyone. Browse our learning resources for free.

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BRAND SLOP

Delta gave its AI the ability to cancel tickets. You can guess the rest, but the details beat the guess.

A Platinum Medallion member asked Delta Concierge to cancel one leg of a JFK–LAX award trip. Concierge told her, in writing, “Your JFK to LAX flight has been canceled, and your LAX to JFK flight remains booked.” It had cancelled both, redeposited all 32,400 miles, and issued a receipt reading “Refund Number: null.” She posted the screenshots on 3 August. Delta says a bug caused it, the itinerary was restored, and the functionality is fixed.

Fine. Bugs happen. The interesting part is that the assistant confidently told her the opposite of what it had just done, in a sentence a human would have to actively lie to produce. The app still labels Concierge “BETA,” which is a fascinating word to keep on a feature that moves people’s money.

Check what your own assistant is allowed to confirm, as opposed to what it’s allowed to do. Two different permission sets, and most teams only wrote one of them down.

That’s it for today!

See you next time,

— Peter & Torsten

Nobody sent a calendar invite. On 2 August, Article 50 of the EU AI Act became applicable, and a chunk of what your team ships is now inside it.

Read who it lands on, because that’s the part people get wrong. Providers, meaning the model vendors, have to build systems that tell people they’re talking to an AI and mark generated output so it can be detected. Deployers have to inform people they’re exposed to deepfakes, to emotion recognition and biometric categorization, and to text publications on matters of public interest “without human review or editorial control.”

You are the deployer. Your agency is a deployer. Your vendor’s compliance page does not cover you.

The exemption in that last clause is the whole ballgame, and it’s good news if your workflow is honest. Text with genuine human review and editorial control sits outside the labeling duty. The blog nobody edits does not.

Enforcement runs through national market surveillance authorities and the AI Office, not through a single regulator you can call. The Commission has published a voluntary Code of Practice on transparency with sections for providers and deployers, plus an official icon set for labeling. About 190 organizations had signed by the end of July.

Signing is voluntary. Demonstrating equivalent measures, if you don’t sign, is mandatory. One of those is a form, and the other is a project.

TALK ON THE MARKET

Julia Donnelly, CFO of Pinterest, explaining a soft quarter to analysts:

Different regulation, same lesson. A CFO stood on an earnings call and named European rules as the reason the number moved. Compliance stopped being a legal cost line somewhere around the point it started showing up in guidance.

NUMBERS MATTER

8% and 6%. Lower cost per impression and lower cost per acquisition for advertisers using Amazon’s Ads Agent targeting, by Amazon’s own account, now live in 11 more countries this year. Single digits. That’s what agentic media buying pays today, from the company with the most to gain from a bigger number.

DAILY PROMPT

Use this in the next week, not the next quarter, and take the output to legal rather than asking legal to start from nothing. Most teams will find the policy is easy and the evidence trail is the hard part.

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CMO CORNER

Build systems that make the right outcome easy and the wrong one hard.

Compliance written as a policy document gets read once. Compliance written into the workflow, where publishing without a recorded reviewer is simply not a button anyone can press, holds up when the person who wrote the policy is on holiday. Change the default, not the guidance.

We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.

Learn more about Teamless →

We run an interview series with marketing leaders about how AI actually changes their work. Real use cases, not predictions.

Read the previous editions →

If you’re doing something worth talking about, the opportunity is free and available for anyone. Simply reply to this email with your pitch.

TOOL UPGRADE

Disclosure obligations need a paper trail, and a paper trail needs tooling. Three for the evidence side:

Originality.ai best for checking what your agency actually handed you before you put your name on it. Try Originality here →

Brand24 best for catching the moment someone outside the building notices something you published, while it’s still one post. Try Brand24 here →

Databox best for pulling the review and publishing record into one place a regulator or a board could actually read. Try Databox here →

We have 300+ curated, filtered, and categorized AI tools in our directory. Browse to find the best ones that help your marketing team.

We negotiated discounts, bonuses, or extended trials on AI marketing tools.

For $10/month, you save $1,724/month on tools. Plus, you can access all our content archive & chat as a bonus.

We even have a 10% OFF on all paid plans bonus for free subscribers.

Join AI-Ready CMO Pro today →

Get 10% off forever

LEARN THIS

If your governance currently lives in one person’s head: the Scaling & Governance Starter Kit. It’s built around just enough structure to keep velocity while protecting brand and data, including an AI maturity ladder that tells you honestly which stage you’re at, based on the signals in your own team. For the leader who now has to prove a process exists rather than describe one.

We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more about AI marketing for free for everyone. Browse our learning resources for free.

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That’s it for today!

See you next time,

— Peter & Torsten

Your Amazon plan is a spreadsheet of keywords and bids. Somebody should probably tell it what happened last week.

On the Q2 call, Amazon said that shoppers who click a Sponsored Prompt convert to a sale 48% more often and spend 21% more than shoppers who don’t. A Sponsored Prompt is a suggested question, placed inside a conversation, that a brand paid to have asked.

The surface underneath it got big quietly. Over 350 million people used Alexa for Shopping in the last twelve months, active users nearly doubled in the quarter, and interactions rose more than fivefold year over year.

Amazon Ads did $19.8 billion in the quarter, up 26%.

One caveat worth saying out loud, because Amazon won’t. Every one of those engagement numbers is a cohort of people who chose to use an assistant, compared against people who didn’t. Some of that higher spend is the kind of shopper, not the tool.

The part you can act on is smaller and duller. Something is now reading your product copy aloud to a buyer and deciding which question to put in their mouth. Go read your own detail page the way a machine would, with no photography and no layout, and see whether it still argues for you.

TALK ON THE MARKET

Andy Jassy, on the same call, on where AWS is heading:

He said it about cloud, and the market added roughly $360 billion to Amazon on the day. Read it as a media buyer instead. Your fastest-growing retail media partner just got told it can spend whatever it wants for the next several years.

NUMBERS MATTER

53%. Share of US consumers who plan to shop this holiday season exclusively at stores they used last year, in Optimove Insights’ Holiday Shopping Report 2026, published 5 August, based on a survey of 648 consumers fielded in spring. Half the market has already decided where it’s going. The other 47% is the entire prize.

DAILY PROMPT

Use this before your next Amazon content refresh, and run it on your two closest competitors’ pages in the same sitting. Most detail pages were written to be looked at. The thing ranking them now can only read.

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CMO CORNER

If you’re always reacting, you’re not leading. You’re lagging.

Amazon has been building this surface for two years in public. Nothing about last week was a surprise to anyone who was watching, and almost everyone found out from an earnings call. Pick the two platforms that own your demand and put an hour a month against their product releases. That hour is the difference between planning for a change and being told about one.

We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.

Learn more about Teamless →

We run an interview series with marketing leaders about how AI actually changes their work. Real use cases, not predictions.

Read the previous editions →

If you’re doing something worth talking about, the opportunity is free and available for anyone. Simply reply to this email with your pitch.

TOOL UPGRADE

If a machine is going to assemble the ad, get better at feeding it. Three tools for teams running paid at volume:

Holo — best for generating on-brand ads straight off your own website, so the machine starts from your product rather than a blank prompt. Try Holo here →

Birch — best for rules that scale and pause campaigns across platforms without someone watching a dashboard at 11 pm. Try Birch here →

Adwisely — best for smaller teams who want the optimization handled and would rather approve than operate. Try Adwisely here →

We have 300+ curated, filtered, and categorized AI tools in our directory. Browse to find the best ones that help your marketing team.

We negotiated discounts, bonuses, or extended trials on AI marketing tools.

For $10/month, you save $1,724/month on tools. Plus, you can access all our content archive & chat as a bonus.

We even have a 10% OFF all paid plans bonus for free subscribers.

Join AI-Ready CMO Pro today →

Get 10% off forever

LEARN THIS

If a suggested question is now a buying signal, it’s worth having a system for the rest of them: the Revenue Signal Playbook.

It works off one pattern: signal triggers AI action, which produces output, with a categorized table of the signals most teams notice too late or act on inconsistently. For the marketer who has the intent data and no repeatable thing that happens when it arrives.

We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more about AI marketing for free for everyone. Browse our learning resources for free.

More AI marketing resources →

That’s it for today!

See you next time,

— Peter & Torsten

The media buy you spent your twenties learning to do just happened without a person in the room.

On July 22, Broadsign and the agency Draft Digital ran what they’re calling the first fully agentic out-of-home campaign: a buy-side agent and a sell-side agent negotiating and closing the deal end to end. Two machines, one billboard, no human at the handoff.

Easy to file this under “cool demo, not my channel.” That’s the wrong read. The interesting part isn’t out-of-home.

It’s that the whole choreography of media buying, the back-and-forth that justified a lot of headcount, is now something two agents can run between themselves.

Which relocates the job. When the execution is autonomous, your leverage isn’t in placing the buy. It’s in the objectives, the constraints, and the guardrails the agents operate inside. You stop being the negotiator and start being the person who wrote the rules the negotiators can’t break.

That’s a better job, mostly. It’s also a quieter one, and quiet is uncomfortable for a profession that has always measured itself by how busy it looks.

— Peter & Torsten

Numbers matter

48% — How much faster retailers running shopper agents grew sales, by Salesforce’s data, with AI-referred traffic converting at 8x the rate of social.

The agents aren’t only buying the media now. They’re outperforming on the sell side too.

Daily prompt

Use this before the first autonomous anything touches your budget. The brief you’d write for a new hire is the brief the agent needs too, except the agent follows it exactly, which is both the upside and the trap. Write the guardrails once and every future pilot starts from a safer place.

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CMO corner

You don’t need to touch every project. Shape the system that guides them.

This is the whole week in one line. Discovery, production, the media buy, all drifting toward autonomous. Your job keeps moving up a level, from doing the thing to defining what “good” means for it. Say it precisely enough and the system holds. Leave it vague and you’ll be back in the standup.

We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.

Learn more about Teamless →

We run an interview series with marketing leaders about how AI actually changes their work. Real use cases, not predictions.

Read the previous editions →

If you’re doing something worth talking about, the opportunity is free and available for anyone. Simply reply to this email with your pitch.

Tool upgrade

If agents are going to run parts of your funnel, start where the guardrails are easy to set. Three tools for putting agents to work:

Chatbase — best for building an agent on your own data and setting exactly what it can and can’t say. Try Chatbase here →

Reply — best for an AI SDR running multichannel outreach end to end, on rules you set. Try Reply here →

Lemlist — best for outreach sequences that personalize at scale while a human still owns the list. Try Lemlist here →

We negotiated discounts, bonuses, or extended trials on AI marketing tools.

For $10/month, you save $1,724/month on tools. Plus, you can access all our content archive & chat as a bonus.

We even have a 10% OFF on all paid plans bonus for free subscribers.

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Get 10% off forever

Learn this

The version of leadership this whole week keeps pointing at:

Guide: The Autonomous Leadership Manifesto →

Fifty theses on leading when the doing is done for you, written for the exact moment your job stops being execution and starts being the rules execution runs on. Read it the way you’d read a mirror.

We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more about AI marketing for free for everyone. Browse our learning resources on our site for free.

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Brand slop

Equinox found out how the automation goes. This week the luxury gym pulled an AI-generated out-of-home ad and apologized after dozens of Asian creators called it out for dehumanizing and sexualizing East Asian women. The campaign was named, with no irony available for purchase, “Question Everything but Yourself.”

Nobody in that thread was asking whether a human made it. They could tell.

The ad went up. It reached a billboard. It got photographed, condemned, and pulled, in that order, and the brand was last to the conversation about its own ad.

That’s it for today!

See you next time,

— Peter & Torsten

There’s a setting in your ad account you’ve never opened. It’s on.

Ad Age reported this week that Meta and Google’s platforms can generate and adjust creative on their own, from adding music to “visual touch-ups,” under automation settings most brands never toggled off. The ad that runs under your name is no longer guaranteed to be the ad you approved.

Sit with that. Your brand safety review, your legal sign-off, your one pedantic person who catches the thing everyone else missed. All of it assumes a human put the ad up. Increasingly, one didn’t.

The failure mode isn’t a checkbox you forgot. It’s a checkbox that re-checks itself after a platform update, quietly, on a Tuesday. You find out when someone outside the building takes a screenshot.

Go into Meta and Google today and read what’s switched on. Not what you set. What’s on now. Some of these settings turn themselves back on after you turn them off, which is its own kind of tell about who the tool is really working for.

— Peter & Torsten

Talk on the market

Mark Zagorski, CEO of DoubleVerify, on the week’s study:

He runs a verification company, so of course he’s selling trust. Doesn’t make him wrong. The brands getting burned this year aren’t the ones using AI. They’re the ones who stopped looking at what it made.

Numbers matter

48% — The share of marketers who say they’re concerned about using AI to build ad creative, rising to 63% in North America, in DoubleVerify’s new study.

Nearly half the industry is nervous about the exact feature their ad platforms just switched on by default.

Daily prompt

Use this as a standing monthly check, not a one-time audit, because the settings drift back. Thirty minutes here is the difference between catching a rogue auto-generated ad in your account and reading about it in someone’s screenshot. Put a recurring calendar hold on it today.

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CMO corner

Step out of the spotlight so the system can shine.

Fine advice, right up until the system ships a billboard nobody vetted. Delegating to agents isn’t the same as abdicating the standard. You still own the guardrails. You just stopped owning the keystrokes.

We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.

Learn more about Teamless →

We run an interview series with marketing leaders about how AI actually changes their work. Real use cases, not predictions.

Read the previous editions →

If you’re doing something worth talking about, the opportunity is free and available for anyone. Simply reply to this email with your pitch.

Tool upgrade

If you want AI in your creative, make the ad yourself so the platform doesn’t make one for you. Three tools for creative you actually approve:

HeyGen — best for on-brand AI video and avatars where you sign off on every frame before it runs. Try HeyGen here →

Descript — best for editing video and audio like a text doc, so revisions take minutes and stay in your hands. Try Descript here →

Pictory — best for turning long-form content into short social cuts without handing creative control to an ad engine. Try Pictory here →

We negotiated discounts, bonuses, or extended trials on AI marketing tools.

For $10/month, you save $1,724/month on tools. Plus, you can access all our content archive & chat as a bonus.

We even have a 10% OFF on all paid plans bonus for free subscribers.

Join AI-Ready CMO Pro today →

Get 10% off forever

Learn this

Build a content system that assumes review instead of hoping for it:

Guide: The AI content library →

It’s for teams scaling AI creative who want speed without the Equinox moment, with a structure that keeps a human in the loop where it counts. The point isn’t less AI. It’s AI that can’t ship unseen.

We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more about AI marketing for free for everyone. Browse our learning resources on our site for free.

More AI marketing resources →

That’s it for today!

See you next time,

— Peter & Torsten

Two sentences left monday.com this week. One went to the SEC. One went to the staff. They do not describe the same event.

On July 22, the company filed a restructuring plan cutting about 600 roles, 20% of its people, and told regulators it supports a leaner operating model as it “continues to invest in its AI-driven growth strategy.” That’s the version for the market. AI as the engine, cuts as the fuel.

Then co-founder Eran Zinman wrote to the people losing their jobs and told them the opposite:

The stock is down roughly 74% year over year, which is the context nobody put in a memo. When a number like that is on your desk, “restructuring for the AI era” is a much better press release than “the multiple compressed and we over-hired.” Both can be true. Only one gets said out loud.

You will see this framing again. Probably from a company you respect. The tell isn’t whether AI is mentioned. It’s whether the timeline of the stock chart lines up better than the timeline of the technology.

— Peter & Torsten

Numbers matter

90% vs 18% — Share of organizations that say AI is transforming their workflows, against the share seeing significant revenue impact from it, per HCLTech.

A 72-point gap between “everything changed” and “it showed up in the P&L,” which is the gap every AI reorg is quietly betting it can close.

Daily prompt

Use this the week before you announce anything, not after. The gap between monday.com’s SEC filing and its staff memo is what happens when nobody pressure-tests the story first. Run this, and you’ll either fix the framing or discover you don’t believe it, both of which are better found in private.

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CMO corner

Leadership is designing value flows, not proving your value.

The reorg question underneath the reorg: what is a leader actually for once the doing is automated? If your answer is “oversight,” you’re describing friction. Design the flow, set the standard, then get out of its way.

We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.

Learn more about Teamless →

We run an interview series with marketing leaders about how AI actually changes their work. Real use cases, not predictions.

Read the previous editions →

If you’re doing something worth talking about, the opportunity is free and available for anyone. Simply reply to this email with your pitch.

Tool upgrade

If your team really is going leaner, protect the hours you free up instead of letting meetings eat them. Three tools for doing more with fewer people:

Fathom — best for killing the “who’s taking notes” tax on every meeting, with summaries and action items handled. Try Fathom here →

Wispr Flow — best for drafting at talking speed instead of typing speed, across every app you already use. Try Wispr Flow here →

Gamma — best for a board-ready deck in minutes, so the leaner team spends its hours deciding, not formatting. Try Gamma here →

We negotiated discounts, bonuses, or extended trials on AI marketing tools.

For $10/month, you save $1,724/month on tools. Plus, you can access all our content archive & chat as a bonus.

We even have a 10% OFF on all paid plans bonus for free subscribers.

Join AI-Ready CMO Pro today →

Get 10% off forever

Learn this

The part every reorg skips is the people who stay:

Workshop: Winning your team for AI →

It’s for the leader who has to rebuild trust and momentum after a hard change, when half the room is updating their LinkedIn. Practical moves for keeping your best people bought in, not just retained.

We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more about AI marketing for free for everyone. Browse our learning resources on our site for free.

More AI marketing resources →

That’s it for today!

See you next time,

— Peter & Torsten

Count the people who touch one email before it goes out. Four? Five? Now count the revision rounds. This is the part of your job no deck has ever had a slide for.

Knak surveyed enterprise marketing teams, including ones running marketing for Google, Amazon, Uber and Meta, and found that 85% missed at least one launch date in the past year. Not from bad strategy or weak creative. From everything that happens after the idea is approved: the handoffs, the sign-offs, the rebuilds.

Here’s the part that should sting. Seventy percent of them have AI in production. Eighty-eight percent say the output still needs moderate to substantial human editing before it can ship. AI got everyone to a faster first draft and then dropped them at the exact same door: approvals.

The single biggest cause of missed launches wasn’t design or copy. It was getting sign-off, at 47%.

So the tool sped up the one part that was already fast. The slow part, the human queue in the middle, is untouched. You can feel productive all day and still ship on Thursday what was ready Monday.

— Peter & Torsten

Numbers matter

$262 billion. — What AI agents influenced in spending during the 2025 holiday season, by Salesforce’s own data. Agents aren’t a demo you’ll evaluate next year.

They already moved a quarter-trillion dollars while your team was arguing about a subject line.

Daily prompt

Use this before you ask for headcount or a new tool. Nine times out of ten, the missed launch isn’t a people problem or a software problem. It’s two redundant approvals nobody remembers adding. Run this, and walk into the budget meeting with the map instead of the complaint.

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CMO corner

You can’t scale what you haven’t defined.

Everyone wants AI to give them throughput. Throughput comes from a defined system, and most “processes” are just habits three people happen to share. Define the sign-off path on paper first. Then automate it. Automating a mess only gets you a faster mess.

We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.

Learn more about Teamless →

We run an interview series with marketing leaders about how AI actually changes their work. Real use cases, not predictions.

Read the previous editions →

If you’re doing something worth talking about, the opportunity is free and available for anyone. Simply reply to this email with your pitch.

Tool upgrade

If the bottleneck is coordination, not writing, point automation at the queue. Three tools for that, depending on how technical you want to get:

n8n — best if you’ve got a technical person and want the whole workflow self-hosted on your own box. Try n8n here →

Lindy — best for an agent that actually chases the approval and updates the record, instead of drafting more copy nobody was waiting on. Try Lindy here →

Reclaim — best for defending the focus time that the approval queue quietly eats every week. Try Reclaim here →

We negotiated discounts, bonuses, or extended trials on AI marketing tools.

For $10/month, you save $1,724/month on tools. Plus, you can access all our content archive & chat as a bonus.

We even have a 10% OFF on all paid plans bonus for free subscribers.

Join AI-Ready CMO Pro today →

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Learn this

The honest version of “does any of this pay off.”

Guide: Finding ROI in AI workflows →

It’s the guide for the CMO who has to defend an AI line item to a finance team. Short, downloadable, and built around numbers a board will accept.

We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more about AI marketing for free for everyone. Browse our learning resources on our site for free.

More AI marketing resources →

That’s it for today!

See you next time,

— Peter & Torsten

Somewhere in your building, a team is still fighting for position on page one of Google. Be kind to them.

Salesforce just put a number on the thing they’re optimizing away from. In its new State of Commerce Report, the use of agentic search as the first step in a purchase journey grew 200% year over year. Traffic referred from AI chats grew somewhere between 150% and 428% in every quarter they measured, pulled from the behavior of 1.5 billion shoppers. Over the same stretch, discovery through your own brand-owned pages fell 7%, and traditional search fell 15%.

So the shopper arrives pre-briefed. Something told them what to consider, what to skip, and roughly what to pay, before your site ever loaded.

Twenty-eight percent of commerce orgs actually use agentic AI today. The other seventy-two are polishing a funnel whose front door quietly moved down the street.

You don’t have to panic-buy an agent this week. You do have to know what ChatGPT and Gemini say when someone asks for a product like yours, and whether your name shows up in the answer at all.

— Peter & Torsten

Talk on the market

Caila Schwartz, who runs shopper insights for Salesforce’s commerce arm, said the quiet part:

She sells the tool that claims to fix this, so calibrate the urgency accordingly. The behavior underneath it isn’t hers to spin. The opinion sets before you get a word in.

Numbers matter

56% / 42% — Share of consumers who admit they can’t reliably tell AI content from human, versus the share who say a brand’s low-quality or “uncanny” AI ad would hurt their opinion of it, in DoubleVerify’s new global study.

They can’t spot it, but they can feel it, and they hold it against you.

Daily prompt

Use this when you’re building next quarter’s content plan. Run it in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, paste the output into the plan, and you’ll be the only person in the room who can say what the assistants actually tell buyers about you. That’s a five-minute audit that reframes an entire roadmap.

Have a tool or service that you want to get in front of our audience? Reach 20,000+ marketers who read AI-Ready CMO every day.

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CMO corner

A vague strategy creates busy leaders. Precise systems make you optional.

Read the second sentence again, because most people flinch at “optional.” That’s the goal, not the insult. If keeping up with the AI-discovery shift needs your personal attention every Monday to stay on the rails, you didn’t build a response. You built a recurring meeting.

We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.

Learn more about Teamless →

We run an interview series with marketing leaders about how AI actually changes their work. Real use cases, not predictions.

Read the previous editions →

If you’re doing something worth talking about, the opportunity is free and available for anyone. Simply reply to this email with your pitch.

Tool upgrade

If the game is getting your brand into AI answers, here are three tools built for exactly that, in order of where they fit:

Frase — best for auditing which questions the AI engines answer in your category, then building content that matches the intent. Try Frase here →

Scalenut — best for turning that audit into full, briefed content fast, without a week of outlining. Try Scalenut here →

RankPrompt — best for tracking whether your brand actually starts showing up in AI answers over time, so you’re measuring, not guessing. Try RankPrompt here →

We negotiated discounts, bonuses, or extended trials on AI marketing tools.

For $10/month, you save $1,724/month on tools. Plus, you can access all our content archive & chat as a bonus.

We even have a 10% OFF on all paid plans bonus for free subscribers.

Join AI-Ready CMO Pro today →

Get 10% off forever

Learn this

Before you argue for any of this, you’ll want the research framing.

How to Do Market Research with AI. Free. →

It walks through using AI to map what your buyers actually ask and where your brand is missing from the conversation, which is the exact gap the AI-discovery shift is opening. Built for marketers who need signal this week, not a research degree.

We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more about AI marketing for free for everyone. Browse our learning resources on our site for free.

More AI marketing resources →

That’s it for today!

See you next time,

— Peter & Torsten

Let’s count the dead bodies.

The first podcast I (Peter) started was called 99 Problems. The concept: 99 business problems, one guest per episode explaining how they solved theirs. I stopped at around 20. Then came Leadership Anywhere, about remote work and async leadership, which ran for over a year and more than 60 episodes before it wound down. Then the AI Ready CMO podcast, which we stopped after roughly 10 episodes and converted into async written interviews instead. On top of that, as a CMO, I’ve helped multiple companies build branded podcasts. Almost none of them launched. The ones that did went bumpy fast.

Different shows, different audiences, different budgets. Same cause of death every time: doing a podcast properly takes far more work than anyone plans for.

There are only two ways to run a show

Everyone obsesses over mics, formats, and episode ideas. None of it matters. What matters is which of two ways you run the show.

The first is the uncontrolled version. Record the conversation, edit almost nothing, publish, maybe even go live. It can feel very human, and it works for creatives, solo operators, and small companies with nothing to lose. Now try selling that to a mid-sized tech business. Legal, brand, and the CEO’s chief of staff will all have opinions. Most companies can’t or won’t publish uncontrolled audio, and honestly, they shouldn’t.

The second is the controlled version, which means editorial work. Everyone underestimates this. At a bare minimum, every recorded minute costs 10 minutes of work to make it publishable. On a rough episode, more. Do the math on a 40-minute episode, weekly, and you’ve hired half a producer without noticing. Add video, promo material, and clips? I won’t even start.

None of it matters. Because: your calendar.

Here’s what actually killed my shows, and it applies whether you’re controlled, uncontrolled, on a big team, or on no team. You are fighting your own time. Coming up with ideas. Researching guests. Being available to record, prepared, on a recurring schedule. I canceled recordings because of sickness, client meetings, a cut internet line, or, hate to admit, because I simply wasn’t in the mood.

And I was mostly doing it alone. You think your CEO will be different? Your best people are your best guests, and their calendars are exactly why they’ll never show up consistently. They’re busy producing work, not talking about it. Recording loses to client work every time. It should. So the show becomes a scheduling negotiation, and it dies not from one failure but from a hundred small calendar defeats.

The cadence a show needs to build an audience is precisely the cadence a senior team cannot sustain in a studio. That’s the whole problem in one sentence.

What AI-native production changes

Aloudable’s model removes the recording session from the equation. Your expert approves a voice model once, from a sample. From there, material they already produced — reports, articles, research — gets structured into episodes in their own voice. A human editor shapes every episode. Nothing publishes until your team signs off.

Frazer-Nash Consultancy published a twelve-episode season with under thirty minutes of recorded audio per contributor. Across Aloudable’s client shows: 150+ episodes shipped, zero recording sessions, live on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

In short: it’s the controlled version of podcasting with the two killers removed — the editing math and the calendar fight.

What stays yours

Everything that makes it personal is still you. The ideas are yours, pulled from work you actually produced — not generated opinions wearing your voice. The voice is yours, from a model you approved. The final word is yours; nothing publishes without your sign-off. A human editor shapes each episode, but the thinking and the taste in it are your expert’s, not a machine’s.

What’s gone is the part nobody misses: the studio pressure, the retakes, the scheduling. You without the recording stress is still you. Arguably a more consistent you, because this version actually shows up every week.

Most AI content gets this backward. It fakes the thinking and dresses it in a human wrapper. This keeps the thinking real and synthesizes only the delivery. The judgment stays yours.

Is that enough to preserve trust?

Mostly, with one condition: your audience should know. Disclosure belongs in the format, not buried in show notes. Listeners are more comfortable with AI-assisted production than most CMOs assume, provided nobody pretends otherwise. The brands that get burned will be the ones that hide it.

Also, it won’t work with all podcast formats, for now. Interviews are sketchy to do like this. A genuine human conversation is unpredictable; it has to stay human. But an episode where an expert talks through a problem? Informative, planned, straightforward, even if a human would do it live.

Does the world need another podcast?

Not the smartest question for a sponsored article, but we wouldn’t be honest without it. Easy to joke that even your grandma has a podcast by now. The truth is the opposite. Podcasting remains a resource-intensive marketing activity, and the long tail is still thin. I wish more SMBs marketed their work through podcasting. For them, products like Aloudable are a real help, making production easier, faster, and more predictable. If that’s you, book a demo at aloudable.com/get-a-demo and judge the output yourself.

Aloudable combines generative AI with structured human editorial oversight to manage scripting, production, and quality control, transforming written intellectual capital into professionally produced conversational audio. It works with knowledge-driven organizations across professional services, finance, technology, and research to distribute insights via digital audio. More information is available at aloudable.com. Companies can request a demonstration at aloudable.com/get-a-demo, and Aloudable is also on LinkedIn.

Request a sample episode →

That visitor was an AI agent working on behalf of a customer, and there are more of them every week. Cloudflare says over half of web traffic is now non-human. One study found that in three-quarters of Google AI Mode sessions, no human ever clicks through to a website at all. The person still exists. They still have budget and intent. They just sent a machine ahead to do the reading.

This is a strange moment to be a marketer, because everything we build is designed for eyes. Hero images, headline tests, page speed, brand color, the carefully sequenced nurture email. All of it assumes a human is looking. Meanwhile, the fastest-growing segment of your audience has no eyes, no patience for your interface, and no ability to be charmed. It either finds clear, structured, retrievable information, or it moves on and quotes your competitor instead.

Nobody is going to announce this transition. It shows up as slowly declining traffic that still somehow produces sales, as an agent fumbling through your checkout, as your content getting cited without a single click. The question used to be what your customer sees when they land on your site. The new question is what their machine gets. Most brands haven’t answered it, because most brands haven’t noticed they’re being read.

— Peter & Torsten

OpenAI Finally Ships the Super App

After months of teasing, OpenAI’s “super app” is here, and it looks a lot like Claude Cowork. ChatGPT Work merges the chatbot with Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent, into a single application that can dig through your connected apps, break a complex project into steps, and grind on it for hours: finished decks, docs, sheets, even hosted websites. It runs on GPT-5.6, which launched the same day, and it’s rolling out to Pro, Enterprise, and Edu users first, with Plus and Business following.

The magic, just as with Cowork, is that it can work through absolute mess. Not the clean, tagged version of your marketing folder that exists in your head, but the real one with half-finished briefs, three versions of the same deck, and a dozen of call transcripts nobody read.

ChatGPT Work is built to pull finished work out of that pile, and OpenAI claims its own finance team cut month-end close from days to hours doing exactly this.

On the flip side, the app is genuinely confusing at first (Chat, Work, Codex, Sites, and Scheduled Tasks now all live in one desktop app, and the Atlas browser is being sunset on top of it), and usage is metered like Codex, so complex tasks eat your plan faster than a chat ever did. Still, this is now the second major lab betting that the chat window is where work actually gets finished.

Kimi K3 Crashes the Frontier Party

Every few months, an open model drops and someone on LinkedIn declares the gap with the closed labs officially closed (this has been going on for at least a year now, and it is legitimately funny).

But this time the benchmarks mostly back them up.

Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 last week and it’s an amazing model on par with the very best from Anthropic and OpenAI. The number that matters for our corner of the world comes from AA-Briefcase, Artificial Analysis’s benchmark for long-horizon knowledge work: multi-week projects built from messy spreadsheets, emails, and transcripts, graded on deliverables like market analyses, segmentations, and presentations. Kimi K3 scored 1543, second only to the eye-wateringly expensive Claude Fable 5 (1574) and ahead of GPT-5.6 Sol, Claude Sonnet 5, and everything else you can currently buy. The previous Kimi generation scored 816 on the same scale. Yes, it’s an Elo-style score, but a +727 jump is absurd on any scale.

One carve-out before you rip out your Anthropic subscription: “open” doesn’t mean cheap or fast here. K3 averages $10.57 per Briefcase task and nearly an hour of runtime, which makes it pricier to run than Claude Opus 4.8 and roughly 2.5x slower than Fable 5. So no, you probably won’t switch. But when frontier-level knowledge work exists as downloadable weights, the closed labs lose pricing power, and you gain negotiating room. Your procurement team just needs to be able to credibly threaten to leave.

Google Zero Stops Being a Metaphor

Nilay Patel has been warning publishers about “Google Zero,” the day Google traffic drops to nothing, for years, mostly to eye-rolls. A fresh New York Times report suggests the eye-rolling era is over.

One study of Google’s AI Mode found that in about 75% of sessions, users never clicked out to another website. They asked, they read Gemini’s answer, they left.

Google disputes the study’s methodology (small sample, artificial tasks), and that’s a fair objection to keep in mind. But the surrounding data all points the same direction: Cloudflare reports human traffic to finance, publishing, and retail sites fell by nearly 40% in under a year, and more than half of all web traffic is now non-human.

The deal that built the open web (and the deal we marketers depend on) was simple: you make content and search engines send you visitors. It is coming apart in real time. Bots read your content, but they don’t click your ads, join your list, or buy your products.

None of this kills SEO. It just stops being enough on its own. The playbook now has three legs: visibility inside AI answers (your content needs to be the thing Gemini and ChatGPT cite), owned audiences (newsletters, communities, apps — anything that doesn’t route through a search box), and honest measurement of which “traffic” is even human anymore.

Cowork Learns by Watching You Work

Anthropic added a feature to Claude Cowork called “Record a skill,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like: you record your screen while doing a task, narrate what you’re doing out loud, and Cowork turns the demonstration into a reusable automation skill. Next time the task comes up, the skill runs instead of you. It’s live for Pro, Max, and Team users in the desktop app, and OpenAI has a near-identical feature in Codex, so this is clearly where the category is heading.

We’ve been telling marketers to write skills for months, and the pushback was always the same: it felt like a developer thing. Writing a skill file, even a simple one, was one abstraction too many for someone with a campaign to ship.

That excuse is gone.

If you can do the task and talk about it at the same time — and you already do this every time you onboard a junior — you can now automate it.

Start with the task you’d least like to explain to a new hire for the fourth time. The weekly reporting deck, the lead-list cleanup, or the way you reformat the agency’s deliverables before anyone else is allowed to see them. Record it once, narrate it like you’re training an intern, and see what comes out.

Worst case, you’ve documented your process. Best case, you never do it again.

Shopify Just Made Every Store Readable by AI Agents

Here’s a problem you may not have thought about: when an AI agent shops on someone’s behalf, it usually has to operate your website the way a confused tourist would. It “looks” at the page, guesses which button adds to cart, clicks, hopes. It is slow, error-prone, and expensive.

This week, with zero announcement, Shopify fixed that for millions of stores at once: every storefront it hosts now hands visiting agents a simple menu of things it can do. Search the catalog. Pull product details. Check the return policy. Add to cart. Start checkout. The agent picks from the menu instead of fumbling with the user interface. It’s already live on Reebok, Alo Yoga, Fenty Beauty, Steve Madden, and basically every standard Shopify store — including, probably, yours.

The technology behind this is called WebMCP, and it’s on track to become an official web standard, with Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Edge teams both pushing it. To be clear about what it doesn’t do: no agent can spend money on its own. The final purchase still requires the actual human to confirm. But think about what robots.txt did for search engines — a simple convention that told Google what it could look at, and within a few years everyone had one. This is shaping up to be that, except for agents that act instead of just read. When Shopify makes something the default across millions of stores, the rest of e-commerce tends to copy it within a quarter.

So what do you actually do? If you’re on a standard Shopify store, nothing — you already have it, and it might be worth asking your agency or dev team to show you what your store now offers agents.

If your storefront is custom-built and hosted by your own team, the switch wasn’t flipped for you; adding this is a real (small) project someone needs to own.

And if you’re not in e-commerce at all, file the question away, because it’s coming for your site too: when a customer’s agent shows up, does it get a menu, or does it get the confused-tourist treatment?

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Quick context first. Over the last year, AI has absorb…

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