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The $20 Agent Just Had Your Org Chart For Breakfast

The $20 Agent Just Had Your Org Chart For Breakfast

The Productivity Flywheel Is Spinning Faster

Peter Benei & Torsten Sandor
July 22, 2025

Every July, we used to debate whether to raise the paid-media cap or hire another analyst. This July, the debate is simpler: “What happens when a $20 subscription can do both jobs, before lunch?”

Three seemingly unrelated releases this week—OpenAI’s agentic ChatGPT, Moonshot’s eerily human Kimi-K2, and OpenAI’s embryonic checkout layer—aren’t just feature drops. Together, they form a new flywheel:

Insight → Asset → Transaction collapses into a single prompt.
Creative → Distribution → Revenue runs end-to-end without human hand-offs.
And the scarce resource flips from headcount to context quality, the prompts, metadata, and brand rules you feed the machine.

If your 2025 planning deck still allocates weeks for “research,” “localization,” or “reporting,” shred it. The calendar just lost a few rows.

— Peter & Torsten

Peter Benei | Co-author

Consultant at Anywhere Consulting

Torsten Sandor | Co-author

Senior Director of Marketing at Appen

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ChatGPT Agent

From Chat to Execution

OpenAI just rolled out a full agent mode for Pro, Plus, and Team users. Think of it like a junior analyst who never sleeps: it can gather competitive intel, scrape pricing data, build a 12-slide deck, and drop it into your Drive. Then ask if it should send your CRO a summary.

In early tests, it outperformed human analysts on data-science tasks and surpassed Copilot in Excel by 2 times.

Why it matters for you

Your GTM calendar isn’t competing with “fast” anymore. It’s competing with instant. The advantage is no longer “we have data” but “we know how to context-load the data so the agent doesn’t hallucinate.”

What to do next?

» Mandate Workflow Automation: Pick one core reporting task in your team (e.g., weekly campaign summaries) and assign your team lead to fully automate it with the ChatGPT Agent this quarter. The goal: free human hours, not just generate faster reports.

» Rewrite Junior Role Descriptions: Your next junior hire isn’t an analyst—they’re an “AI Operator” or “Workflow Designer.” Required skills: critical thinking, quality control, and orchestration of AI agents, not Excel and PowerPoint.

» Get Your Context Ready: Draft a one-page ‘context pack’ (brand voice, approved data sources, KPI definitions) and attach it to every prompt. It makes all the difference.

Hands-on

We’ve tested ChatGPT Agent on a typical junior marketer task:

Imagine I am the Chief Marketing Officer of a babywearing brand. I want to find key opinion leaders in the babywearing and the wider baby care space. Put together a list (10-20, as many as you find) of newsletters (Beehiiv, Substack, etc), podcasts, YouTubers I could reach out to. Put them into an Excel with title, URL, and also find an email contact to the author (or the URL to a contact form if email is not available).

It started working in the embedded browser, transparently showing the process:

It returned a ready-to-use Excel spreadsheet with names, URLs, and contact emails. Check the chat and results for yourself. Oh, and it took 18 minutes. No junior marketer can compete with that.

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Kimi K2

This AI Tops the Creative Charts and Sounds Human

Last week, we mentioned Moonshot’s Kimi-K2 in our rapid-fire news. Then we took it for a proper spin… and it deserves the spotlight. For marketing teams, it’s a game-changer.

Kimi just hit #1 on the creative writing leaderboard, surpassing Claude Opus 4 and OpenAI’s o3. Why? There are fascinating theories, but here’s what matters: Kimi doesn’t sound AI. No “delve into,” no “it’s important to note,” no robotic filler that gives other models away. It even nails style guides.

But pay attention: it hallucinates numbers and quotes more often than ChatGPT or Gemini. Use it for tone and voice, but fact-check rigorously. It sounds wild, but today your best copy might come from an open-source Chinese AI model. Kimi brings the style. You bring the oversight.

Why it matters for marketers

When every competitor can churn out 100 blog posts overnight, voice becomes the last true differentiator. Kimi offers scale and taste.

What to do next?

» Run a Blind Voice Test: Give your brand style guide and a core messaging brief to GPT‑4o, Claude 4, and Kimi‑K2. Share the outputs, along with one human-written version, with your leadership team (without labeling them). The results will shape your 2026 content budget.

» Target Your Hardest Creative Challenge: Find the one content type your team struggles to scale with quality (e.g., witty social replies, high-end conceptual ad copy). Make that your first Kimi pilot.

» Shift From Writers to Creative Directors: Your content team’s job isn’t to write every word anymore. It’s to generate 10 variants with Kimi, pick the best two, and refine them to perfection. Move from production to curation.

» Find a Trusted API Partner: Kimi is a Chinese model, and your board might balk at using kimi.com directly. Consider partnering with providers like Groq or Fireworks AI to deploy it securely.

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OpenAI Checkout

Commerce at the Point of Conversation

OpenAI is testing a native checkout feature that allows users to complete purchases directly within ChatGPT. This shifts the LLM from a traffic source to the storefront, salesperson, and POS system, all in one.

With GenAI-driven e-commerce already surging, this is a land grab for the entire customer relationship management. In plain terms: if your product isn’t in the top 5 AI answers, it’s invisible. And if the marketplace gets baked into the chatbot, the “long tail” of discovery may disappear entirely.

Why it matters for marketers

The traditional “SEO → PDP” funnel is breaking. If the LLM controls discovery and checkout, your SKU either lives in its index or vanishes from customer consideration. Structured feeds and pay‑to‑play slots are coming faster than you think.

What to do next?

» Appoint a Head of AI Channel Visibility: This isn’t optional anymore. Someone on your team needs to own your brand’s presence in LLMs as their core KPI. This is the SEO of the agentic age.

» Run an AI Mystery Shopper Audit: Have your team ask the top 3 LLMs to solve the problems your product addresses. Does your brand appear? Is the info accurate? If you’re not in the top 3 answers, you’re effectively invisible.

» Restructure Product Data for Conversations: Review your product pages. Can an AI pull meaningful answers from them? Bullet points and generic marketing copy aren’t enough. Embed Q&As, use cases, and structured specs.

» Draft a CEO One-Pager: “What happens when 20% of our Amazon traffic shifts to chat-based checkouts?”

Cheat Sheet

Context Engineering Beats Prompt Engineering

Not strictly “news,” but a widely shared essay that’s a must-read. The argument: “prompt engineering is dead; context engineering is the real moat.” It lays out smart frameworks for packaging data, tools, and user intent so LLMs deliver consistent, brand‑safe outputs every time.

Why it matters for marketers

Clever prompts worked for early adopters, but scale needs repeatability. Context engineering turns your marketing playbooks into modular systems: personas, voice rules, campaign history, live pricing, all injected automatically so every prompt inherits your org’s memory.

What to do next?

» Build a Context Stack: Combine your brand style guide, persona sheets, legal red-lines, and performance benchmarks into a single JSON snippet. Attach it to every prompt in your content‑ops platform (Notion, Airtable, or API).

» Assign Context Owners: Demand gen manages ICP examples; brand team curates tone snippets; product ops adds live feeds.

» Run a Monthly Retro: Which context snippets reduced edits the most? Double down on those.

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Rapid-Fire News

Quick scans on things that mattered last week.

1. Meta Cracks Down on AI Content Farms
Following YouTube’s lead, Meta will demonetize low-effort, unoriginal AI content on Facebook.
» For marketers: The AI content gold rush is over. Scaling with AI now requires originality and quality—not just volume.

2. Half of Managers Are Evaluating AI to Replace Staff
A new survey shows that managers are being tasked with assessing whether their teams’ roles can be automated.
» For marketers: If you can’t show clear ROI for human headcount over algorithms, your budget is in play.

3. Google Maps Can Call Businesses for You
A new AI feature in Maps will phone local businesses to ask about pricing and availability.
» For marketers: Clear, machine-friendly communication over the phone is now a customer touchpoint.

4. Dubai Introduces Human/AI Content Labels
A new framework categorizes content based on the level of human involvement.
» For marketers: AI transparency is becoming global. Define your “Made with AI” policy before regulators do it for you.

5. Anthropic and OpenAI Face New Marketing AI Rivals
A new leaderboard ranks AI models on their ability to handle marketing tasks from copywriting to campaign strategy. Emerging players are starting to outrank even OpenAI and Anthropic in specific use cases.
» For marketers: Don’t put all your bets on a single tool. Watch the benchmarks and diversify your AI stack for optimal output.

CMO Tips

What AI Readiness Really Means

Most teams think “AI readiness” means tool fluency. It doesn’t. AI readiness involves embedding AI into real-world workflows with clarity and structure.

If your processes are broken, AI won’t save you. It will just amplify the dysfunction. Here’s what readiness looks like:

Strategic Alignment: Your team knows exactly why you’re using AI and how it connects to business objectives.

Collaborative Workflows: AI is integrated into day-to-day operations, rather than being siloed as an “experiment.”

Creative Confidence: Your team trusts AI to assist—not replace—them in producing high-quality, on-brand work.

Tech Integration: Your stack and data are ready for AI orchestration.

Team Skills: Your people have shifted from “doing” to orchestrating workflows with AI agents.

Pro Tip: Don’t try to fix everything. Identify and eliminate the largest obstacle to your AI adoption (e.g., creative team hesitation or complex workflows). That’s your leverage point for growth.

Run our AI Readiness Assessment. It works not just for CMOs but also for individual marketers & marketing teams.

The AI stack is evolving faster than most marketing teams can keep up with. The leaders who redesign workflows now will own the next era of growth, creativity, and visibility.

If this edition gave you an edge, forward it to one marketing leader in your network who’s ready to level up for the AI-native world.

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See you next week.

— Peter & Torsten

» PS: Ready to level up AI across your marketing team? We advise CMOs of the future.