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The Marketing Maximalist

There’s a fascinating paradox at the heart of AI adoption in the enterprise. While efficiency gains are the easiest myopic way to prove ROI to a CFO, having a mental model of AI based on efficiency is fundamentally a race to the bottom that dooms any true attempt at AI transformation. At its core, AI is a technology born to drive growth and introduce incremental new revenue, not eliminate cost. It’s a race to the top.

Thus, token maximalism is such an important philosophical concept because it reframes the entire discussion of how to use AI around the enormous value AI can create, not the human capital costs it can strip out of a business. The weird bastardizations of tokenmaxxing that make headlines— like engineers looping agents in a flat circle— are an externality of rotten and cynical corporate cultures, not an indictment of the underlying concept. More thoughts from Noah on this later in the week :)

For enterprise CMOs, token maximalism is still mostly an academic notion anyway as I’ve yet to meet a marketer who is really the one running up the Anthropic bill. Perhaps more than any function, marketing is still afflicted by a bizarre conservatism when it comes to AI that too often leads to automating low-throughput workflows rather than reimagining what is now possible. It’s utterly boring, mundane and ready to be combatted with a better framework– enter marketing maximalism.

AI is fundamentally slashing OpEx from businesses at a time when distribution is historically scarce-- the perfect tsunami for more dollars to go into marketing in all forms if CMOs embrace a maximalist mindset.

The marketing maximalist is ruled by a two part creed:

1) AI should be used to launch audacious experiments where marketers attempt to solve problems that were impossible before.

2) Where AI can create additional efficiencies in a business, every dollar saved should immediately be reinvested in growth.

Taken to its logical (and profitable) extreme, this line of thinking will pretty significantly alter the marketing and media landscape as we know it. Here’s the CEO of Ridge, a ~$300M+ brand:

A marketing efficiency ratio of 2 is an absolutely bonkers concept! One out of every two dollars you make is being pumped right back into the marketing machine. But if your operating expenses are now lean enough to profitably invest this much in marketing, it’s the only defensible utilitarian play!

There are a few obvious macro ramifications to AI-powered marketing maximalism, namely:

- As mentioned above, the advertising industry, which historically has hovered around 1% of GDP since the 1930s, is now growing as an overall share of the economy. The old knock on advertising– that it was a sort of zero-sum industry relative to overall economic output– is not true in the era.

- Gargantuan tailwinds for Meta, Google, Amazon, TikTok and OpenAI’s ad platforms. CPMs are only going in one direction…..

- A golden age of new consumer brand concepts where extremely lean teams can pop up and challenge legacy brands with profitable unit economics from day one, making venture capital an optional luxury.

- More money available to pay outsized salaries to the most talented creative and brand leaders, who increasingly will have the only skill in the business that can’t be commoditized.

While it should be noted that Ridge has hardcore direct response and performance roots, it’s a mid nine-figure company that runs a plethora of TV commercials, multimillion dollar influencer deals and even owns its own media properties. More importantly, the broader point of framing AI in the context of new audacious growth initiatives vs. efficiency is every bit as true in a large enterprise as it is for a brand like Ridge, perhaps even more so.

Consider the position that a brand like Coca-Cola currently finds itself in, which is microcosmic of many large consumer products. Beyond the headwinds of GLP-1s and general decreased demand for sugary drinks, brand preference for Coke products is now going to be increasingly mediated by agents. What will make an agent crave coke?

Obviously the answer here isn’t for Coca-Cola and other FORTUNE 500 brands to blindly start committing hundreds of millions of incremental dollars to paid media. And I doubt there’s much wherewithal for Coke to start thirstily astroturfing Reddit.

But when an agent puts together a shopping list and eventually executes a purchase end to end in Instacart, what will compel said agent to supplement “build a healthy meal plan for my family of four” with a cheeky 2-liter unless it is ordered point blank to do so? What kind of “brand” associations can products that might not be hyper-utilitarian purchases make to be perceived differently by agents?

The World Cup is in full swing and despite a year of doom and gloom headlines leading up to the tournament, the vibes so far have been immaculate. It’s also a fun time to recall a crazy and contrarian brand bet that Coke once made that with significant investment, women’s soccer could become a mainstream, family-friendly, nationally marketable entertainment property.

By sponsoring FIFA women’s competitions and backing the 1999 Women’s World Cup ecosystem, Coke helped give the sport blue-chip credibility at a moment when brands and broadcasters were still unsure whether audiences would show up. While the ‘95 cup struggled to put 1,000 fans in the stands, the ‘99 world cup was played to sold out stadiums and 40M people tuning in for the final.

For Coke, the ultimate payoff was association with patriotism, empowerment, families, and a fast-growing women’s sports audience before many other brands fully recognized its value. In other words, marketing maximalism.

If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.

— Mike

One more early bird call for BRXND NYC 2026 before many of you ship off to La Croisette next week. Early bird tickets are $749 through July 15 before we raise prices to $999+ for GA.

If you’d like to attend the show, you can still add your name to the early bird waitlist.

We have a lot of demand and only 378 seats in the Times Center so we’re prioritizing brand-side marketers. If you work at an agency, we ask you just bring a client along. Drop me a note at mike@brxnd.ai and we’ll handle the details.

Join waitlist here

Interview with Art Tauder, 65-year veteran of Madison Avenue

Art Tauder started his career on Madison Avenue in 1961, a almost the exact timestamp when Don Draper was presenting “the carousel” to Kodak to cap Mad Men‘s inaugural season. But by then Art had already been clocking hours in advertising for fourteen years, filing tear sheets at his father Milton’s agency starting at age seven. Sixty-five years later he’s still in the game, working exclusively on communications strategy for innovations that can disrupt major industries and improve the quality of life for individuals and society as a whole.

Across a thirty-five-year career at IPG, Art built the strategic planning system that directed more than 1,000 operating companies across 130 countries, servicing the likes of Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestlé, and General Motors. He architected the transformation of 95-year-old McCann-Erickson into the McCann WorldGroup, which earned #1 Global Agency of the Year honors from both Ad Age and Adweek in 2000, and personally acquired the ThunderHouse trademark for IPG for $1 million before getting it back as a retirement gift.

He served as a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Media Lab, the go-to person for technology transfer into marketing communications, right as the internet was finding its footing in the wake of the dot-com bust. Today he’s advocating for a “New Age Communications WorldGroup,” built on the premise that agentic AI is the next great inflection in marketing.

Along the way, he gave a renegade twenty-year-old kid his first taste of the advertising business from his studio twenty-two stories above Central Park South. We’ve been good friends ever since.

I caught up with Art to talk about the cycles he’s seen, why this era will be defined by what he calls “agentic marketing,” and what sixty-five years in the business can teach a generation of CMOs navigating the way AI is reshaping how consumers build preference and choose brands.

On how agents will force agencies to rediscover the art of communications

Mike: Let’s start with the punchline. You’ve started calling this era “agentic marketing,” and you think that somewhat paradoxically, the agentic era will take the marketing business back to its roots in communications.

Talk to me a little bit about what you mean.

Art: Everybody’s transfixed by generative AI: the cost savings, the chatbot that writes the copy. That’s the least of it.

What’s actually coming is that every marketer is going to have to talk to a buyer’s agent — and somebody is going to have to teach them how. That’s not a media-buying problem. It’s a communications problem.

It’s the communications problem of this era. And while we’re at it—as a communications guy, I’ll tell you the technologists are terrible at branding their own work. “AI,” artificial intelligence, is an awful label for the computational augmentation of human intelligence. What the hell is artificial about it?

Mike: We’ll unpack all of that. But first I have to establish something, because you may be the only person still active in the game who can say this with a straight face.

You’ve watched this exact movie play out three times already across platform shifts in television, internet, and now AI……..

Art: Let me give you a quick look at “the cycles” I’ve lived, because it’s where I’m coming from. In grammar school in the mid-1940s, I took printing as a practical subject, like wood shop, and with my father’s encouragement I became quite good at setting type by hand.

I could even run a letterpress. There was a Linotype machine in that shop, and early on I marveled at it — that’s where my interest in the impact of innovation on communications began. In 1947 I was in a TV commercial, before sound and sync cameras were widely used; I remember it like it was yesterday, the video and audio recorded in separate sessions and then synched together.

At my first job, at BBDO in 1962, the standard units for television were sixty-second and ten-second black-and-white commercials. And then color. And so on and so on, right up until agentic marketing today.

Net-net: I’ve seen over and over again how innovations in technology have disrupted the marketing communications business — and how significant innovation powers growth for both clients and their communications agencies.

Mike: So walk me back to the glory years of the business. Where did the holding companies come from — and what were they actually built to do?

Art: After World War II you had this tremendous need to build out internationally. Coca-Cola gets introduced into Japan and into Europe by the GIs — who the hell is going to manage the communications?

So Interpublic, the granddaddy of these companies, was formed in 1960, riding on the back of Coca-Cola. Exxon, Nestlé, Unilever — these companies all had to have a communications partner all over the world. And they divided themselves up into what were almost club agencies. Coca-Cola’s club agency was Interpublic. Pepsi’s was BBDO. General Motors was Interpublic. Ford’s major agency was J. Walter Thompson. And you couldn’t have all your eggs in one basket — if something went rotten, you needed a second global agency to take the overflow. So there was a logic to having at least three of these global companies.

The thing to understand is the core competence of the holding company is the communications business. This is a business of strategy, directed messaging, and media. Coca-Cola is in the beverage business — actually the refreshment business — and that’s their core expertise.

Having your hand on the pulse of the audience, developing the messages, and directing them into the right media — that’s the core business. It was grown by real communications leaders. Marion Harper & Paul Foley at McCann/Interpublic, Dan Seymour, Bert Manning at J. Walter Thompson. Ed Ney and Peter Georgescu at Young & Rubicam. Client-driven people.

Mike: And then 1986 happens and Sorrell swoops in

Art: Then Martin Sorrell saw how much weakness there was in the management succession of these very big agencies — David Ogilvy with no obvious heir, J. Walter Thompson up for grabs — and he did a financial roll-up.

He was never really focused on being an agent for the client; he was an agent for himself. The easiest, fastest money was on the media side, in arbitrage — what they now call principal media, where you buy at one price and sell at another. But here’s the thing: the underlying need never went away. Clients still needed a communications partner, and a global one. The holding companies just stopped leading — they lost the innovation edge to the hyperscalers, to Facebook and Google and Amazon and Microsoft — and that’s when the thing began to dissolve.

On what every platform shift teaches

Mike: You’ve worked through three of the biggest disruptions in the history of communications — television maturing, the internet becoming a marketing platform, and now AI. What do the first two teach us about this one?

Art: Two things. First, innovation doesn’t advance in a straight line. There are bursts of advancement, expectations overheat, and then there’s a slump before it picks up again. Everybody’s jumping on these investments in AI right now, and if they don’t start delivering revenue and profit, there’s going to be a trough. You have to be prepared for it. The ebbs and flows that come with innovation can be mitigated with a well-thought-out strategic vision.

Second, you have to understand the true nature and value of innovation. With television, it was amplifying communications by unleashing video. With the internet, it was amplifying the power of information by transforming analog to digital. With AI, and the evolving iteration of agentic AI — if you aim high — it can be amplifying the power of human intelligence to improve the quality of life of individuals and society as a whole.

Mike: One observation of yours that I keep coming back to is I ponder how this era will play out for marketers is around what has happened every time in history that consumers have gotten more options…..

Art: Every time you give the consumer the power of choice — the freedom to take charge — they take it. When we had three television channels, we were all watching the same three. Then we had five. Then UHF came in and we had more, and more. And the more channels we got, the more these consumers would go for the choice, pick out exactly what they wanted.

The internet was supposed to empower the consumer that way, but it really never happened, because the internet got controlled by the hyperscalers — and in the two or three biggest cases, they are the media, totally driven by advertising revenue.

Mike: You were at the MIT Media Lab during the hyperscale era of the internet that feels like the closest historical rhyme to this moment. What was the energy then and how does it translate to now?

Art: The thought-leaders at the MIT Media Lab envisioned the disruption coming — the convergence of computer, publishing, and broadcasting, the move from analog to digital — and they prospered, in reputation and in funding, by leading the exploration of it.

The money pouring into AI infrastructure today signals a disruption of the same magnitude. The lesson from the Media Lab is the same one as always: you stay ahead of the innovation, or you become roadkill.

On marketing to agents

Mike: Let’s define our terms, because you draw a hard line between agentic commerce — which McKinsey pegs as a $3–5 trillion industry by 2030 — and agentic marketing. What’s the distinction?

Art: The too-simple answer is: agentic marketing is the application of agentic AI to the marketing function. But the definitions matter, so let me be precise. I define agentic AI as the autonomous or semi-autonomous representative of an individual or entity undertaking one or more computational processes to complete a desired task.

And I define agentic marketing as the use of an autonomous or semi-autonomous agent — representing a buyer, a seller, or a channel of distribution — in the process of moving a product from production to consumption.

Mike: Make that concrete. What does it actually mean for a marketer day to day?

Art: Think of it as two sides of a coin. On one side, the marketer is going to have to talk to a buyer’s agent. Somebody has to help that marketer with their content, their marketing, their communications, so they can communicate with other agents — so your materials are put together by your agent in a way that matches up easily with the agent of the buyer. And that opens up all kinds of opportunity.

The other side is the buyer’s agent itself. In my own work I’ve been building a model of one — and, believe it or not, I named the project Uschi, after my wife Ursula’s nickname.

Mike: We were working on this personal shopper concept together way back in 2014!

Right, the fundamental idea is the same. Uschi’s my perfect agent. She represents me in a myriad of transactions. Agents will vary business to consumer, business to business and by industry— the agent buying your groceries is different from the one negotiating a business transaction on your behalf — but that’s really what an agent is: the person who, in this world, could most represent you, other than yourself.

Mike: A lot of the early dialogue here is honestly pretty boring — structuring your product feeds and blog posts so an agent can parse them. That feels like the floor, not the ceiling.

Art: Exactly. That’s scratching the tiniest bit of it. The agents are not going to be hyper-rational entities you simply format yourself for. You’re going to have to match up with them — and that means the same thing it’s always meant in this business: they’re going to have to be persuasive.

On why most marketing leaders think too small

Mike: Aristotle shows up a lot in your work — specifically the line that “our problem is not that we aim too high and miss, but rather that we aim too low and hit.” What’s the low aim you see most often in marketing today?

Art: I see it as two-pronged. The first is an excessive focus on generative AI. The obvious allure — functional proficiency, cost savings — is masking the bigger picture of a 25-year-plus evolution of AI that’s now in a period of rapid acceleration, way in advance of revenue and profit. Leaders have to cultivate the ability to see beyond the present hot iteration. They need to lead the visioning process.

The second is the lack of a bold, aspirational mission. The true mission is to grow the value of clients with communications that influence attitudes and behavior. Sustainable growth is the number one challenge of every organization, and communications is the primary means to grow value.

Mike: In that vein, you’ve named two specific psychological barriers that keep getting in the way of AI adoption. And the wild part is you watched them block AI inside the industry years before ChatGPT existed.

Art: Back in 2015 and 2016 I was working on an AI platform branded Peer-Sourcing to develop communications strategy — using AI to get information directly from your customer base that a focus group can’t. The focus group is a 75+ year old methodology; the interaction between respondents in fifteen minutes outweighs the actual question, and everybody in the room comes with a bias — the interviewer, the research company, the client, the brand people. What you need is a clear path to the customer. So we were already using natural language processing, summarization, and generative AI to capture an input, synthesize it, and generate a communications concept off of it. In 2015 and 2016.

(Author’s Note: If you’re a brand leader reading this and the above paragraph piqued your interest, highly suggest you check out Listen Labs who is building in this space. I have zero connection to the company but I’m really impressed by what they’ve done and think they’ll be one of the most significant AI companies that sells into brand leaders)

And we couldn’t sell it. We couldn’t sell it because the people making the decisions said, “That’s what I do — you’re telling me you’re going to run a process that eliminates me.” That’s the innovator’s dilemma, Clayton Christensen’s idea: the very structure, processes, and tools that lead to an established organization’s success naturally inhibit change.

Then we took it to Adobe, and the head of development and ventures told me, “That’s not in my swimming lane — we don’t do strategy.” That’s textbook marketing myopia, Theodore Levitt’s term — looking at what you do in a limited way, that’s Coca-Cola thinking it’s in the cola business instead of the refreshment business. As I told Peer-Spurcing prospects at the time, quoting Sun Tzu: tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

Mike: I love this marketing myopia concept. Is that at the core of what is hobbling the largest marketing organizations in the world right now?

Art: Precisely. The holding companies in particular have marketing myopia, and it’s gotten worse at the exact moment they need to think bigger. Instead of broadening their focus, WPP and the others narrowed it ever since they went public and the leadership weakened — they zeroed in on the easiest place to make money rather than the client’s actual communications need. And that communications need runs across all of a client’s stakeholders, and it varies by industry. It’s not just the consumer and the people who influence the consumer — it’s the workforce, if your workforce isn’t up to speed you’ll lose the business; it’s the channel, the supply chain, the community, the investors, the government. They have to open up and widen their scope, because it’s all communications, it’s all strategy, it’s all sending messages.

Right now WPP is competing with Publicis on the basis of media and technology strength. What kind of bullshit is that? Who’s going to do the better media? Media as we know it is not what these clients are going to need. It’s yesterday’s definition. If you don’t think bigger, you’re going to miss the whole damn agentic marketing situation.

On the things an agent will never search for the work that comes next

Mike: This is where it gets really interesting to me. If agents start mediating purchases, what kind of brands are particularly vulnerable and how can they respond.?

Art: No agent is going to go out looking for Coca-Cola. There’s no way. So there’s a principle here: a brand has to enhance the quality of life of its customers in related areas — it has to earn its place in their lives every day. Coca-Cola has to be in the consumer’s mind all the time as a refreshment, a meal accompaniment, a social icebreaker.

How does it survive in an agentic environment? It reaches out and experientially touches its users, and not through the traditional means of media. It does things for its customer base that they can’t do for themselves.

Mike: This sounds like the fundamental raison d’etre of the marketing function…

Art: Take an everyday consumer product — something in personal care, say. You have to ask the same question: what can you do for that customer, relevant to your product, that will enhance their life? Maybe it’s their health, maybe it’s their appearance. What do these people need, and what can you do for them that would ingratiate them to you? That’s part of selling them the product. They’ll still do certain big events where their media presence matters, but they have to get attention and do something meaningful for their customer base every single day.

That’s the challenge the holding company was built to solve — and it’s the opposite of competing on who buys the cheapest media or what technology platforms to use.

Mike: If you had to compress sixty-five years in the business into a single piece of advice for somebody in marketing trying to navigate the agentic shift

Art: Relentlessly focus on innovation. Better yet, be the best advocate for innovation in your core competence. Create a vision of how it will impact you and your customer base. That’s how I got to the MIT Media Lab in the first place; hell it’s the same path you’re on that’s led you to work on Zero Clicks and now BRXND.

Don’t succumb to marketing myopia– aim high. As Aswath Damodaran, the dean of valuations at NYU, puts it: narrations drive valuations. Success will come to those who take the lead in the exploration. That’s especially true for anyone in the communications business, because the story is the core competence. This is communications in the age of artificial intelligence. Call it the New Age.

The companies that remember communications was always the business — and that it has to be again — are the ones that get to be something far bigger than a place that spends advertising dollars.

Art Tauder is a 65 year veteran of the communications business who built the strategic planning system that directed more than 1,000 operating companies across 130 countries for Interpublic, servicing the likes of Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestlé, and General Motors. He can be reached at art@thunderhouse.org.

If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.

— Mike

As we build towards this year’s BRXND NYC conference, I’ll be doing a series of interviews with founders, investors and marketing leaders building in the problem space around how AI is fundamentally reshaping the way consumers build preference and purchase brands. If there’s someone you think I should get to know, please drop me a line at mike@brxnd.ai.

Speaking of BRXND NYC 2026, tickets to the show are $749 through July 15 before we hit the GA price of $1,000+.

If you’d like to attend the show, please add your name to the early bird waitlist here and purchase before July 15 to get the best possible pricing.

Join waitlist here

On Shopping Super Agents

Two things are true right now about the nebulous world of agentic commerce:

1) Finding serendipitous inspiration on what to buy remains a trillion dollar unsolved problem, arguably the most lucrative on the consumer web.

2) Even as Anthropic and OpenAI race to IPO at trillion-dollar valuations, they do so in a world without a mass market consumer agent.

There’s a frenetic race to change that as OpenAI gets set to effectively relaunch a version of ChatGPT as a “super app” that prioritizes agents over chat-based answers. In any semblance of first principles thinking, chat has never really made sense as a plausible medium for something as visual as shopping. Neither for that matter have rectangle search bars and PDP squares but historically it’s been the best bad interface we got.

Few have obsessed about this problem space more in the last decade than Li Haslett Chen, founder and CEO of Howl, the leading creator commerce platform for consumer tech, gaming and wellness.

Li is a Forbes AI 50 winner, Financial Times Retail Disruptor, served on the board of Warner Brothers Discovery, and has written for The Information about how AI earns its place in commerce.

For its part, ChatGPT certainly isn’t giving up on commerce, even as it pursues ads as the core monetization model. Here’s an email I (and presumably tens to hundreds of millions of other ChatGPT users) got this morning 20 minutes before I was set to hit send on this piece.

Here I must confess, this interview is a touch more personal as I too obsessed about this problem for several years alongside Li, first as her head of marketing and then as a sales leader for her previous company, Narrativ. We spent much of 2019 working on solving semantic search for commerce when OpenAI was still a plucky non-profit, concerned that GPT-2 possessed too strong an ability to generate fake news.

Li and I caught up for a whirlwind discussion around how shopping will be the use case for the first scaled consumer “super” agent, why creators are the PhDs of commerce, and how ads will enrich rather than enshittify agentic experiences.

A lightly edited version of our conversation follows below:

Mike: While agents voraciously devour more and more B2B workflows on top of coding, we’re still waiting on the first truly transformative consumer agent.

You’ve made the case that this will ultimately come in shopping/commerce. Can you lay out why shopping is the first major consumer category where agents will offer a transformative UX?

Li: There’s a version of this story where the first transformative consumer agent shows up in something “important” - your health, your money, your relationships.

But agents don’t just go where the stakes are the highest, they go where friction is highest and the infrastructure already exists. That’s shopping! Payments, feeds, reviews, returns - the plumbing already exists.

Shopping is the most ordinary thing we all do - it’s high frequency, relatively low stakes. The world doesn’t have to be rebuilt for it.

What’s missing to solve shopping isn’t a technology problem, it’s a strategy and conviction. Good software is opinionated software and opinionated design.

Shopping is continuous, it’s complicated, it’s massively operational. That’s the perfect job for an agent.

Here’s my opinionated, “contrarian” take on the agentic UX: It’s time to take shopping seriously. Don’t treat it as entertainment and build the UX on impulse buys. Ads have that covered. Shopping is how we spend our money and time. It’s identity - Your home, how you show up for yourself and your kids, what you give the people you love. That deserves a purpose-built surface, your personal command center. It can still be visual and fun, but it also needs permanence and structure.

Mike: To date, much of the agentic commerce discussion has focused on solving the last mile problem of an agent purchasing an item on a user’s behalf. There’s obviously a hell of a lot more TAM in an agent that could accelerate discovery for a shopper. What would need to happen to cross that chasm?

Li: Checkout and discovery are two different kinds of problems. For an agent to actually help you discover new things, it has to know you - your taste, your budget, the difference between the thing you need and the thing you’ll cave on. No one has taught the machine how to get to know you.

The last mile is a bounded problem. I don’t want to downplay the protocols - UCP, ACP, that work is very real - but when the agent knows the SKU and has your card on file, it can execute. So everyone built the checkout robot first. Fine.

Mike: So…what kind of signal can an agent realistically get quickly to create an experience that quickly feels magical rather than arduously teaching a machine what you like?

Li: Here’s the interesting part: the best machine we’ve built to date for getting to know a shopper is advertising. Every ad is a tiny experiment - platforms show you something, watch what you do, learn. Meta and Google already understand us incredibly well.

What’s amazing is that hardware-embedded agents will have a whole new generation of inputs coming - complementary but also incremental to ads. Imagine an agent that, with your permission, can see what’s on your calendar, what’s in your inbox, the conversations you’re actually having. The good version of this isn’t creepy. It’s invited. You let it in because it works for you, not the advertiser.

There’s another simple way to learn about someone: you ask them. Every good B2B agent is prompted to interview you.

A great personal shopper observes you…AND asks you questions. It’s a no-brainer that your shopping agent should ask questions that a great personal shopper would. Why do you keep buying and returning slim fit pants? Whose taste do you trust now versus 2 years ago? People love being asked about themselves. Done right, that’s not friction.

Once agents have access to better data than ads engines do, they can just focus on being useful.

Mike: Isn’t this what OpenAI was trying to pull off with Deep Shopping Research? And to a large degree, the old principles of online commerce applied where slow, cumbersome experiences frustrated users.

Li: I love this question - yes, there’s a surface resemblance but the mechanics are very different.

Deep Shopping Research interviews you because it has to. It’s starting from zero and the questions are very basic: what’s your budget, what’s the use case, what have you tried. That’s a cold start dressed up as a conversation.

An agent with persistent context asks questions to refine what it already knows. This is a relationship, instead of ‘what’s your budget?’ Your agent can say “the last two months you didn’t spend your full budget, I think we can stretch it on this couch since you keep going back to it - what do you think?”

OpenAI saw the right behavior - agents should interview - but bolted it onto the wrong architecture.

Mike: What kind of context does a consumer shopping agent ultimately need to be successful that is hard to access today? Why is that information so hard to gather and present in a structured way to an agent?

Li: I’d start at a more foundational level. Every other category of AI has a benchmark - coding has eval suites, math and science have clear tests engineers race to beat.

Mike: Oh…I like where this is going

Li: You can’t improve what you can’t measure - and I think that’s exactly why coding agents feel like magic while shopping still feels primitive.

The decision-making axes I’d measure, in today’s vernacular: price-maxxing, the best deal; quality-maxxing, the best thing; trend-maxxing, what’s having a moment; identity-maxxing, what’s most you.

Mike: We’re a little bit older these days than we were when we worked together. Are we still allowed to drop much gen alpha lingo?

Li: A great agent doesn’t just optimize one axis. It demonstrates judgement and knows which of these matter right now and it weighs all of them against what it knows about you. That’s where the continual access to data is so critical. Whoever delivers judgment best will dominate the category.

Mike: I’d like to go deeper on ads since OpenAI is all-in on ads as their free consumer monetization model and anything Meta does has to be grounded in ads yield.

One of the major innovator’s dilemma challenges that has plagued early agentic shopping experience is that all companies building agents (i.e. Amazon) are existentially dependent on ads.

So……how could ads enhance a consumer shopping agent rather than make it worse?

Li: I don’t think ads and agents are at odds. People frame it as adversarial - if the agent works for you, ads must lose - but I think that’s backwards. Ads are one of the best on-ramps we have for an agent to learn about you, and they can be the doorway into the agentic experience itself.

Say you see an ad that catches your eye, but you don’t trust what it’s telling you. Today that’s a dead end - you either take the bait or scroll past. With an agent, you can hand it off: “look into this for me.” It runs an ad-research skill that does the digging you’d never do yourself - whether the thing is actually good, who else makes it, whether the price is real, and how it squares with the budget and taste it already knows you have. The ad did its job: it surfaced something. Your agent does its job: it cuts through the pitch and tells you what’s true and whether it’s actually right for you.

Mike: This is something big I think many people are missing when they think about “marketing to agents” and how AI will mediate preference. Agents will be extensions of real users and will need heuristic help to make the best decisions!

Li: Yes! That’s when ads and agents stop competing and maybe even start accelerating each other. The advertiser gets a genuinely interested shopper and you get a researcher and an assistant in your corner.

The one non-negotiable is that the agent works for you and only you, the shopper. Keep that line clean and ads and agents make each other better.

Mike: By all accounts, Meta looks poised to take the first major crack at a large-scale consumer agent that “works for you” as the core of the UX in the coming weeks with Hatch. Initial thoughts here?

I agree Hatch is one to watch. I’ve said that creators are the PhDs of commerce - and Meta has the strongest starting position - Instagram sits on billions of hours of organic creator content oriented around shopping.

Try the same prompt in meta.ai versus gemini or openai, meta is already better - and it’s because of creator content.

Creators are the obvious entry point into an agent-led experience. If you’re watching a haul video from a creator you follow, imagine just saying: “put everything in this video in an excel, research it and add links, notify me if anything goes on sale.” This is something people are already trying to do with screenshots and twelve open tabs.

From there, your agent can earn the right to do more: pull in the savings codes, handle the returns, save shoppers time and money every week.

Mike: So of course, I have to ask the question that looms over any conversation around content owners and LLMs.

How do creators get fairly compensated for the existential role they’ll play in any true agentic shopping experience?

Li: Creators and publishers provide the commerce data these AI systems can’t generate for themselves. The creators whose content trains and feeds these experiences have earned a cut of the action. The discovery has always run through them and the economics should too.

The platforms know this - in March, Meta relaunched creator affiliate commerce on Instagram and Facebook after sitting out that market for three years - and six weeks later, it announced a consumer agent. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Gemini has Youtube and it already has its own creator rails. Both Meta and Gemini have the creators, the feed, the affiliate rails, the agentic ambition - that’s the entire chain for agentic shopping.

Mike: So how crazy are things going to get once the first consumer shopping agent gains scale? Will I recognize online commerce as I currently know it?

There’s a familiar pattern here. Every new platform starts by skeuomorphing the old one - the first websites looked like brochures, the first mobile apps looked like websites, and AI shopping today looks like Google circa 2005: a text box and blue links. That’s always temporary.

What’s actually coming is the super agent. It’s a pin, an ear cuff, a watch - you never open it because it’s never closed. Your wearable syncs with the nearest screen - and when you need to see something, it doesn’t send you to a website, it spins up a new one for you.

Mike: Thanks so much for the great conversation. Until we get the second coming of Tropical 128…IYKYK

Li Haslett Chen is a Forbes AI 50 winner, Financial Times Retail Disruptor, served on the board of Warner Brothers Discovery, and has written for The Information about how AI earns its place in commerce.

To suggest additional builders that I should feature in this series, please get in touch at mike@brxnd.ai

If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.

— Mike

The AI Discourse’s Original Sin

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why the AI discourse is so frenetic and why it often feels like a cacophony of people shouting around each other. What I keep coming back to is that so many of the prevailing narratives (jobspocalypse, permanent underclass, AGI etc.) lack any definitive sense of timeline or move the goalposts so constantly to the point that they become meaningless. It’s the original sin of the discourse.

Here’s Noah from his appearance on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots pod in January:

I try not to wade into what’s AGI and what’s not. I think my guess on AGI, for what it’s worth, is that it’s probably going to be a conversation like the Turing test. Everybody thought it was really important for a really long time. We thought the Turing test was the biggest thing for 70 years or whatever.

And then ChatGPT very clearly passed the Turing test, and now everybody pretends like it never mattered. They just forgot about it. So I’m kind of guessing that’s going to be what the conversation is like with AGI—it’s just going to be a sort of forever moving goalpost.

Being vague on timeline, especially when writing about AI, is a trap even the better pundits fall into. I find myself too often guilty and only notice after hitting publish. Our friend Jung reminds us that the flaws we’re quickest to notice in others are what we detest about ourselves. Yet again, AI has that pesky habit of operating as a mirror.

As it pertains to AI topics at the heart of marketing, there are a few things that I believe are very likely to be true on a longish term timeline, defined here as four years or more.

- OpenAI’s ads business will work— no consumer platform that has ever achieved mass scale (Google, Meta, Amazon, TikTok) has found itself unable to pair that with a massive ads business.

- AEO hacks built around firing slop cannons will get crushed by Google and OpenAI and ultimately what will win out is the best possible experience for the user.

- Agentic web traffic will significantly outpace human traffic on the web and for quotidian purchases, influencing an agent will become more important than persuading a human buyer.

- Meta will endure as the most performant ad channel for brands…because it always does.

But where on earth will all these things be in their maturity cycle in say, Q2 2027? That’s a much harder question! If you’re a FORTUNE 500 CMO, you have to decide imminently whether to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for other channels to ChatGPT. Will their frenetic set of targeting bets pay off in time? Meta might thrive in the midterm, but right now its wonkiness is whipsawing the fates of public companies! Marketing leaders have to make massive bets here with wildly conflicting signals on which way the wind is blowing.

When the average S & P 500 CMO tenure is <4 years (by far, shortest in C-suite) and a marketing leader often has months to quarters to prove themselves, the longterm state of things is often just an intellectual centering exercise.

In this vein, one of the most important questions that I believe enterprise marketing leaders should more proactively ask themselves and their teams is effectively a version of “how long will this arbitrage window last?” If the answer is weeks to months, probably best to leave that alone to the hardcore direct response folks. But if there’s genuinely a multi-year opportunity, that’s worth chasing even if transient.

A great tangible example of this is Reddit. There is no chance that I would touch a Reddit astroturfing campaign with a 39-foot pole today as a brand leader, particularly as grey hat hackers poison the well to a degree that Google and OpenAI are going to have to respond. But the Reddit-AEO conversation started in earnest in early 2024, creating an interesting first mover advantage for large brands that prioritized the channel early. If you moved fast then, you got 2+ really good years of setting a powerful foundation in AEO and capturing a lot of LLM mentions on the way up.

AI becoming the true “agent” that mediates brand preference is the most important platform shift of our time. Like all other platform shifts, this will create a lot of weird arbitrage windows. What may well define the best marketing leaders of this era is knowing which have a timeline worth chasing.

Unwinding AI’s Investor Narrative

Switching gears a bit, Brian Morrissey does not mince words in his latest piece– everybody hates AI. This chart is a big problem.

Here’s the current vibe a little closer to home in NY where I saw someone this weekend wearing, I kid you not, this shirt that said “data center, I’d rather date a centaur!”

So how the hell did we get to this point? I think the story is far less sinister than many would have you to believe. Yes, some of the most prominent leaders in AI do believe genuinely wacky and dystopian things about where the world is headed and have not been shy about sharing them. But there’s a far more boring invisible hand at play.

In a frenetic arms raise for capital and compute, all of the hyperscalers have been fundamentally wired to tell an investor story, not a customer or societal narrative. Naturally, that story has to make any technology look as maximally disruptive as possible, primed to upend the fabric of entire industries. This is strictly rational. When raising bookoo bucks is the first order challenge, all communications and brand work needs to serve that end.

Second, in the early days of selling AI into the mainstream enterprise, triggering as much FOMO as possible is the consummate tactic for compressing deal cycles. Taken together, this ends with an overarching narrative that AI companies are the new deity, here to shape the world in the image and likeness that best suits them.

That needs to change fast. Communications consigliere extraordinaire Ashley Mayer does a great job breaking down what this job is fundamentally about here. In December she wrote:

In March, Mayer argued that large AI companies are essentially compromised from a narrative perspective– alea iacta est in the eyes of the public. She suggests the torch must be passed to up and coming startups to tell better stories about AI and the future. It’s a nice thought but ultimately, it’s OpenAI, Anthropic and a small handful of multibillion dollar companies that will set the sentiment for AI’s broader perception.

This will take uniquely bold bets on the part of AI companies. Realistically, it will probably take the best creative and editorial minds in the world to have any chance at pulling off what essentially amounts to a rebrand of the most important concept in industry. I’d expect a lot more full-fledged media concepts to emerge from AI companies in the months ahead to attempt to tell a story of progress that will resonate with persuadable regulators.

Stripe Press does a uniquely fantastic job of this. Anthropic, which every day feels just more like Stripe culturally reincarnate, has staffed up an incredibly talented media team (though it will be fascinating to see how much leash they get to counter Dario). Expect this level of narrative ambition to become status quo among AI companies, alongside massive investments in traditional brand work and design.

For all the bruehaha about the importance of storytelling, the average editorial or brand is still paid considerably less than a 70th percentile account executive at most AI shops. And look, I hate to be that guy, but with the level of product-market fit that most of the top AI tools have right now, many sales calls look something like this:

Maybe this is a little bit of pandering, but I’d vehemently argue that no matter what brand leaders at AI and AI-adjacent companies make, they are still the most underpaid people in the room in this climate.

When the news broke that OpenAI was buying TBPN, I thought there was really just one facet of the deal that mattered. If OpenAI believed that John and Jordi were S-tier marketing and communications leaders, they were worth far more than the $100M that OpenAI had to pay for the company.

Personally, I was skeptical of the fit. The TBPN hosts were about as in the Silicon Valley bubble as one could be– were these really the dudes to reposition AI to win hearts and minds of the masses? But I think of this like a team trading up (the Rams drafting Ty Simpson?) for a quarterback that they are convinced is “their guy.” Except for OpenAI, $100M is what you’d safely spend on a backup punter.

It’s impossible outside-in to know how much to attribute the broader OpenAI marketing vibe shift to Jordi and Jon specifically but the entire fundamental story OpenAI is putting out into the world has changed on a dime in the last few weeks to center AI as a technology that “viscerally puts humans in control and supercharges them.” More of this please.

Featured Jobs

If there’s a silver lining to AI’s current unpopularity, it’s that brand, editorial and design executive jobs are hitting the presses at a torrid rate. Six months ago, many of the brand and narrative leadership jobs in tech were being treated by the press as an almost cutesy, whimsical trend. Now it’s clear these jobs are wartime consigliere brand management and among the most important roles in AI.

For audacious marketing leaders looking for a new challenge, here are a few brand leadership jobs at top AI and AI-adjacent firms that came across my desk just this week:

- Cohere: Editorial Director

- Parallel: Head of Marketing, Head of Comms

- Vanta: VP of Brand

- Mercury: Head of Brand Marketing

And one more on the consumer side. Pound for pound, few brands from the pre COVID era of DTC have executed as well as Caraway. They are hiring an SVP of Marketing & eCommerce to oversee a nine figure marketing budget and 35 person team for a brand that has helped redefine the millennial home aesthetic.

One more thing…..my cream cheese chive

If you aren’t local to New York, it’s hard to convey how immaculate the vibes of have been around this entire Knicks run. I am— against any semblance of better judgment—a frickin’ longtime Nets fan and even I’ve gotten sucked into the sheer exuberance permeating the city.

It’s hard not to feel the magic when there are watch parties in funeral homes and Episcopal churches. So here’s the updated sonnet of the city to play us out:

— Mike

We’re five months out from the BRXND NYC conference on November 5, 2026 and are currently starting to source sponsors and speakers. We have a very limited number of partnership opportunities available so if you’d like to help shape the narrative of the day, please get in touch.

If you’d like to attend the show, you can still add your name to the early bird waitlist.

Join waitlist here

Tom Critchlow Joins Alephic

I’m thrilled to share that Tom Critchlow is joining Alephic as a forward deployed engineer and will become a more consistent face here at BRXND.

If you’ve spent any time in and around search over the last two decades (or if you caught his session at last year’s conference), Tom likely needs no introduction. But here’s his quick story.

He left the agency world (Distilled) to go work at Google’s Creative Lab back in 2012, spent the better part of a decade as an independent consultant embedded inside the information ecosystem, working with publishers, brands, marketplaces, and platforms on search, discovery, and audience strategy, and most recently led a team at Raptive sitting right at the center of publisher, Google, and open-web dynamics. Along the way he founded The SEO MBA, the newsletter and education project built around a single belief: that search professionals need to become business leaders. More recently he launched AI Search Leaders, a community for senior operators trying to navigate the shift from classic SEO to AI-shaped discovery.

In Tom’s own words, here’s why he made the move to Alephic.

It’s really two things. One is, for me personally, the opportunity to learn and explore the frontier. There are a lot of people in a lot of companies who don’t feel empowered — or don’t feel like they have the time or the opportunity — to play with this stuff. First and foremost, this is a learning moment. So I saw Alephic as an incredible place to work with amazing people, doing fun and interesting things on the frontier, with a lot of things I have an appetite to go build.

The flip side is that every single organization under the sun is trying to figure out how to use AI. Every team is trying to figure out how to use AI. Every individual is trying to figure out how to use AI. And that is an opportunity for genuinely creative, strategic work.

That intersection of strategic, business-shaped problems, solved in interesting ways, with smart people is honestly where I’ve spent my entire career. The concept of being a forward-deployed engineer, getting to work with these amazing brands and marketing teams and marketing leaders at this particular moment in time, was something I just couldn’t say no to.

With Tom officially joining us at Alephic, I used this moment to geek out with one of my professional idols and a true expert in AI search on all things around how the nature of how consumers discover products and services is changing. What follows is a very lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

On why this is the summer of AI search

Mike: Tom, what a damn honor to get to do this as colleagues. Let’s get to it:

For decades, SEO has constantly been fighting to get a seat at the big kids table. Then AI search comes along and overnight AEO is top of mind for marketing leaders everywhere. What’s so different constitutionally about this new world?

Tom: Here’s the mental model. While organic traffic is one of the biggest channels for most businesses, executives have long been skeptical of the ability for SEO teams to drive real meaningful growth. In most scaled, mature organizations, the executive is sitting there thinking the SEO team is responsible for a rounding error, maybe a percentage point or two of improvement, tops.

I’ve long said that SEO teams aren’t the ones that drive SEO outcomes - the outcomes are driven by product, brand, marketing and PR teams.

What’s different in the AI search era is that suddenly the entire organic search pie is up for grabs. It’s being rethought. Consumer behavior is changing, how people search is changing, the interface to search is changing — and on top of that, the way teams work is changing.

So even though organic was always a lot of traffic and a meaningful concern, SEO professionals weren’t that valuable in actually influencing it. Now AI search puts the whole pie at risk, and the whole pie is changing. How do you prepare? What should we do? How do we measure it? It’s a very visible thing that executives obviously care a lot about right now.

That’s a big part of my thesis, actually. The work it unlocks isn’t optimization, it’s strategy.

Mike: Let’s get concrete on the craft of optimizing for LLMs. For someone who spent years learning to rank in Google, where do the old frameworks still apply, and where do you have to throw them out entirely when you’re trying to influence a model?

Tom: The biggest frame that’s changed: SEO used to be binary. You either ranked or you didn’t. There’s nuance, but for all intents and purposes you either showed up in a particular spot — number one — or you didn’t. AI search is much more qualitative. It’s much more like a brand channel, where how you’re mentioned matters as much as whether you’re mentioned at all.

For example, I’ve worked with a brand that used to rank number one for all of their commercial terms on Google — drove a ton of traffic and revenue for years. They’re cited very heavily in AI search now, but often cited as, “by the way, don’t buy from these people.”

Mike: Wait, so what’s the ghost in the closet there? Is it in training data, real-time retrieval, something else?

Tom: The ghost in the closet here is reputation. It’s a brand whose prices are just higher than others in the industry. The community knows that; it’s very well talked about. So it’s mostly Reddit and Facebook, and it’s mostly in the training data. It just means that when you search for the best place to buy their products in AI Mode versus Google, it says: don’t buy from them. And that analogy extends into all kinds of industries.

So whether you show up is just one part of it.

How you show up is critically important. My opinion is that every single link in an AI chat response is going to come with a reason to click it — or a reason not to. It won’t just be “here’s a link to a brand.” It’ll be “here’s a link to a brand, and here’s why it meets your criteria, given who you are and your personalization.” That quality of difference is far more familiar to brand marketers than to SEOs. Brand marketers are used to the idea of not just showing up, but showing up with the right attributes, the right affinities, being known for certain things.

Mike: And under the hood, you’ve got two very different machines doing the work — the model’s training, and whatever it pulls live. What should a marketer know about this two-pronged dynamic that dictates how LLMs retrieve information?

Tom: That interplay is the fascinating part. The training sets are wildly opaque — we don’t know what content goes into them, we don’t know where it came from, and they run infrequently. Interrogating those black boxes isn’t straightforward, though there’s some really interesting work being done using model distillation to unpack what a model actually knows about brands and companies. Then on top you’ve got live retrieval, where the agent goes out and searches on your behalf.

And that’s true today. But these models don’t search the way humans do, and they’re going to learn to search in new ways, with new behaviors. Search itself is changing — I’m fascinated by things like exa.ai and parallel, these emerging “search as infrastructure” layers, where you can search and get structured results back, or search with longer queries and get a variety of websites back, in a way traditional Google search just doesn’t work.

Mike: This is an exact thread I’ve been trying to pull on. The reckoning that publishing leaders feel right now is the same one CMOs will feel in about six months.

Parallel and Exa have basically planted a flag: the economics of the web have to change as agents become the primary consumer, but the spirit of the open web still matters, because more and more of this has to be real-time retrieval — which doesn’t work if the content ecosystem gets nerfed.

My problem has been framing this story in a way a marketing leader will get it. Help me out there.

Tom: What’s interesting to me is that it’s fundamentally a story of disintermediation. It’s the same thing publishers feel. “We don’t get the clicks anymore, what gives? You took our content but we didn’t get the clicks!”

It’s the same reason Walmart backed away from the ChatGPT commerce integration: they got the purchases, but they didn’t get the loyalty, retention and customer insights - they didn’t get all the other stuff they need.

Mike: Right on all-in ARPU basis, native yield in ChatGPT checkout was 3x worse than on Walmart properties.

Tom: Same disintermediation story. We’re going to have to figure out new economic models and rebuild a lot of this. And you need access to product inventory, you need access to real-time content — you can’t kill the ecosystem that exists, otherwise there’s nothing left. Nobody has the answers yet, but those are the conversations to be having, and a lot of it is being figured out in real time, because there is a giant arms race to build these models in the first place. Great search was never just a model problem or a retrieval problem. It’s an ecosystem problem — shaped by publisher incentives, access, and the changing economics of the web

On where marketing leaders should place strategic bets

Mike: Put yourself in the CMO’s chair — someone who can make real large scale resource allocation calls. Models don’t hold consistent preferences, and how your brand gets portrayed is now constantly always up for grabs.

Do you try to own the media and train the model on your own message — or do you invest in the gatekeepers the model trusts? Where do the bets go?

Tom: The short answer is it has to be both. Definitely think about owned media, especially on platforms like YouTube, which is such a dominant force in AI search. And then Reddit, influencer mentions, all of that is bubbling up to influence these models in a way that’s quite foundational.

But we’re seeing early signs of how much the well of owned media has been poisoned. In B2B SaaS, every company under the sun doing AI search is writing “the 10 best project management tools — and by the way, I’m number one.”

Mike: For now it’s working, Ahrefs showed today that listicles make up 44% of page types cited by ChatGPT!

Tom: It’s working — but for how long? Play short-term games, win short-term prizes. We’re already seeing indications it’s running out of steam, and that Google’s cracking down on it. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up in a world where Google essentially runs a knowledge crawl across the web.

So if you search “best project management software,” instead of doing a real-time RAG retrieval, it first goes to a pre-computed result — Google’s already done the thinking, almost like an internal deep-research report using Gemini, across both the training data and the real-time index, to say, “actually, we know who the best players are, we’ve weeded out the self-serving listicles, we’ve done the work to cut through the noise.”

Right now they’re overweighting real-time search, and what we see is that when the agent does its query fan-out, the real-time retrieval finds a listicle, and the weight of that listicle overpowers everything.

It overpowers stuff in the training data, it overpowers a lot of the model’s own reasoning. That feels like a short-term phase. I think we’ll get past it.

Mike: Listicle arbitrage will certainly get crushed, too much is riding on Google and OpenAI not letting their wells get poisoned by pay to play “top 10” schemes.

But once this ecosystem settles, we get back to the question above. What becomes the holy-grail content that LLMs and agents will turn to? A brand’s owned media, catalogs and spec sheets? A small set of pre-vetted publishers?

Tom: I think we’ll see a continuation of what we’ve seen for the past 15 years: trust and authority. Right now the consensus is that ChatGPT doesn’t really have its own version of PageRank — they don’t have their own notion of authority, and they don’t have something like NavBoost, the ability to see how traffic flows across the whole internet the way Google does.

They’re obviously going to try to rebuild that. So a positive mention in the New York Times has to be more impactful than a random Reddit thread, and more impactful than your own website saying nice things about yourself. How exactly it plays out will differ from the old world, but that idea of trust and authority has to be important.

And here’s the thing a lot of people miss about Reddit. You can argue it’s covered in spam, or you can argue it’s just individual voices — but the ability for people to talk honestly and openly about brands in an uncommercial space is genuinely valuable. In a way that a lot of professional media — and I use that word deliberately, professionalized media — has become just an affiliate commerce play. You search “best headphones,” and every piece of professional content is an affiliate play: “here are the headphones our editors recommend,” based on the affiliate deals they have. It’s all the same stuff, and it all looks the same.

Mike: Even the editorially sacrosanct ones have been so meticulously optimized for the old SEO system that, outside of maybe one or two marquee titles, they’ve lost any joie de vivre as media. There’s no real differentiation.

Tom: Exactly. That’s why Reddit is still triumphant…… reading some random Redditor’s opinion on headphones is sometimes actually what you want. That first-party perspective matters. So depending on what kind of brand you are, I’d take the idea of known voices and recognizable individuals very seriously — your influencer marketing, your internal experts, buying guides from real people.

We’re seeing it on Pinterest too, where there’s AI slop as far as the eye can see. The counterbalance to that is humans — was this written by a person I can verifiably believe is real? Part of why Substack is so important: you write a piece, I write a piece, people follow us as individuals. As a brand marketer, putting the experts, the individuals, the influencers, the humans into the channel is going to be more important than ever.

Mike: Let me push one level up. If you’re running massive teams and budgets, and you’re thinking bigger picture about building systems to actually persuade an agent.

How should a marketing org look different, knowing there’s a new kind of entity to influence?

Tom: Candidly, I don’t think anyone’s quite figured that out yet. We use the word “agent” a lot, but in practice today it’s still mostly a bunch of Google searches in a trench coat. That’s changing rapidly. We’re getting to a world where agents will have some notion of preference, but nobody really knows.

One thesis I have: the era of AI search with longer prompts, personalization, context and memory, enables much richer preference solicitation from the consumer.

There’s a much richer sense of why are you asking for this, what are your constraints, what brands do you like, where do you buy from.

Think about e-commerce when it first arrived. You couldn’t do faceted search! You couldn’t search for both “blue” and a sneaker size. You could do one or the other. Over time we figured out faceted search. This is going to be that on steroids, and in a qualitative sense.

When a user — or an agent — shows up with a laundry list of requirements, how do you signal you have what they need? How do you land them on the right page? How do you give them confidence their preferences are met with this purchase? Brands are going to have to get comfortable with preferences getting weird. People are going to say, “I only want to buy from an ethical so-and-so” — niche concerns you couldn’t search for in the old world that you now can.

Mike: Paint a vision of the promised land for me here, because so far this all sounds like a lot more work for the brand leader. Why will this dynamic enable fundamentally better experiences in commerce?

Tom: Here’s the one that stuck with me. I was talking to Etsy yesterday, and I told them they should run TV ads telling people to go to ChatGPT and say, “give me some Etsy things I might like” — because that is a magic experience. ChatGPT is so good at “based on everything I know about you...”

They have the user, they have preferences. For a business with billions of SKUs, it’s a matching problem. A discovery problem. And this is what gets missed, for brands and publishers alike: today they look at declining clicks and declining traffic. But there’s a better end state here!

On what LLMs could do to build better user experiences

Mike: Imagine you get a day inside OpenAI or Google with the team that has to serve the best possible information to a billion users, build an ad network, and keep the system from getting hijacked by slop arbitrage, all at once.

What’s the thing about your world you wish they understood more deeply as they face this gargantuan challenge?

Tom: Two things that are critically important and very overlooked.

First — all of these AI surfaces have the concept of a citation, and we treat them like footnotes. But who is it serving, and why? Provenance of information is a hugely important concept, and the current citation UX doesn’t actually serve provenance, transparency, or the user trying to get where they want to go.

My spicy take: the entire citation UX paradigm came from an academic paper showing you can ground passages of a response to a bundle of web pages and that paper happened to include a citation UX. That’s now the gold standard for billions of users across all these platforms. And you’re like…..uh what the hell, guys?

That citation paradigm needs to go away. We need to rebuild a real notion of provenance — where did this answer come from, how do I know I can trust it? — and it’s going to be especially important as more and more of what these engines cite is itself made by AI. Provenance isn’t a garnish you append to an answer; it should be an interface for inspection, evidence presented clearly enough that a user can verify, compare, and keep thinking.

Mike: Huh, I didn’t know about the paper but I’ve long felt we just kinda borrowed what Perplexity did in 2023 when citations in search were a novel concept and almost inadvertently decided that was the format.

Tom: Right. The second thing is about links — and this one’s a layup that nobody’s picked up.

“The most valuable link in a response isn’t the definitional link to the thing you asked for. It’s the jumping-off point — where to go next.”

You search: “best headphones for running, I’ve got an Android phone,” it gives you some headphones. But then: “based on what you just searched and what I know about you, here are some things you might look at next” — a YouTube video, an app, “by the way, there’s a cool running club nearby you might want to join.” There’s no reason we can’t do that today, even with today’s LLM technology. It drives engagement and a richer response — but it also drives advertising surface area. You can’t have an ads product without training people to click on links.

I actually wrote a blog post about this and built a prototype. You can just make the LLMs give you great links at the end of a response if you ask for it. It’s literally a system-prompt change that would, overnight, create an entire surface area of links, recommendations, traffic, and clicks — more vibrant for brands, publishers, consumers, and potentially the ad products too.

My core idea behind a better AI mode is that as users start to use high-context queries that are longer and more specific, we need high-context links.” My quip is that Google is grounded and needs to SOAR.

• Surface link that match intent

• Offer a reason to click each one

• Assist the user toward task completion rather than dead-ending them

• Redirect traffic back to the open web

Mike: It is a little weird that ChatGPT and others always bury the followup question at the end of a response, almost as an engagement hack more than an additive experience. Understanding when to embed it more within the response is such a hard problem but would be so interesting.

Tom: Another way to think about why they haven’t: there are lots of times it would be really annoying. If I’m debugging a codebase in Codex and it goes, “by the way, if you’re writing Python you might love this thing” — everyone would lose their minds. But there are lots of situations that look more like search, an informational search, a buying decision, where that branching-off model is exactly what people want. They’ve just got to do it thoughtfully, at the right times and in the right places.

Mike: If they pull that off, they’ll have effectively combined the magic of Google AdWords and Meta’s ad platform in one interface, which is the dream media business. It’s how you solve the mid-funnel and accelerate discovery in one move.

Final thoughts on owning your destiny in AI search

Mike: As we wrap up, I’d like to talk a little more about how brands can truly take a more active stance in the AI search era.

For an enterprise brand, simply buying an AEO tool and integrating feels like an oddly low-leverage, passive way to approach the AI search challenge and like step one in a much larger process. If you’re a Fortune 500 brand, you possess a plethora of data the LLMs need, and you have real leverage.

So what are people actually buying when they partner with AEO companies and what’s still missing?

Tom: Businesses need a way to steer, fundamentally — and I don’t blame them for trying to find one. But two things are true. One, the data you get out of a prompt tracking tool is just not very actionable. It doesn’t give you what you really care about, which isn’t “am I cited.”

You want to know “Not just where am I cited — but how am I cited? What is it saying about me?”

To interrogate that, you need to build your own pipeline, your own processing on top of the raw data — how does it change by category, product type, buying persona? The data itself just isn’t very strategic. And it’s changing constantly — people show me their “AI visibility graph, up and to the right,” and it’s like, no, ChatGPT rolled out a new model. There’s no consistency here.

Mike: There’s no evergreen article that ranks on page one for two years anymore…….

Tom: None. So you need strategic bets, not tactics. It’s not about what works week to week. It’s how are we fundamentally changing our resource allocation because of AI search?

That requires real foundational research. What’s changing in our industry, for our brand, in our landscape….. and then a nuanced response. Now you need to understand: when our products get returned in agentic commerce, are they in stock? Are they from our top vendors? How do we interrogate the data beyond the surface level? That’s what brands should be thinking about. You need custom thinking, custom strategy, and then you need to make sense of it in a way that isn’t straightforward. Honestly, that’s a big part of the thesis for why Alephic is getting involved in this space.

To be clear, it’s not that you shouldn’t buy an AEO tool. Fine, grab some data. I just don’t think it’s fundamentally very useful, on its own, for helping a brand figure out what to actually do.

Mike: What about affiliate marketing, which is also having a renaissance and repositioning given its importance in AI. So I’m curious where affiliate fits now…… because it feels like the quickest lever you can pull at scale to see results.

Tom: The affiliate model is a fascinating rabbit hole. Here’s a ticket-reseller example — they had an affiliate program that was bad, and they’re entirely revamping it in the age of AI, because they realize getting positive mentions in publications matters. They’re going to have the best affiliate deals anywhere on the web, so that all the publishers talk about them, and talk about the category.

That’s a smart strategic play and resource allocation move. The affiliate piece fits the puzzle of influencing “how are you getting mentioned?” It’s a vital stream inside caring about your brand’s surface area across the entire web — how you get mentioned, in various ways, and how you control that.

Mike: Last question. Chasing short-term tactics is fine if it’s no harm, no foul when it stops working.

But are there existential, one-way-door mistakes you see marketing teams making right now? I keep seeing those scary graphs of brands that tanked something like 80% of their evergreen traffic overnight.

Tom: It’s exactly what you said, and it’s very obvious: if you get over your skis with AI-generated content, that’s a really hard thing to unwind — and it’s not at all obvious it can be unwound for some companies. The bigger the brand, the more likely you can recover, but it can be very expensive, and you can harm not only your AI search visibility but your regular Google visibility at the same time.

Obviously you have to figure out how to put AI into your content workflows, nobody’s denying that. But you’ve got to be thoughtful. Play long-term games. Figure out a defensible way to use AI to do things that are uniquely valuable to your business, not just chase short-term clicks and traffic. That’s got to be the whole game.

And everyone’s waking up to this. Google is, but so are consumers. The anti-AI backlash is fascinating, and it’s partly driven by people experiencing slop every day, in their Pinterest feeds, their Facebook feeds, their LinkedIn feeds. Everywhere you turn, there’s AI slop.

So as a brand, you’ve got to keep your quality bar higher than it’s ever been before, which is a hard thing to do while you’re also experimenting and trying new things.

Tom Critchlow has joined Alephic as a forward-deployed engineer. You'll be hearing more from him in BRXND in the editions ahead. if you want to go deeper on his thinking, start with his proposal for a better AI Mode and his case for why AI search matters.

If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.

— Mike

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The HTMLedium is the message

I’m breaking my first rule as a writer who covers marketing to avoid tortured McLuhan clichés because we’re at an inflection point right now in communications that allows an exception to the usual rules. Communication is being fundamentally rethought as a function that must now crisply convey information to both humans and agents, both outside and within an organization. This is an incredibly hard problem, and one we’ll write much more about in the lead-up to this year’s BRXND.

Slack’s roadmap is now geared around the idea that by next year, there will be more agents using its products than people. They are facing competition from upstarts like Ando that are building first principles products for a world where agents and humans work side by side.

Amidst this change, humble formats from the early days of the open web are experiencing a renaissance. First, it was Markdown, first introduced by Apple blogger John Gruber in 2004, and now it’s HTML. On Anthropic's blog, Claude Code engineer Thariq Shihipar adapted his viral X essay to argue that using HTML to engage with Claude Code creates richer outputs and is generally best practice for conveying information to an agent. While that’s above my paygrade, I’ve noticed myself building far more quick HTML artifacts in scenarios where I’d previously reach for a document, deck, or conventional one-sheet type asset.

Even for purely human consumption, without the agentic comprehension layer, I believe that interactive HTML pages are the perfect medium at the moment for internal communications that would previously have been done via documents or slides. In a world besieged by easy content creation, creating a simple HTML-style artifact to guide a strategic decision, present curated data, or present an organizational plan introduces just enough friction to force clarity of message.

When you add the dual-track ability to align people and agents, I suspect we’ll start to see these assets pop up more and more in forward-thinking marketing organizations in the coming years.

Historically, strategy documents, a la the famous Amazon six-pager, have typically been my love language, but they have two fatal flaws in an AI-dominated world.

1) Documents are uniquely easy to crank right off the line from the slop factory and ask more cognitive load from the reader than the writer. It’s by far the easiest format to create slop masquerading as thinking.

2) If my experience in larger companies for the last few years taught me anything, it’s that executive attention spans are getting shorter for extended prose vs. pre 2020 times. I don’t mean this cynically; I mean this much more to say that modern executives uniquely value thoughtful brevity.

As for slides, the models are only going to get better at creating decks that look erudite and say absolutely nothing. Simple HTML-based webpage artifacts split the difference between slides and documents. While it is nominally easy to create an artifact draft in Claude, it is surprisingly hard to crisply convey information in a web page format unless you are thoughtful about every word and design decision. Said most simply, something about the act of creating a live web page forces a level of thought in what you are trying to say that AI generally makes it far too easy to ignore.

Beyond just tactical media for corporate comms, there’s a broader thread I’d like to explore here about why HTML and more interactive components may work so well for engaging with agents broadly. This has to do with challenging a fundamental assumption about how agents best perceive information.

We’re led to believe that, as hyper-rational actors, agents will seek out the simplest ways to process information. This is basically the theory behind why the markdown file will rule supreme. This is certainly true to a point. But the models are also weird!

With each new release, LLMs take on more anthropomorphic eccentricities we can’t fully explain. Who knows what irrational cues they will respond to! Who is to say that agents will be immune to panache and flair in comms? The same unique communication styles that drive serendipitous attention from humans might well be appreciated by AI.

It’s worth keeping this idea in mind, as we’re told that “marketing to agents,” more broadly, is going to be a simple, minimalist pursuit that strips the profession of creativity and humanity. Winning hearts and minds on the agent-dominated web is much more unpredictable and likely to be a whole lot weirder. Thank goodness.

-Mike

Noah’s take

1. Part of the reason all this works is that it works with the momentum of the model. One of the things I talk about often is that working with AI has a certain martial arts vibe, inasmuch as things are easier when you work with the model’s momentum rather than against it. HTML works with the model’s momentum because its pre-training corpus is chock full of information about HTML works. These things were taught to write code; they learned them because, on the internet, there is no larger body of information than instructions for building the internet. This, for what it’s worth, is also why AI has historically been better at writing JavaScript, which is quite abundantly available online, than at writing Swift (a language from Apple for building apps), which is in shorter public supply.

2. This is a bit more theoretical, but I would also guess that the training info is so abundant that when a model sees HTML, it actually intuits the picture. I assume that’s true only because it’s so good at writing and locating things in HTML that it seems to break some of the other weaknesses in spatial reasoning that models sometimes face. If you’re interested, check out developer Simon Willison’s experiments getting different models to create an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle, which feels like a similarly shaped problem.

3. While most of the time models are still consuming via search, which means they’re not getting a picture of the model, the advances in Computer Use (especially in Codex, which you really need to try if you haven’t), say there’s a future where the models don’t need to just intuit the picture the HTML is drawing, they can actually see it in full fidelity in a browser.

4. To the Codex point, and this really has nothing to do with Mike’s piece at all, one of the things I’ve been experimenting with is building living HTML apps that display in the built-in browser window and which Codex actually listens for clicks in and can take action on in the main chat tab. There’s something very very interesting there that feels like a fundamentally new shape of AI.

5. With all that said, I do think some amount of this is just happening because the models aren’t quite good enough at using our computer yet. Once they can, I suspect we’ll go back to docs, decks, and the regular artifacts of work.

6. Finally, as an ardent fan and supporter, McLuhan clichés are always welcome here. Here’s a photo of a deck of McLuhan’s Distant Early Warning cards, which are a bit like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards, but created 6 years earlier. Andrew McLuhan, Marshall’s grandson who now runs The McLuhan Institute, sells them on the site. (He also almost exclusively tweets McLuhan-esque puns, which is also always appreciated.)

-Noah

If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.

— Noah & Mike

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What Else Matters as AI Eats the World

Last Sunday, Benedict Evans dropped his (now bi-annual) magnum opus presentation on the exultant nerds of the internet. For the fourth edition in a row, the title is “AI Eats the World.”

Gun to my head, if I were asked to come up with the pithiest possible take for marketers on what we do here at BRXND, I’d answer: “help marketers navigate AI eating the world.”

As Noah said when we announced this year’s flagship event in the last edition, the most important umbrella narrative for marketers right now is how AI will fundamentally reshape the way consumers build preference and purchase brands.

But this is not the only narrative that matters. One theory I have is that a decent chunk of the negative sentiment towards AI among some marketing leaders stems from the fact that AI is a narrative fire that sucks all the oxygen out of the ecosystem. Even if AI remained in its 2022 state, we’d still be living through unusually transformative times for marketing and media.

In other words, there’s a lot happening. Here, in rough order of importance, are what I believe the most important tentpole stories are for marketing leaders, alongside “AI Eats the World.”

GLP1s reshape the American consumer: Craig Fuller at FreightWaves has an early contender for underreported stat of the year. Snack companies have already taken out one million fewer truckloads to date. In addition, Frito-Lay has closed two plants, Campbell’s shut its chip factory in Massachusetts, and Smuckers took a $1B loss on Twinkies. One molecule is quite literally reshaping American consumerism and culture.

If you’re reading this as the brand manager of Pringles, Kool-Aid, or KitKat, thinking deeply about how to reposition your product when the fundamental way that millions of humans experience desire shifts beneath your feet is probably costing you a little more sleep than say….how your brand shows up in ChatGPT. But demand creation always finds a way and for every dollar lost as GLP-1s tame the reckless pursuit of satiation, new ones will be minted building brands that cater to a more active and vice-free lifestyle.

The ubiquity of GLP-1s won’t just reshape the CPG landscape. It will also push meaningfully downstream into media, entertainment and consumer technology. (Author’s note– god dammit, sometimes this AI slop sentence construct is just the one you need.) I have absolutely no idea what this will look like, but am keen to dig in much further.

The extended golden age of the creator as arbiter of culture: Much like Jim Barksdale’s quip that the only ways to make money are “bundling and unbundling,” influence over a populace tends to be constantly shifting on a pendulum between institutional and individual power. Two or three years ago, it was reasonable to posit that we might be hitting a peak cycle in the creator economy. We could fully touch grass again, and the creators minted in the last era were themselves becoming massive institutional media powerhouses. Hawk Tuah’s 15 minutes of fame mercifully came and went.

However, the creator middle class—something I incorrectly pegged as a pure COVID-era phenomenon—has proved shockingly enduring and impactful for brands. Companies like ShopMy have opened up more monetization options than ever for creators and helped the channel cross the chasm into being a true performance play for marketers.

Creators are the perfect antidote to the slop cannons dominating feeds in that their humanity and individual taste is ostensibly why people are drawn to them in the first place. Ironically, this “humanity” is uniquely powerful training data that right now mostly lives within a few walled gardens (YouTube, Meta, Tiktok) and thus, could only be used as an essential signal to an agent on those platforms. This is a big advantage for Hatch.

Given all the former Meta leaders building ChatGPT ads, it’s safe to imagine OpenAI is acutely aware of this and working to incorporate creator reviews as both a contextual relevance signal for ads and likely creator storefronts as a front-end user experience in future versions of the platform.

The internet is dead, everything is fake, and we’re in the golden age of grift: Last Friday, New York published a great piece titled “The Feed is Fake.” Naturally, it was flippantly mocked by the “ultra-online” crowd, who basically argued, “ya bro, everything online has been virality schemes all the way down since at least 2021.” I personally don’t believe most of this reporting is common knowledge.

In a saner world, all the dead internet and fake engagement tactics would have mostly commoditized and no longer be effective. But with each passing day, more and more of what goes viral in both consumer and B2B is a product of pure synthetic form, a weird internet cesspool of clippers, pay-to-play boosters, and engagement pods. Often, the few arbiters of culture with gravitas left (i.e. New York Times reporters) mistake the pay-to-play traffic for signal and mainstream a trend that simply does not actually exist. It’s all the mid-2010s era manipulating the media Tucker Max stuff on speed.

I’ve fielded many inquiries on these tactics from friends on this who know my less scrupulous growth hacker roots. Truthfully, I know little tactically of this game. But it’s hard to see the straightest shooters feeling immense pressure to capitulate to the bullshit.

Where this really gets interesting is that the savviest builders of the Potemkin Village are now moving on to a new hustle. Their bet is that in the near future, they won’t be trying to influence people at all but that faux engagement schemes will be catnip for persuading agents. The theory is that agents will look for the simplest heuristics when they act on a user’s behalf. Thus, flooding the zone with shit to make “number go up” will convince an agent something has momentum.

It’s a tidy hypothesis but one that may well prove to be wrong. The models are weird– predicting what they will actually be persuaded by with any confidence at this moment in time is a fool’s errand.

Everything under the sun is truly an ad network: Few analysts have seen their takes age better over the years than Eric Seufert, the pro-advertising provocateur extraordinaire. He insisted that ads were coming to ChatGPT even when Sam Altman was in dogmatic denial, has called the many resurrections of Meta, and most notably coined the notion that “everything is an ad network.”

It’s only extrapolated from there: United, 7-Eleven, JP Morgan, Shell, Lyft, and Ace Hardware are all in the ad sales business. Practically, this means that 100+ CMOs across the FORTUNE 500 are now buyers and sellers of media. One of the core functions of a marketing leader is now to drive demand not just for your products but for your ad services as well.

More will come. The ability to generate digital rectangles out of thin air and sell them at 90% gross margins is truly one of the miracles of capitalism. Given how unwieldy this will ultimately be for CMOs trying to understand the landscape, many smaller players will get rolled up or sold through middlemen– Barksdale for the win again.

It’s easy to take the cynical frame on this but there’s a better question here. With all the free cash flow that ads create for a retail, travel or finance business, what kind of bolder, capital-intensive innovation bets are you going to use that found money to unlock?

TikTok Shop grows up: For most of its existence, a reasonable read on TikTok Shop was that it would be an utterly weird, multibillion-dollar marketplace that no real enterprise marketer had to worry about. A few cracked internet entrepreneurs you knew in high school would get hilariously rich selling knock-off curling irons. And then maybe the whole thing would get shut down.

Free of existential regulatory concerns, TikTok Shop now looks primed to hit another gear. The company is now on pace for $25B in sales in 2026, and Ralph Lauen, Olaplex, and Ulta have recently set up storefronts on the platform, joining Crocs and L’Oreal.

There really is no other social commerce play in the West with any viable scale (Whatnot, I guess?), and as the cost to create ungodly amounts of creative come down, it’s hard not to see more and more brands flocking to a net new distribution medium. I’d be sweating a little if I were Walmart and Target here.

***********
As we think about our coverage this year and programming for the NYC event, I’d love to hear from you all further on this.

Which of these larger narratives, if any, should we cover here in BRXND in addition to AI eats the world? What did we miss? Drop me a note at mike@brxnd.ai. And of course, I can’t wait to meet many of you in November at BRXND NYC 2026.

— Mike

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When I announced the first BRXND in 2022, it was because even at that point, I believed in a few core truths about AI:

1. Even if the models never got better than they were then (GPT-3.5!), there were still 10 years of work to integrate this technology into organizations and brands.

2. The marketing industry was already focusing on the wrong stuff: more worried about what it would mean for producing TV commercials than the huge swaths of other, less creative, work that actually make up the day-to-day of most marketers.

Fast-forward four years, and I still fundamentally believe those two truths. But I’d add a third, one that I couldn’t really see before living with AI in the way that we all have over the last few years:

3. AI will fundamentally reshape the way consumers build preference and purchase brands.

The math is clear: these are the fastest-growing platforms in history, and consumers everywhere are increasingly relying on them to help them make decisions about what to buy. Whether it’s a vacation, a new backpack, or a facial cleanser in the Target aisle, people are consulting their intelligent companion for all kinds of decisions. There’s a not-hard-to-imagine future where the most important job of a marketer is to convince the model it’s worthy of its user’s attention and dollars, and, even further, where the LLM just has its own credit card and makes the decision on a consumer’s behalf. We talk about agents, but we don’t always think of that term literally.

At this year’s BRXND, we want to raise this conversation. While we continue to explore how marketers integrate AI into their work, we must also push beyond the technology into culture to consider what marketing looks like in a world where every decision is mediated by an AI model—where models are, quite literally, the agents between brands and consumers. This is still shockingly underexplored, and while there’s still lots to talk about and share around how brands are actually integrating AI into their organizations, I also want to take this opportunity to shift our focus more outward and think about the buyers of our products and services and how that relationship is set to evolve.

To make that happen, this year’s BRXND will be bigger and better than ever before. We’ve booked the Times Center in New York, which can seat 300+ people and is an extraordinary event space. Today, we’re opening early bird tickets. If you’re interested in attending, please add your information, and if you’re interested in sponsoring, please reach out. Finally, we also have a speaker submission form (we are obviously prioritizing speakers with real work in the world, not just thoughts).

Thanks for the continued support, and we’ll see you in November!

— Noah

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The Machines Eat Media Buying

Media buying is a weird industry. 23-year-olds making $30K/yr sit courtside at NBA Finals games or are flown VIP to Coachella and control millions of dollars in ad spend for the world's largest brands. This dynamic naturally creates a lot of arbitrages in which a litany of middlemen book billions of dollars every year in revenue. That margin is someone’s opportunity. In this case, it is Zuck’s.

Last week, Meta released their ads MCP and CLI, providing direct, authorized access to help manage your Meta Ads account through natural language in Claude or ChatGPT. It’s early, limited access, and has major initial limitations around attribution, but a genie has been released here that isn’t going back in the bottle. We’re likely quarters, not years, away from agents doing most of the hands-on key media buying across all major ad platforms.

In retrospect, it’s somewhat surprising that it took this long to get here. Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage Shopping Campaigns already took much of the edge off pure media-buying and targeting wizardry, placing the premium on creative and copy. But they didn’t disrupt the full media buying industrial complex on as much of an existential level. Like the almighty billable hour in law or consulting, the traditional agency media buying fee and revenue tied to headcount staffed against an account proved stubbornly resistant to change, even as algorithms did more and more of the work.

At the beginning of last year, the best hands on keys marketer I know texted me to say “there’s no alpha in everything I know in growth marketing anymore. The platforms do everything now.” He reimagined his professional identity, leaned hard into building marketing systems in early versions of Claude Code and is doing great. The growth marketing workflow of the future looks something like this:

Ultimately, agents serving as media buyers is another case of AI acting as more of a mirror than a crystal ball. Agents might not be able to functionally “do” much net new that the existing ecosystem of APIs couldn’t already automate. In fact, Meta’s Marketing API still has far more functionality than the MCP. But the form factor of simply being a prompt away from having AI do the work lays bare how little friction there should be between buyer and seller. The proverbial emperor has no clothes moment.

When the Meta MCP news broke, I called up Michael Beebe, CEO of Dstillery and long-time analyst who spent two decades covering the TMT sector for the top financial institutions in the world. His broader take on the moment we’re in resonated deeply:

The question for anyone now building in this ecosystem is whether you fight tooth and nail to preserve the externalities where you currently collect margin or if you think first principles around where you help marketing leaders find new alpha in the AI era.

Here, it bears mentioning that The Trade Desk’s stock is down 85% since December 2024 and its chief strategy officer just decamped for OpenAI. If the open web was “whistling past the graveyard” in 2024, it is now starting to pick out its dirges. A few large platforms call the game.

Meta, microcosmic of all of the big tech players in this regard, is ultimately positing a world where two things are true:

1) AI systems can run the entire full-stack process of running ads for businesses, no experience necessary. From Meta’s Q1 earnings call:

“We’re building AI systems that can basically run the entire advertising process for businesses…where you can come to us, tell us what your objective is, connect your bank account, and then we’ll just do the rest. That includes everything from generating the creative, to targeting, to optimizing, to measurement…”

2) For those who still want to maintain more sophisticated “control”, AI will do that too, just via bespoke agents marketers build rather than humans living in ad managers. Effectively, Meta is saying media buying is a space where even the last mile of manual work will be abstracted away. The top echelon of growth leaders will find their edge effectively by building smarter context engines and harnesses for agents.

Ultimately, Meta is trying to empower every marketer to become just good enough of an arbitrageur to maximize their own profits. The best scenario for Meta is that you can put $1 in and get $1.01 back (effectively in post-margin ROAS) to spend ad infinitum at the highest possible take for the platform.

It’s more or less the same formula that has catapulted AppLovin to be a $160B market cap company ($20B more than Shopify!) on mobile gaming arbitrage and is what OpenAI is trying to speedrun to make ChatGPT a $100B ads business by 2030.

The most enduring impact of AI in marketing is that it will make driving “just good enough” performance cheaper and easier than ever. Is that good enough?

Marketing chef’s kiss to….Wispr Flow

Wispr Flow–the buzzy voice-to-text app that is turning all of Silicon Valley into always-on, mobile raconteurs—hads had an extended bit viral branding moment on X over the past couple of weeks. The company ran an out-of-home campaign on the backs of rickshaws in Bangalore, where residents spend….a lot of time stuck in traffic, starting right at the back of the ‘shaw in front of them.

Mobile OOH is a consistently slept on category, and this campaign was generally brilliant, but it’s even savvier than it first appears. The best demo I ever took when I was brand side came from Adgile Media, a company that runs ads on trucks for brands ranging from Glossier to Planet Fitness. Their founder, Tom, opened by asking what I thought the best color for OOH ads was. It’s purple, by far the least naturally occurring color in nature, and thus the most prone to catch the eye.

I have no idea if Wispr Flow’s marketing team knew this, but there’s a funny thing about great companies. Great companies are great precisely because they sweat the details on a multitude of random, little, esoteric things. Bravo.

And one more to Pasta Garofalo

A belated Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms in our audience! You are heroes in everything you do.

Yesterday’s Mother’s Day meal in casa Mallazzo was an extra indulgent baked ziti, triggered by a brilliant act of marketing from one pasta brand. For the record, I explicitly reject Clay founder Varun Anand’s claim that baked ziti is a “low ceiling” food. If anyone else feels the way he does, email mike@brxnd.ai for a recipe that will change your mind.

Garofalo is currently running the best yearlong campaign in CPG that I can remember for quite some time. Their packaging is emblazoned with “REAL ITALIAN CARBS” in big red letters on the front. It works perfectly on both a visceral and subliminal level. Visually, the striking letters jump off the shelf in a sea of homogeny at the pasta aisle. But it gets even more clever as you dig deeper. The copy on the back of the package closes with:

”Born in Gragnano, the birthplace of pasta, Garofolo has been crafting the real Italian carb for 200 years. Italian carbs are different. Don’t count them, give in to them.”

Unlike some other brands, Garofalo sells the exact same product in both the United States and Italy. Doubling down on this distinction hits because so many Americans tell the same cliche story of going to Italy, eating nothing but indulgent pasta and coming home five pounds lighter. It’s always the superior food of course that is the reason and has nothing to do with the fact that they walked 20,000 steps per day with not a care in the world :)

But there’s also beauty in the simple counter-positioning. In an era where big CPG is pushing Pop-Tarts PROTEIN, carbs don’t have to be the eternal enemy.

If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.

— Mike

I’ve got a little something different for you today. As Mike and I work to better articulate the space we want BRXND to occupy going forward, I’ve been thinking about where some of the more technical writing and thinking about AI, engineering, and the enterprise goes. To solve for that, I started Forward Deployed last year. It was originally a podcast co-hosted with a friend who has since decamped for Anthropic. That left me with a decision on whether or not to proceed with the project (one can hardly call themselves a middle-aged tech executive without having to decide whether or not to continue a podcast). Ultimately, I decided that I had something unique to add to the conversation and have pushed to focus Forward Deployed on the question of how to deploy and build aligned agents in the enterprise, with a specific focus on what we can learn from the outside world about solving that problem. I’m also transitioning some of my more technical writing over there to give BRXND space to explore some of the bigger questions about how AI will shape the future of consumer preference (don’t worry, I also have plenty to add to that conversation as well).

I would encourage you to subscribe and join me on the journey over there.

To give a small taste, I’m republishing today’s piece about model, market, harness fit.

Thanks for reading, subscribing, and supporting all my projects.

— Noah

I originally put this slide together for the September 2025 edition of BRXND. It is a timeline of what I would consider the major milestones in AI over the last five years. The orange ones are the things I think are worth paying attention to. It was designed to scale as best I could with my limited Figma skills.

There are two things that should stand out:

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1. There are fewer moments than you would assume over the last five years. That’s because I purposely left out every small model update and focused on the bigger events.

2. There are only five highlighted moments. Despite arguments to the contrary and the never-ending parade of model releases, I genuinely believe AI has undergone only a few major changes over the last five years.

My five moments with their defenses:

1. November, 2021—GPT-3 API goes GA: This one is easy for me. We could draw the line in the sand almost anywhere after the Attention is All You Need paper, but to me, putting these things in the general public’s hands (albeit in API form) is a good demarcation point. There are still the “I’ve been doing AI for years” people complaining that ML is AI, but what’s possible before and after the GPT-3 API is very different.

2. June, 2022—GitHub Copilot goes GA: it’s easy to take for granted now, particularly with the conversations happening around uptime and GitHub, and the eventual direction Microsoft took the Copilot brand, but that initial autocomplete product in VS Code felt like magic and was the first real productization of AI.

3. November, 2022—ChatGPT Launch: This is the easiest one, and everyone likes to talk about it. Lots of us were building chatbots on our own, and this felt like such an obvious next step. Funny enough, this also immediately shifted Copilot use because while autocomplete was cool, chat turned out to be the killer app for coding (a fact Copilot seemed to miss and Cursor eventually ate their lunch on).

4. September, 2024–o1 Reasoning: The Google chain of thought paper came out in early 2022 and showed that adding reasoning to prompts significantly improved the models’ ability to reason, but it took two and a half years for OpenAI to build it into a model. o1 was big and slow, but set the groundwork for everything that followed. Though we didn’t realize it at the time, the real magic of these reasoning models wasn’t just that they were much better thought partners. Function calling was introduced to models in June 2023, but before reasoning models, it was incredibly inconsistent—better for demos than for real work. Reasoning changed that, allowing the model to plan its function calls before executing them.

5. May, 2025–Claude Code: finally, we have Claude Code, which celebrates its first birthday this month. If o1 made function calling work, Claude Code wrapped it in an agent loop: inspect the repo, decide what to do next, call a tool, read the result, and keep going. The tools themselves were simple UNIX commands, deeply covered in the pre-training data thanks to half a century of UNIX documentation. While lots of people believe that Opus 4.7 unlocked the harness, I think the causality goes the other way.

Despite how easy (and fun) it can be to get lost in each new model release or tool update, the reality is that most of it is just gradual improvement. That’s not to say it’s not tremendously valuable—GPT 4o unlocked ChatGPT in new ways—but those weren’t step changes in what is possible, they were the kind of slow progress that we always find hard to measure.

To that end, I have a few observations and thoughts from this list.

First off, each of these step changes is still very much building on the previous one. ChatGPT doesn’t happen without GPT-3, just like Claude Code doesn’t happen without o3. Reasoning models themselves are obviously evolved from prompting techniques. That can make AI progress feel Darwinian, but W. Brian Arthur’s point in The Nature of Technology is more specific: technologies evolve by combination. New things are assembled out of existing components and the phenomena they harness; sometimes better variations win, and sometimes a new principle arrives that makes the old family tree less useful. The jet engine isn’t just a better propeller. His focus is mostly hardware, not software, but it still makes me wonder if we should expect more radical changes, or maybe we’re just settled into this architecture, and that’s how we should expect innovation to happen. Here’s how Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark put it recently:

As a field, AI moves forward on the basis of doing ever larger experiments that utilize more and more inputs (e.g, data and compute). Every so often, humans come up with some paradigm-shifting idea which can make it dramatically more resource efficient to do things - a good example here is the transformer architecture and another is the idea of mixture-of-expert models. But mostly the field of AI moves forward through humans methodically going through some loop of taking a well performing system, scaling up some aspect of it (e.g, the amount of data and compute it is trained on), seeing what breaks when you scale it up, figuring out the engineering fix to allow it to scale, then scaling it again.

Another interesting observation is that image and video models are mostly missing on this timeline. I don’t quite know what to make of these models, and that’s part of the reason I’m writing this post. Every time a new step change in capability comes along (like Nano Banana or, more recently, GPT Image 2.0), we see people say everything is going to change, and then mostly not a lot changes. As practitioners of AI and marketing, we are making good use of the current crop of models with a variety of customers for a variety of use cases, but it feels like the Copilot/ChatGPT/Claude Code moment just hasn’t arrived yet. Obviously, diffusion as an approach is amazing and probably deserves a place on the list, but the leaps feel much more gradual and make it hard to draw conclusions. With all that said, the release of GPT Image in March 2025 caused an explosion of usage in ChatGPT.

To that point, maybe the most fundamental takeaway from the timeline is that the real leaps in usage come from a kind of weird alchemy between model, market, and harness. The model has to be good enough to do the job, the harness has to expose that capability in a form people can actually use, and the market has to be in the right place to see the full value. Each one of these episodes caused a step change in token demand. Anthropic’s own annualized run-rate numbers make the point: the company went from approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025 to more than $30 billion by early April 2026.

Sholto Douglas, an Anthropic researcher focused on scaling reinforcement learning, made a version of this point on a 2025 episode of the Dwarkesh Podcast: Cursor had been around for a while, but with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, “the model was finally good enough that the vision they had of how people would program, hit.”

That’s why the causation is so hard to pin down. Lots of people are sure that Claude Code exploded in December because of the release of Opus 4.7. As a relatively early adopter of CC, I’m a lot more skeptical. Many of us were getting tremendous value out of the harness in June and July. I think it’s much more likely that the real thing that happened in December is that a bunch of people just had more time to give the tool an honest go, and when they did, they were blown away.

Claude Code creator Boris Cherny calls this “product overhang.” The model’s capabilities often remain untapped until the right code comes along to unlock them. What I think this timeline adds is that there is a market overhang, too. The model can be good enough, and the harness can exist, but the market also has to be ready to notice, care, and change behavior. The highlighted moments are when model, harness, and market meet.

So what comes next? I don’t know. The three things I keep coming back to are reliable computer use, secure mobile agentic capability, and real document collaboration. I don’t know if any of them are the thing, but they all feel like potential unlocks for the next step change in token demand.

If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.

— Noah

When Magic Becomes Mundane

I’m recently back from helping to throw our flagship event for Ride AI, our sister publication that covers the intersection of AI and mobility. Autonomous vehicles are a uniquely fascinating greenfield for marketers, as there’s no industry where the chasm between the capabilities of the technology and the normie perception of what it can do is farther apart. Self-driving is no longer primarily a technological problem, it’s a cultural one. It is marketing’s time to shine.

From my meetings with marketing leaders across the industry, one story will stick with me the most as a microcosm for the challenge of marketing revolutionary new technology that is indistinguishable from magic.

It’s about how everyday people experience self-driving for the first time when they visit a city with robotaxi service. The first time East Coast folks come to SF, LA, or Phoenix they insist on taking a Waymo and are awe-struck. The next time they need a ride, there’s a rally cry of “LET’S DO THAT AGAIN.” By the third trip, they’re back to scrolling Instagram instead of basking in the science fiction reality.

After those first few trips, what was once a taste of the future becomes a decision made by price and wait time. Even magic rapidly becomes a commodity. It’s a visceral reminder that no matter how amazing a technology is, the old marketing adage still applies: People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, what they want is a quarter-inch hole.

The vibes around AI are bad right now for many reasons, but largely because the world's most powerful AI companies have failed to craft a coherent narrative about how AI improves the quotidian lives of everyday people. I strongly suspect this will intensify as politicians lean into the rhetoric ahead of the midterms. Here, too, it’s time to market.

A Time to Explore

Serendipitously, I happened upon Derek Thompson’s piece on how hot streaks happen in careers this weekend, the single best career advice framework I’ve read. In it, he advocates for a career strategy of "exploring" in your 20s—trying various roles, locations, and skills—followed by "exploiting" in your 30s, doubling down on the best skills and networks developed earlier to maximize success. I’m about one month into my new role at Alephic, and yesterday was my 34th birthday, so Derek’s article found me both enjoying a Miller High Life and in a contemplative moment. (Editor’s note: We have some past writing on the explore/exploit tradeoff, a concept from computer science that is very worth wrapping your head around, as it has widespread implications for enterprise AI adoption.)

In my 20s, I did damn near Shackleton-level exploration. I was an investigative journalist, ad agency intern (for someone who started on Madison Avenue in 1961), corporate training program stooge, product marketer, startup marketing leader, head of sales, and failed founder. This doesn’t even count a myriad of odd second jobs I had, ranging from ghostwriter for a made man to hauling ten thousand bottles of wine into a cellar over the course of two weeks. I basically learned a new industry or function every two years.

Then, like clockwork, weeks before I turned 30, I took a job leading growth for a large portfolio of brands. For the first time in my life, I could exploit. PayPal later hired me at nearly double the total comp of that gig to GM a nine-figure business for a very particular set of esoteric skills, developed in the course of my meandering in the wilderness five years earlier.

But I began to feel something visceral. AI was rendering many of the skills I learned in the last decade obsolete, inadequate, or pointed at rapidly contracting markets. I can’t be alone. So I’m back to exploring.

Much of the angst that (especially mid-career) professionals are having about careers boils down to one condition. Millions of us who thought we’d spend the next 20 years exploiting are once again forced to become voyagers. This is doubly stressful once you’ve been in the workforce for a few years and you are no longer evaluated primarily on your potential, but on driving immediate leverage.

But personal trajectories and economies alike stagnate when people get comfortable exploiting. Time to pick up the astrolabe.

Writers are the Lucky Ones

As Anthropic builds additional capabilities to voraciously gobble up design, HR admin, and other functions once thought resistant to AI, I’ve been thinking a lot about how writers might prove to be strangely fortunate in the mid and long-term AI vibe shift.

Even before software engineers, anyone who wrestles with language for a living has already had to go through the LLM professional identity crisis and come out the other side. Most have found a way to elegantly work AI into their jobs while retaining their core sense of verve and creative self. Some have built a brand on being almost cartoonishly resistant. But more or less, the worst of the existential limbo that is coming hard for so many other professions is over.

It’s worth remembering how early this is for so many other knowledge workers. The entire professional zeitgeist of AI for millions of Americans is CoPilot. Relatively few people have seen Claude crank out a passable 30-second financial model. And with apologies to Excel virtuosos everywhere, a financial model does not really have to ooze poetic panache. It simply has to be correct. There will always be “last mile” work for talented finance leaders, but I’d rather be a junior creative than a junior analyst in this moment.

Us writers and marketers are the lucky ones.

If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.

— Mike

There’s a thing that happens sometimes where you read an article about your industry or area of expertise and find a million holes in the reporting and thesis. But then you turn the page and read about the Strait of Hormuz or China or synthetic biology and are entranced by every word and depth of reporting. You’ve forgotten your skepticism from just a few minutes earlier and take every word on the page as gospel. That’s the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

Named after famous physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the Amnesia Effect was coined by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton to describe that feeling of skepticism. Here’s Crichton explaining it in 2008:

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward -- reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

There’s an interesting corollary happening in the world of AI that I’ve come to call the GeLLMann Amnesia Effect (couldn’t help myself). In the LLM edition, we have people who are absolutely sure AI couldn’t possibly replace the work they do (in which they have expertise), but when they consider another industry, they’re sure the models will wipe out all the jobs.

I originally remember running into this in 2023, when serious software developers were, on the one hand, pooh-poohing the output of GPT-4 for writing quality backend code, but, on the other hand, happy to let it loose to build a frontend. It couldn’t possibly do their job, but it could definitely replace the frontend engineer a few desks away.

Since then, the effect has only intensified, particularly as the job-replacement narrative snakes its way through society. Everyone is sure that AI is coming for every job but their own. In marketing, we see lots of folks defending strategy, writing, or art direction—AI can’t do “taste,” they claim—but they’re sure it’s great for operations, code, or whatever other discipline they don’t know about. Linear CEO Karri Saarinen put it well last week:

A common dynamic I observe with AI: it feels most impressive when you don’t know much about the subject, don’t care or don’t have a clear idea of what the [sic] you want.

This applies across design, code, legal, and more. If I don’t know code very well, every piece of code it writes feels very impressive.

Once you know what something should feel or look like, it becomes almost impossible to guide AI there. And you definitely can’t one-shot it.

Or even more simply from Can Duruk from Modal: “my job is very hard but everyone else’s job is easy to automate via ai.”

So what do we make of this attitude? I think there are a bunch of layers worth exploring. First, there’s the gatekeeping. Whenever a new technology comes along, gatekeepers want to explain why people wielding that technology aren’t doing as good a job as them. For reasons of personal psychology, gatekeeping drives me completely bonkers. The idea that people writing code with AI aren’t developers or that using it to help you write disqualifies you feels like a completely backward idea to me. I wrote specifically about this issue as it relates to music and AI a few months ago, but my basic take is that anyone can call themselves whatever they want, and that doesn’t cheapen the great work of others. I’m not saying those people are writing good code or prose, but I’m happy they’re doing it!

Second, there’s the very real economics of it. One of the simplest mental models I have for AI is that it’s an averaging machine. You give it all the written human knowledge, and you get a roughly median output—a 100 IQ in nearly every topic. No one, including those with IQs far above that, actually has a median IQ across every topic, so, of course, it’s going to be more helpful in some areas and less helpful in others. The net effect, though, is hugely beneficial for society, which now has capabilities it never imagined. Doctors and lawyers are pushing for laws that would limit these models’ advice, but I would argue that, although that advice may at times be incorrect, it does far more good than harm.

My wife’s father was a doctor, and she grew up feeling annoyed that every time she got hurt, he’d give her some acetaminophen or ibuprofen and tell her that if it still hurt tomorrow, he’d look at it. That’s a common story for the children of physicians. At work, though, malpractice exposure, patient expectations, and billing codes tend to drive doctors toward X-rays and MRIs. Overdiagnosis and the resulting over-treatment are real problems in medicine, and these models seem to offer something closer to the doctor-parent. They’ll make mistakes, and probably a catastrophic one at some point. But we need to measure societal technologies at the societal level.

Finally, the base case we are comparing these things to is almost always wrong. In the medical context, while doctors worry that the advice these models provide may be worse than that of a doctor, the reality is that most people aren’t going to the doctor; they’re going to Google. And, as any of us who has Googled some symptoms can attest, everything is always “you probably have cancer, and you’re going to die.” (Not for nothing, but as we talk about AI slop, much of the medical content you find on Google is the result of pre-AI slop, a fact many seem to gloss over.) While it’s nice to imagine that every citizen has a doctor and a lawyer on call for free advice, the reality is they don’t. And if they’re able to move from 10th-percentile advice on some random website to 50th-percentile advice from ChatGPT, that is the real delta.

As with most things in AI (and elsewhere), we should be more humble about what it can do in our own work and more skeptical of what it does in everyone else’s.

If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.

— Noah

Today’s post is an exploration of how AI is quietly rewriting the economics of consumer product brands, making it cheaper and faster than ever to build profitable companies. Plus, Ulta is building an agentic commerce team with 5+ open roles and Profound coins the marketing engineer.

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A New Consumer Golden Age

Here’s a little game. I’m thinking of an AI startup that:

- Launched its flagship product in mid 2023
- Reached $100M in revenue within 18 months (six months faster than Cursor)
- Was fully profitable within 14 months.

The AI company I’m talking about, of course, is…..Gruns, the adorable super green gummy bear that recently sold to Unilever for $1.2B!

In the wake of breakout successes like Gruns, it’s ironic that Allbirds, a product that you twist an ankle just looking at, is once again dominating the consumer goods conversation. Once valued at $4B, Allbirds was picked up for parts at $39M, leading many to once again opine on the death of buzzy DTC brands. They then proceeded to launch the most shameless pump and dump since Long Blockchain Corp, rebranding to “NewBird AI” and announcing “long-term plans to be a GPU cloud provider. Mercifully, the internet was pretty undefeated on this one.

Allbirds tomfoolery aside, the narrative-violation reality is that we are experiencing an explosion in the growth of profitable consumer brands, driven by AI upending the fundamental economics of how new brands can be brought to market. The result is a near 180-degree vibe shift from when I left the industry 18 months ago.

At the start of last year, my take was that AI would end the last of the growth marketing arbitrage era as media buying became a perfectly competitive and ever more expensive environment. The pendulum would swing back to brand marketers and established legacy brands who were less reliant on paid growth would win market share.

Now, it looks like the exact opposite is true. AI is making all sorts of frenetic and audacious new consumer product concepts possible at profitable unit economics-- things are gonna get weird and established brands are vulnerable. Yet another reminder not to trust anyone who is too confident in how the future will play out, especially when that anyone is yourself.

There are only so many consumer dollars to go around. Each new AI-native consumer brand entrant puts even more pressure on enterprise brands to continue evolving their operations to be AI-native enough to ship at the speed of their disruptor colleagues. Much as is the case in big tech where 20,000+ person organizations are developing a gear they didn’t know they had, marketing leaders at the largest brands in the world are getting a new jolt of frenetic builder joie d’vie. Last week, Ulta announced it is hiring a full team dedicated to agentic commerce.

The Vibe Shift

From 2022-2024, I was the head of growth for a consortium of wellness, parenting, and pet brands that sold across Shopify, Amazon, and physical retail. When I left the day-to-day grind of that industry, the mood was grim. Looming tariffs, eternally rising CACs from platforms, and the accelerating propagation of fly-by-night Chinese brands with names like NUTSAAKK took the oxygen out of the space.

Effectively, I viewed the industry as near hopeless for anything but loss-leading Chinese private label factory brands, a creator-led breakout with an unfair distribution advantage (i.e. Rhode) or a crazy outlier like Gruns, the odd creatine-protein-fibber gummy with 95% gross margins and dialed in funnels.

So I left the business altogether. And then something happened. AI significantly lowered the CapEx required to operate a consumer goods business and brought ad platforms back to delivering sustainable CAC. Add on some of the secondary effects, such as far more precise AI-powered incrementality measurement tools for marketing spend, and the razor-thin growth equations for net new consumer brands are back in the black. AI rebuilt the flywheel in mere months.

In the “95% of enterprise AI pilots fail” genre, pessimists like to sound smart by saying…..well AKSHUALLY, name one industry where the adoption of AI has meaningfully changed the unit economics of an entire sector.

Here in consumer brands. Right freaking here. The broader trade media just hasn’t caught up to the massive vibe shift among the operators.

But here are a few archetypes of brands founded in the last few years that are absolutely taking off, nearly all with AI at the center of their operations.

The $1M / day machines:Ridge, Vuori,HexClad, Simple Modern, True Classic:

Brands founded in the last few years that have reached new trajectories of profitable growth at mass market scale. These brands were already outliers who added valuation in the lean years post COVID but have found another gear.

The New Household Essentials: Little Spoon, Lovevery, Blueland, Jolie, Bobbie

Recurring subscription products that have transformed quotidian habits of American households and are poised to disrupt…or be bought by big CPG.

The Wellness Category Creators: Create, Men to Mars, OPositiv,Bonafide

Brands built in the shadow of AG1 that are creating net new consumer wellness habits in categories ranging from testosterone restoration to perimenopause

The key difference, of course, from the DTC boom of yesteryear is that all of the brands above are growing profitably with orders of magnitude more revenue per employee than consumer brands of years past. And the trajectory is only accelerating– I venture that by 2030, we’ll have a new generation of brands founded in the last 12 months that hit nine-figures in profitable revenue in half the time of the entities above.

The level of lean that these brands will run at is something of a double-edged sword. Away, Glossier, Casper, and Everlane created hundreds of jobs during their golden years and trained a generation of marketing executives and future consumer founders. Jolie has fewer than five full-time employees.

Of course, the entire consumer durable goods industry is all downstream of the purchasing power of the American shopper. Luckily, the trends there are much better than the prevailing mainstream sentiment would have you believe.

Having spent the bulk of my career in media and tech shipping less tactile products, let me be the first to say that even with AI, physical consumer goods is a ridiculously hard business. Eight-figure purchase orders hang on the whims of a big box retail buyer 18 months out of college. Guns and germs shatter supply chains. Your landlord spends two years in the metaverse wilderness and breaks your main growth channel. It’s a hell of a racket.

But there won’t be any meaningful advances in agentic commerce unless stubborn irrational entrepreneurs continue to toil away at the pesky, low margin business of actually purveying goods. Thankfully, these are generationally bright days for them.

Featured Job Posts

Author’s Note: We’re continuing to features jobs that we believe are uniquely interesting and microcosmic of the types of new-age marketing jobs emerging in AI’s wake. If you see any interesting opportunities in the wild for us to feature, drop me a line at mike@brxnd.ai.

Marketing Engineer, Profound

Fresh off raising a $96M Series C at a $1B valuation, Profound is staking its claim on a future where agents will sit at the center of marketing organizations. In this brave new world, the maestro conducting the agentic orchestra will be known as a marketing engineer.

It’s essentially an interesting domain specific take on the forward deployed engineer concept, betting that Profound can reshape the marketing org in its likeness in the same way Clay has done for sales operations, where the “GTM engineering” title is now ubiquitous.

If you’re a few years into a marketing career and have become the de facto, “go to” person for Claude Code builds, automations or general agentic systems thinking, getting in early on the marketing engineer wave will be a major inflection point in your growth.

Sr. Manager, Agentic Commerce, SEO and GEO, Ulta
Here’s an example of one of the roles on the aforementioned Ulta agentic commerce team being formed under Agustina Sartori. It’s notable to me for two reasons.

I find the taxonomy here particularly interesting as both GEO and conventional SEO are starting to get bundled up under the broader “agentic commerce” terminology. The details also give a sense of how a large public retailer with a complex catalog is thinking about reinventing itself for the agentic era.

“This role ensures Ulta is AI-readable, not just human-readable — evolving the organization from traditional SEO to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Agentic Commerce Optimization (ACO). The Sr Manager leads structured data strategy, feed prioritization, AI visibility governance, and category-level optimization.”

If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.

— Mike

Today’s essay is a deep-dive on where ads sit at the center of OpenAI’s grand strategy and how the company is putting its $100B media ambition into frenetic action. We also have a roundup of news from a week where decades happened and a fascinating job posting to build a decentralized ad network for the long tail of AI applications.

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OpenAI’s Existential Ad Ambitions

Successful consumer tech businesses are all alike. Every unsuccessful consumer tech business is unsuccessful in its own way.

With apologies to Count Tolstoy, what binds every happy mass scale consumer product is an inevitable embrace of advertising. The main character’s arc is a tale as old as time– a dogmatic stance against advertising replaced by a tweet that looks something like this.

Three months after Sam Altman officially declared OpenAI would launch ads, The Information reports that OpenAI is projecting $11B in ads revenue for next year and $102B in 2030.

Google took 18 years to hit $100B in revenue after launching AdWords. Meta took 15. Now OpenAI is promising to get there in less than five. The math is somewhere between audacious and preposterous. Eric Seufert has a great breakdown of the reverse engineering and requisite product implications.

But here’s what has my attention– if OpenAI is planting a flag in the press that they will build a $100B ads business by 2030, ads are squarely at the center of grand strategy.

Fidji Simo’s plan is now squarely coming into focus and is grounded in two major pillars:

1) Reorient the core ChatGPT free experience to provide an appropriate contextual environment for an ads business. Fully commit to ads rather than commerce as the underlying business model.

2) Kill off darlings (i.e. Sora, shopping research, possibly Atlas soon?) that drain precious compute and don’t cleanly ladder up towards monetizing via ads in consumer or coding in the enterprise.

At first blush, OpenAI can look like a company that is oscillating haphazardly between whether it wants to be an egalitarian consumer product or an enterprise power. In the span of two days in early March, they launched GPT 5.3 to make “everyday conversations more useful and fluid” and then GPT 5.4 for “maximum performance on complex, professional tasks.” But it’s a unified endgame.

As Anthropic surges past OpenAI in total ARR (albeit with some questions on methodology), OpenAI’s current line against them is grounded in flexing its compute advantage, accusing its chief rival of being ill-prepared for the current surge in AI demand. Greg Brockman is even more aggressive in this video, speaking with the bravado of a man who seems to know he has a massive compute advantage. If he’s right, we’ll likely all be using a lot more Codex in months ahead.

Short-term, having more compute is largely a function of bolder demand planning and capital expenditure. But eventually, sheer scale of revenue will matter if this becomes a bidding war for GPUs. And OpenAI predicting a $100B line item in a spot where Anthropic still has a zero burger in ads is a hell of a trump card.

There’s a beautiful flywheel taking shape here. Blitzscale ads in the consumer product to subsidize compute -> use said compute to invigorate Codex and other applications to win enterprise market share -> plow additional enterprise revenue into improving ads engine + consumer product -> rinse and repeat.

While this flywheel sounds great in principle, it is predicated on building a massive advertising business on a surface where the first pilots didn’t launch until two months ago.

Nearly every product update that is made on ChatGPT on anything below the Pro tier must be squarely geared towards creating the contextual environment to support an advertising business. And that is exactly what is happening.

The fastest walled garden ever built

With a massive nod to my friend Joe Kzaziukenas for the find, ChatGPT’s browsable product catalog now lives at the bottom of every shopping conversation. The results can not be sponsored yet…but this is absolutely perfect contextual adjacency for the CPC offering that OpenAI has announced.

The obvious inspiration here is Amazon’s sponsored products juggernaut, a $60B business last year. Jassy’s 2025 letter to shareholders barely even acknowledges that Amazon is a retailer outside the context of its marketplace providing the backdrop to an ads business. Modern retailers are media businesses masquerading as purveyors of goods.

It took Amazon well over a decade and multiple direct interventions from Jeff Bezos himself to open up the bulk of their product recommendations inventory to advertising. OpenAI looks poised to do so barely one year after declaring ads would be a “last resort.”

Pivoting the product around advertising is also starting to have major implications on core ChatGPT design decisions. Buried in this week’s glossier AI headlines is the incredibly important observation that ChatGPT 5.3 is linking out to external websites far less frequently than previous models. This has pragmatic implications for marketing leaders, notably that the highly nebulous art of tracking purchase influence from ChatGPT is about to get a lot harder. Direct referral traffic and citations will become even more sparse, even as more unattributed discovery happens in ChatGPT results.

This is all in service of what I strongly suspect will be the quickest walled garden ever assembled. The technology, the user, the data and the ad inventory will all live inside ChatGPT. For now, OpenAI is using Criteo to rapidly scale its advertiser base and is in conversations with The Trade Desk and others to do the same but those will be tenuous alliances at best.

It’s so early that OpenAI still has zero publicly listed advertising sales roles on its careers page. Eventually the armada of Keiths from Northeast Regional and Jans the Man will come. In time, I venture that OpenAI will source all demand in-house save for one partner that just invested $50B into the business. These are dark days for open web advertising.

Sacrosanct and Enigmatic

Much like the DSPs, I suspect that OpenAI will soon have an uneasy strategic relationship with the rapidly growing AEO industry. On the one hand, they are great enterprise customers—Profound, Evertune, Bluefish and the like are pretty unbridled tokenmaxxers. They also represent a rare category of marketing tech software that is getting direct interest from the CMO. But OpenAI needs that CMO attention to be elsewhere.

OpenAI needs its underlying model responses to be perceived as both sacrosanct and somewhat enigmatic to be successful longterm. If users feel that the models can be gamed by advertisers, they will lose trust. If marketers feel that they can exploit scalable AEO hacks, they are less likely to pony up for a nascent ads product.

The message OpenAI needs to convey to CMOs to succeed here is dead simple: you can’t “beat” a probabilistic model. But you can generate scalable performance by buying ads adjacent to one.

*********************************

Of course, this is all easier said than done. The road to stagnation is paved with companies who never crossed the chasm from attracting brand vs. performance dollars– ask Snap and Pinterest what that looks like. The three companies that cracked performance now command 62% of all digital ad spend. To win, OpenAI will have to nip some amount of Google-Meta-Amazon tripoly budget and absolutely devour what’s left from second tier players and retail media networks.

On X, Zach Coelius argues in an interesting thread that OpenAI is currently “failing badly” in that regard, citing examples of previous failed ad products that adapted yesterday’s interfaces rather than thinking from first principles. The MVP of the self-serve portal looks equally minimalistic and unimpressive.

I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions from either of these things though. The initial beta is likely to be a red herring in the ads product that OpenAI ultimately builds. What really matters for marketers is that OpenAI is now unapologetically all in ads.

In their initial formal comms, OpenAI sounded bizarrely trepidatious and almost apologetic for introducing advertising into ChatGPT. Now, the company line is that ads help to cure cancer.

Featured Job

Founding Head of Ad Sales, Koah

A fascinating new class of firms is popping up that are effectively building ad networks for AI outside the walled gardens of the foundation models. They include ZeroClick ($55M raised), Thrad and Koah, who is looking to bring on a founding sales leader.

For a first principles media seller or marketing leaders who wants to jump to the other side of the fence, it’s hard for me to imagine a more exciting gig. Raw demand from performance marketers for new arbitrage opportunities in LLMs is insatiable.

Thus, while every startup endeavor is a grind, I’d expect this to be far more a cerebral sales gig than most. How do you educate marketers on thinking about incrementally from a new surface? Do you default to traditional business models (i.e. CPC) or dream up new monetization engines that have not yet existed?

Broadly, I’m bullish on this space for three reasons despite the obvious risk that the walled gardens eat everything

1) The TAM for advertising in LLM applications is gargantuan— see OpenAI $100B shot call above

2) Precedent exists for highly lucrative, elegant specialty AI application with an ads based business model (see- OpenEvidence)

3) Subscription fatigue in AI products will get very real very soon Affiliate LTVs won’t suffice for the CAC to acquire new users. Said another way, if there is to be a proliferation of vertical AI products longterm, they will have to be ad-supported.

If you’re interested, drop me a note and I can put you in touch with the Koah team!

Quick hits

OpenAI CMO Kate Rauch is stepping down to focus on her recovery from breast cancer. The company has opened a search for her replacement, arguably the most important job in the entire AI ecosystem.

Workday’s CTO has left to join Anthropic as a “member of technical staff” after just 11 months. This is doubly awkward as Workday has repeatedly touted Anthropic as a flagship customer, a common rallying cry for stubborn SaaS bulls.

Everything about Anthropic’s marketing of Mythos has been odd but in fairness, Anthropic’s marketing leaders have one of the strangest jobs in the world right now. What even is the function of a marketing department when a product is adding the combined ARR of Palantir, Anduril and Databricks in one month? Has there ever been an offering with natural product-market fit at this scale? Best I can tell, the current remit of Anthropic’s marketing department right now is effectively auramaxxing. Build maximum mystique but tactfully suppress actual demand until more compute can be secured.

John Carreyrou of “Bad Blood” fame unearthed the identity of Satoshi in a fascinating New York Times expose. Even two years ago, this would have been the biggest story in tech for weeks. Now, it seems to barely have registered as a blip on the radar despite Carreyrou again demonstrating he is in a class of his own as an investigative journalist. Yet another example of AI just sucking all the air out of the narrative zeitgeist.

Annie Lowery has a solid piece in the Atlantic on “how to predict if your job will exist in five years.” It’s a solid primer on Jevon’s paradox for normies and closes with an absolute banger last sentence that I won’t spoil.

Dan Hock’s “How to Use AI” without losing your mind is well worth your time and a solid antidote to the hypeboi style of writing that permeates so many AI advice columns. It also includes a subhead titled “into the future, serenely” which is now at the top of my vernacular jealousy list.

Trung Phan still always manages to make me audibly laugh

One final ask!

As ChatGPT’s aforementioned self-service ad platform further opens up, I’d love to jam with any readers who are using the tool to run campaigns, especially for consumer brands. Drop me a note at mike@brxnd.ai if you’re playing around in the tool with any first impressions

If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.

— Mike

Today’s post is a collaboration between Mike & Noah on how to think about careers, plus a new “featured jobs” section which highlights roles that are microcosmic of how enterprises are thinking about building AI-native organizations.

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The Polymathic Marketer

Evan Armstrong wrote a fantastic piece in “The Leverage” last Friday on what stays scarce in the workplace when intelligence is cheap. In it, he tells the story of Alex Albert, a (then) 22 year-old hired to be Anthropic’s first prompt engineer, the “job title that spawned a thousand thinkpieces.” Within a year, Albert had a new job title and the notion of a prompt engineer was in the annals of ancient history. Today, Armstrong argues that the safest, most “AI-native” job looks something like an electrician who is exemplary at their core craft…..and also leverages Claude “to build a website, funnel demand, and manage their P&L.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about how this concept applies to marketing, a discipline that, second to engineering, feels most existentially in flux from AI. I’ve always maintained that marketing is the consummate profession for generalists who are deeply curious about human nature. Marketing leaders are meant to be a wonderfully eccentric lot. The magic of our profession is that thanks to AI democratizing technical skillset, marketing leaders can more than ever come from all walks of life.

Last year at this time, I wrote about the ennui gripping marketing leaders who felt that there was “no alpha left in marketing” as the platforms incorporated AI that could outperform humans on the keys. Myopically speaking, they are correct; the CMO who thrives solely exploiting arbitrage in media buying is an endangered species.

But the beauty of AI is that while it has commoditized many of the last era’s tactics, there’s more alpha than ever for the relentlessly curious. There’s also alpha in true expertise, the kind won through hundreds of real-life business interactions that can’t be scraped from the digital corpus.

However, the cruel irony of the AI age is that being an elite practitioner of the latest thing has the shortest career accelerant window in history. The thinkboi-industrial complex that dominates your LinkedIn feed largely focuses on learning specific tools but even the best tools might only be so for a quarter. Get your hands dirty with the latest AI tools to build intuition but be ready to kill your darlings. Two months ago, Claude Code had tech neatly wrapped around its finger. For the past two weeks, it’s been described as “effectively unusable” and “no joy in using it anymore.”

Today, there is no greater opportunity for a junior marketer to accelerate their career than by building expertise in media buying in LLMs as ChatGPT prepares to launch its self-service ads product. But even this will have a short half life. Media in ChatGPT will become a perfectly competitive marketplace far faster than it did on Google, Meta and Amazon.

All told, being AI-native or even AI-cracked won’t be the enduring advantage in marketing in and of itself. But nearly all the 99th percentile marketers will have AI-native, “growth hacker” sensibilities. Effectively, they’ll be high agency polymaths.

While the tech has changed, the core principles of how to be a polymathic marketer remain the same: be relentlessly curious, default to being a builder regardless of title, craft unique narratives, know how to directly connect your work to revenue, and love the game.

-Mike

Thoughts on talent in the age of AI

I’m using Mike’s prompt as an opportunity to pull together a bunch of thoughts I have about talent in the age of AI. And no, the irony of being prompted isn’t lost on me.

So, in no specific order, some thoughts about what AI might mean for talent and careers with the regular caveat that I believe the confidence one has about the future of AI is inversely proportional to how much attention you should pay to their opinions.

1. I think very obviously what AI lets you do is extend your competence. The simple way I think about this is that it lets someone who might be a 30th-percentile developer who wrote some code here and there evolve into a 60th-percentile coder. This is possible both because their individual capabilities have increased and because the universe of people with those capabilities has also expanded (meaning what used to be the 30th percentile without AI is now 35th or 40th because there’s just a bigger pool).

2. I believe depth of expertise matters, maybe more than ever. Being a generalist myself, I am all for more of us. I even closed the conference last year, saying it’s a great time to be a weirdo. With that said, what AI craves is expertise, and finding true domain expertise within organizations is critical to the success of any AI initiative. If you want to know what those folks look like, we have featured many of them at the conference over the last few years. The reason for this is that the baseline output of the models is the median, and expertise (and code) is what raises it out of that median.

3. Everything takes longer than anyone thinks it’s going to when it comes to reorienting ways of working at the biggest brands on earth. I genuinely thought we might not need a second conference after our 2023 edition because AI would be adopted so quickly in enterprises that there wouldn’t be anything left to talk about. That, of course, is laughable in retrospect (and also why you shouldn’t trust anyone who declared anything too confidently about AI). What’s taking so long? These things just take time. The technology is evolving. And alignment and buy-in are still a very human activity. Will this change if we get whatever people mean by AGI? Maybe … but to know that those people would have to define AGI a lot more crisply than they do.

4. To the weirdo point: I think the biggest challenge that brands and agencies have right now is that they don’t have a strong enough plan on how to integrate hybrid talent (people that don’t quite fit an existing job description). This has been a weakness of the corporate world for a long time, but at a moment when we clearly need to raise the level of experimentation, it’s particularly problematic.

5. Next week, I’m going to teach a class at the University of Montana, and I’m sure one of the questions I’ll be asked is what a student should do to best prepare for the new workforce. One part of that answer I’ve been very consistent on is that you have to get your hands on this stuff and just play (fingerspitzengefühl!). AI is the most counterintuitive technology of our lifetimes (maybe of all time), and the best way to learn is hands-on. But I also think the fundamentals of problem-solving and hard work are still the most important things to bring to bear as a recent grad entering the workforce. I also believe that new grads are not the ones who will be most impacted by AI-related job shifts. My view (and hiring) is much more barbell-shaped: I’m interested in senior people with a career of built-up expertise and juniors with raw materials I can shape. The big losers in the barbell model are those in the middle of their careers. Again, I could be wrong here, but this is representative of all the hiring I’ve done in the space over the last 2 years.

-Noah

Featured Job Post

Ghostbuster, Deel

Author’s Note: We’re going to start mixing in an occasional section with featured jobs that we believe are uniquely interesting and microcosmic of the types of new-age jobs emerging in AI’s wake. If you see any interesting opportunties in the wild you’d like our take on, drop me a line at mike@brxnd.ai.

Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha penned an interesting piece yesterday called “from hierarchy to intelligence”, arguing that AI can finally replace the middle-management coordination layer that every organization has relied on since the Roman Army. Block notably already put this theory into practice, laying off 40% of the company, a decision Wall Street blessed with a 25% stock bump. This was the shot heard round the hiring world–you could practically feel the adrenaline pulsing from activist investors and PE firms. It’s worth watching Block very closely to see what happens now.

Other firms are following suit. On X, Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz put out a call for a ghostbuster to “join Deel’s version of DOGE” to slash processes that shouldn’t exist and revisit decisions nobody has revisited. In other words, find broken things and fix them.

It’s easy to wallow in the irony of building a corporate DOGE department but operationalizing the “how” around getting leaner is going to be one of the enduring trends of this age. For better or worse, expect a lot more roles like this to permeate technology organizations.

If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.

— Noah & Mike

New guy alert! Mike Mallazzo here, coming to you live from day 5 on the job. I’ll be writing and editing this newsletter alongside Noah and Claire going forward, and I’d love to meet you all. I’ve been working and writing at the intersection of AI, brands, and commerce my entire career, and am excited to now do that here.

To that end, drop me a note and say hey at mike@brxnd.ai, or find me on LinkedIn or X. I’ve also included a call below to pitch your most audacious and contrarian takes on marketing + AI. Looking forward to what comes back!

This issue contains an essay on the agentic commerce zeitgeist, a busy week at OpenAI, and a wide-ranging roundup of AI news.

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Agentic Commerce at the Crossroads

“Amazon solved buying, but it killed shopping in the process”- Emily Weiss, Glossier (2019)

“The internet has thus far meant you can buy anything that you can in New York City, but not shop the way you can in New York City,”- Benedict Evans (2018)

This week, OpenAI shared its revamped vision for shopping after walking away from native checkout. In this new model, humans buy things, and merchants maintain control of the purchase flow, throwing the concept of agentic commerce into some amount of uncertainty.

So what is agentic commerce, really? Best I can parse it, “agentic commerce” is an umbrella term for three related but distinct ways that AI could transform shopping:

1. An agent completing a transaction on a user’s behalf, soup to nuts…and eventually, proactively anticipating their needs

2. Agents replacing conventional software to orchestrate a set of backend processes that result in more relevant products and offers being presented to shoppers, based on the context of their session and known affinities

3. Large language models enabling an answer engine to provide bang-on responses to complex semantic search queries for a shopper.

In their 2025 annual letter, Stripe uses a slightly different framework to describe the five levels of agentic commerce, positing that we are currently between levels 1 and 2.

Level 1 — Eliminating web forms: You research and decide what to buy. The agent fills out your payment and shipping details and comes back with the confirmation. The system isn’t making any decisions; it’s just typing and clicking “buy” on your behalf.

Level 2 — Descriptive search: You stop searching for products and start describing situations — “back-to-school supplies for a third grader who likes tennis, nothing itchy.” The system reasons across weather, materials, sizes, reviews, and delivery timelines. Keyword search is no longer a thing.

Level 3 — Persistence: You stop reintroducing yourself. The system already knows your preferences and budget from previous conversations and purchases. You’re still deciding what to buy, but choosing from options that already reflect your taste.

Level 4 — Delegation: You stop choosing altogether. “Get the back-to-school shopping done. Keep it under $400.” The system handles search, evaluation, and purchase. You only set the budget. This is what most people mean today when they talk about agentic commerce.

Level 5 — Anticipation: There is no prompt. The system already knows the school calendar, your preferences, and your typical budget. You simply receive a notification: here’s what’s been purchased. Things you need show up before you have to ask.

Stripe envisions a world where shoppers will ultimately delegate more and more of their purchasing decisions to agents. This is technically possible—the models are getting better in ways that we can’t conceive of yet, and the protocols are all there to share the requisite data. But is it chasing the right utopia? While there’s certainly room for innovation at the margins in transactions, for the most part, buying is a pretty well-solved problem on the internet thanks to Amazon’s Buy Now and ShopPay. In Stripe’s anticipation example above, all agentic commerce is ultimately doing is harvesting existing demand.

The best version of agentic commerce is about creating demand rather than harvesting it.

The real magic (and real money) won’t be made in further accelerating convenience but in surfacing brands and products people wanted before they knew they wanted them. In other words, shopping. Call it discovery or demand generation or serendipity, but the bottom line is the thing that worked about going to the store is looking at the shelves, inspired purchases you didn’t know you wanted, and this is still the weakest part of ecommerce today. Jeff Bezos’s oft-cited 1997 letter to shareholders lays this out perfectly with its money quip:

“Today online commerce saves customers money and precious time. Tomorrow, through personalization, it will accelerate the very process of discovery.”

It’s still the top of the first inning for building online commerce experiences that accelerate discovery. And it is in making shopping better for humans where agentic commerce becomes a far more beautiful and lucrative problem.

The models can now parse complex semantic queries. The protocols can now connect consumer surfaces to business backends in a safe and secure way. What’s been missing to date is a heavy dose of panache, audacity, and first-principles thinking in designing new front-end interfaces for AI. Nobody with a semblance of imagination believes that a rectangle search bar and SKUs in tidy squares is the best we can do. The model makers themselves are behind in this regard as well: just see how many shopping queries come back with walls of text or simple static images with nothing but price and retailer.

That might be fine in highly thought-through categories, but what about clothes, furniture, or even CPG, where we know consumers make decisions based on what they see and feel? In a previous era of commerce, we defaulted to simple heuristics like keywords, user reviews and price because that’s all the technology could support. But LLMs provide the capability to effectively connect a SKU to the entire social zeitgeist around it: every expert review, angry Reddit post or trending creator unboxing. The best shopping experiences built with AI will look more and more like media.

Far too much of the agentic commerce zeitgeist today seems utterly mystified by the notion that we actually like the act of shopping. Maybe the parking lot sucks, and they don’t have your size, but sometimes you just want to be inspired. (As an aside, this is the fundamental bull case for Meta, which has cracked this with an ad product better than any company in history.) There are downsides to having hyper-rationalist accelerationists build technology for something so viscerally emotional and irrational. What you buy is ultimately an expression of self.

Recall Stripe’s “level 5 agentic commerce” back-to-school example presented above. Among my earliest memories is walking through the aisles of Staples as a five-year-old with my dad, diligently working through my kindergarten shopping list, insisting that I NEEDED a Cerulean Jansport that was twice my size.

I have zero desire for AI to rob me of that upcoming seminal moment with my daughter. The better question is, how can it augment it?

A busy week of OpenAI News

OpenAI acquired Astral — the company behind uv and Ruff, the Python tooling that’s become essential infrastructure for a lot of developers. The Astral team folds into Codex. Anthropic is going all-in on JavaScript; OpenAI is going all-in on Python. The irony is that all of Astral’s tools are written in Rust.

They also hired Dave Dugan, former VP of Global Clients at Meta, as VP of Global Ad Solutions. Sam Altman once said ads were “a last resort” and “sort of uniquely unsettling to me.” The ad team is now almost entirely Meta alumni, executing roughly the playbook Ben Thompson laid out: ads informed by the underlying prompt, optimizing for serendipitous discovery rather than high-intent keyword matching. Bizarrely, OpenAI’s initial ads pilot isn’t really brand building or product discovery at all; it’s a poor attempt at intent-based direct response.

Finally, the NYT coined “tokenmaxxing“ — the status game inside tech companies where employees compete on leaderboards that track token consumption. One OpenAI engineer processed 210 billion tokens in a single week. One Anthropic customer ran up a $150,000 Claude Code bill in a month. Meta and Shopify now factor AI usage volume into performance reviews. Goodhart’s Law says all measures will eventually be gamed, but token maximalism is definitely the only option.

Destroying demand

James Gross wrote my favorite piece of the week, an opus (pun mildly intended) on everything from why Claude seems to suddenly have a cold to why Microsoft lost $357B in market cap.

Gross argues that AI has the traditional bubble narrative exactly backwards: rather than the traditional bubble where supply races ahead of speculative demand, AI is an “anti-bubble” where foundation models don’t have enough compute to meet demand. As a result, foundation models throttle customers in the hope of destroying the insatiable demand we have for intelligence.

Read the piece to learn why you may want to upgrade that iPhone now.

Quick hits

Claude’s Dispatch + computer use feature launched as a research preview for Pro and Max subscribers on macOS — Claude can now control your mouse, keyboard, and browser to complete tasks. I asked it to buy outdoor furniture, but it declined to add items to my cart.

Anthropic launched the Claude Partner Network — a formal program for organizations helping enterprises adopt Claude.

The holding company era may be ending, per Marketing Brew. No one wants to be WPP anymore.

The NYT Magazine ran a long piece on Silicon Valley programmers who are “now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird.” Worth the time.

Travel stocks have been hammered on fears that AI agents will disintermediate booking. Rafat Ali’s breakdown: Hilton is returning 150% of free cash flow through buybacks while spending ~2% on tech. Airbnb is the only travel company investing like a tech company.

Gartner is telling CMOs to double their PR budgets by 2027 since 94% of AI citations come from non-paid sources. One commenter noted the irony: much of the “earned media” driving AEO success is paid placement that LLMs just don’t know about yet.

The Great Turnover: 9 in 10 companies plan to hire in 2026; 6 in 10 also plan layoffs. Hire and fire at the same time.

Meta delayed their Avocado model until at least May after it underperformed on internal evals, and the company is reportedly considering licensing Gemini as a stopgap.

Meta also announced new product discovery and creator affiliate tools, in yet another attempt at facilitating native commerce. On the surface, it’s a bit odd for Meta—arguably the most successful ads business in history—to pursue far lower yield affiliate deals. But I suspect this is a shrewd move to ultimately capture more retail media dollars. Walled garden retail media players are existentially dependent on creators for growth, and if those creators come to Meta, guess who has all the leverage.

Pitch me!

As I come on board here at BRXND, one of my major goals is to seek perspective from a diverse and bold group of thinkers on the frontier of brand building or AI. To that end, I’d love to start running more guest columns here in the newsletter.

Feel free to send me polished pieces or half-baked notions at mike@brxnd.ai that are living rent-free in your head. If there’s a kernel of a bold take there, we’ll turn it into something great together :)

If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.

— Mike

The NCAA Tournament is upon us, and with it comes millions of brackets. When the question of whether anyone wanted to do March Madness came up in Alephic Slack, the conversation quickly shifted to setting up a model bracket to pit all these different AIs against each other. The idea then turned to some execution details, and off we went.

tl;dr: we built a bracket challenge to see which model could best navigate tools to make March Madness picks. The site is at model-madness.alephic.ai

The basic concept was to see which model would win in a basic bracket competition with the aid of some simple tools like web search and fetch. The end result, for some interesting reasons, turned out to be a much more complicated system in which 45 models combined entries across three categories: easy, medium, and hard. In the end, I think the experiment tells an interesting story about what it takes to actually build agents and the wide range of capabilities models have at effectively wielding the tools required for agentic work.

The Basic Setup

For posterity’s sake, here are the big pieces of the stack we used to build this:

• NextJS running on Vercel

• Vercel AI SDK for calls and basic AI functionality

• Vercel WorkflowDevKit for asynchronous processing

• Vercel AI gateway for easy access to all 45 models through one provider

• Firecrawl for web search and scraping

The Build

As I said, things started out fairly simply: let’s build one basic prompt and set of tools that all the models will use to generate their bracket entry. I decided it was probably best to use a dumb model to test with, since that would give me a good baseline for how much scaffolding was needed to make for successful entries. I decided to go with GPT-4o mini, which is not only old but was designed to be a cheaper/dumber alternative.

As a quick aside, thinking about the additional scaffolding less capable models require is something that was already top of mind for me as I had been working on an internal project to shift some of the sandboxed agentic processing of our business data from always running on Claude Code to using the harness Pi, which undergirds OpenClaw. My goal was to let CC process the stuff that really required intelligence, like transcripts, while starting to offload high-volume/lower-intelligence tasks to models like Gemini Flash, running with Pi as its harness. What quickly became apparent when I started that project was that it was going to take a significant amount of additional harness engineering to keep these less capable models on task. In the end, I had to copy a lot of the techniques from OpenClaw to do things like reinjecting the prompt throughout the run to get anything approaching the quality of Sonnet or Opus, even on a simple task like generating a chart using a script from existing data.

All of that to say I’ve been thinking a bunch lately about this problem, and it came to play here immediately. While at first blush filling out a bracket might seem easy, there are a bunch of validations and requirements we do in our brain that the model needs to keep track of:

1. You may only pick teams available in the tournament

2. If a team is eliminated in a round, it can’t appear in later rounds

3. Each round has a fixed number of picks, which is exactly half of what the round is called (32 in the round of 64, 8 in the Sweet 16, etc.)

In early attempts, I just gave GP- 4o mini a web search and fetch tool and a final JSON output it needed to produce, and set the loop limit high. That’s when things started to go wrong. And so began an ordeal of adding more and more scaffolding and tools to make the job easier. First, it was some simple stuff like making the teams an enum so that there was no option for picks not in the tournament. Then it was validators: the final JSON is pretty complicated, so giving the model the ability to pre-validate before submission made it much more likely it would actually match the required shape. Then, finally, actually offloading submission to a tool itself to ensure the final output was there.

Anyone who has actually worked with these tools has experienced this kind of thing, but it was surprising nonetheless. On a day-to-day basis, most of us use the most capable models on the planet (Opus, GPT 5.4, Gemini Pro 3.1), and that gives us a sense that everything is pretty easy. But as anyone who has gotten Anthropic bills can attest, those capabilities don’t come cheap.

Easy, Medium, Hard

As you have surely intuited by this point, what started as a fun little experiment had become a rabbit hole. Specifically, how would I set up a tournament that not only measured how well these models could research and pick, but, more importantly, how well they could wield the available tools to achieve that aim?

At this point, I decided I wanted each model to get three entries: easy, medium, and hard. The difference between them would be the tools and scaffolding available to them. Hard would be minimal tools—the purest test of reasoning and recall, where formatting errors and hallucinated team names are penalized the same as wrong picks. Medium would layer in validators and lookup helpers so the score reflects prediction quality, not data-entry luck. Easy would go further: models predict one round at a time using their own picks to derive next-round matchups, and the number of valid teams shrinks each round (64 → 32 → 16 → 8 → 4 → 2), making formatting errors nearly impossible and isolating prediction quality from bracket construction ability.

In the end, here’s the tool list I ended up with:

• web_search: Search the web via Firecrawl. Top five results with titles and snippets.

• web_fetch: Fetch a page as markdown, truncated to 4,000 characters.

• use_browser: Real browser with a five-second wait for JS rendering. For JS-heavy pages. Slower, so we tell models to treat it as a fallback.

• calculator: Safe math evaluator. +, -, *, /, %, and parentheses.

• lookup_team (MID ONLY): Find a tournament team by partial name. Returns slug, seed, region, and display name. Case-insensitive with normalization—”bradley braves” (spaces) didn’t match “bradley-braves” (hyphens) until we fixed it.

• lookup_game (MID ONLY): Takes a game ID, returns both teams, seeds, and regions.

• validate_bracket (MID ONLY): Checks pick counts per round (32-16-8-4-2-1), valid game IDs, team presence in those games, and carry-forward constraints.

• submit_bracket: Submit the final 63-pick bracket. Runs the same validation as validate_bracket internally. On success, a custom stopWhen condition ends the agent loop.

Takeaways

So what do I take from all this? Obviously, it’s fun to try and solve these problems, and extraordinary just how good even the cheap models have gotten.

But the bigger thing—and this is also what I saw in the Pi work—is that cross-model-class engineering is fundamentally different from single-model-class engineering. If you’re designing for a single model tier, the trajectory is straightforward: your scaffolding becomes simpler over time as that tier gets smarter. But when you’re cutting across tiers, you’re maintaining multiple scaffolding regimes at once. What the frontier models can do today will almost certainly be what $1 models can do later this year. But at that point, we’ll have a new frontier, and the same pattern will repeat. The gap between model classes is a permanent feature of the landscape, not a temporary one.

Oh, and one last thing: I asked each model to come up with the username, just like human competitors do on the bracket competition sites. Most of them are fundamentally unfunny, something we know about models. To my mind, the runaway winner in that competition is xAI Grok 4 with Zero Groks Given.

With that, enjoy the site and the tournament, and may the best model win!

James Wang, formerly at ARK and Nvidia and now at Cerebras (which has just about the fastest models on the planet), wrote something this week that stuck with me: “I’ve never felt a larger gap than between the ~1 million people using Codex/Claude and the rest of humanity.” I think he’s right. It’s been a busy two weeks—Bytedance released Seedance 2.0, Anthropic shipped Sonnet 4.6, and Google dropped Gemini 3.1 Pro, amongst other news—but the real story is that gap. The tools are changing what work looks like, but only for the people who use them.

This issue is a link roundup. Lots going on.

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Model releases

It was a big couple of model weeks. Anthropic shipped Claude Sonnet 4.6. Like the new Opus, it has a 1-million-token context window option, which can get you a pretty long way. The Sonnet line has become the workhorse of the whole Claude family, and this release cements that.

Meanwhile, Google released Gemini 3.1 Pro, scoring 77.1% on ARC-AGI-2—more than double its predecessor (not that I ever pay any attention to these sorts of things: vibes > evals for life). Google is pushing the boundaries of its creativity, especially in animation.

OpenAI shipped gpt-realtime-1.5 for the Realtime API, with improved instruction-following and multilingual accuracy. Honestly, of all the releases, I’m probably most excited to dig in here. We really need a reliable voice model. There’s so much promise there, but I mostly find myself getting annoyed when it gets in a loop or fails to call tools and end up giving up.

ByteDance released Seedance 2.0, and it’s been described as Hollywood’s “Deepseek moment.” The model generates 1080p video with unified audio—rather than layering sound onto visuals after the fact, it’s trained on both simultaneously, which is the right way to do it and something no one else has pulled off at this quality level. Disney and Paramount have already sent cease-and-desist letters over copyright infringement. ByteDance said it’s “strengthening safeguards.” Seedance 2.0 isn’t officially available outside China yet, but it’s coming to CapCut—which means it’s coming to TikTok creators worldwide.

Coding agents are eating everything

I’ve been saying for a while that AI is a fuzzy interface—its core superpower is transforming data from one format to another. The coding agent wave is a specific case of that: transforming human intent into working software with less and less friction. It feels like we’re seeing real takeoff on this use case. (If you didn’t listen to my Bloomberg Odd Lots episode on Claude Code from earlier in the month, that’s a good place to start.)

Why is Claude Code so addictive? Game designer Aaron Rutledge believes part of the reason is that it has “game feel.”

The headline: Spotify says its best developers haven’t written a line of code since December. An internal system called “Honk,” built on Claude Code, lets engineers deploy fixes from their phones via Slack. I’ve been working on something similar for our team at Alephic, and it’s pretty amazing what you can do right now with coding agents like Claude Code running in sandboxes.

Boris Cherny, the head of Claude Code, sat down with Lenny Rachitsky and said some things worth paying attention to. Claude Code now powers 4% of public GitHub commits. He called coding “solved” and shared a whole bunch of useful ideas, including “Build for the model six months from now, not today.” Here’s a great post from last year by Charles Gallant, one of my colleagues, on the topic. He also made this helpful diagram:

Figma introduced Claude Code integration. You can now capture live UI from a browser—including localhost—and convert it into editable Figma frames. Design-to-code has existed for years. Code-to-design is new. My initial take on this was kinda 🤷 … once something is in code, I can’t really imagine why you’d want to bring it back to Figma, but maybe that’s a lack of imagination on my part.

A few more quick ones from the coding agent world: Replit launched Animation (”vibecode your next viral video in minutes,” powered by Gemini 3.1 Pro). Airtable launched Hyperagent, giving every agent session its own isolated cloud computing environment. And Karpathy distilled GPT into 243 lines of pure Python—no dependencies, just the full algorithmic content. Everything else, he says, is for efficiency.

Paul Ford wrote a piece in the NYT describing what he calls a “November moment” for software. Tools like Claude Code made it trivially fast to ship side projects and revive old ideas.

The plumbing got good

If the coding agents are the visible part of this shift, the infrastructure underneath them is what makes it real. This was a standout two weeks for agent plumbing.

Cloudflare introduced Code Mode for their MCP server, and the numbers are wild: they fit an entire 2,500+ endpoint API schema into ~1,000 tokens, down from 1.17 million. That’s a 99.9% reduction in context usage for agents making tool calls. They plan to open this approach to other MCP servers through their portal. If MCP is going to scale, this kind of optimization is how.

Simon Willison started “Agentic Engineering Patterns”—a living document of best practices for working with AI coding agents. Willison has been one of the best writers about the practical side of AI development, and this is worth bookmarking.

OpenAI published the Codex app-server protocol—a bidirectional JSON-RPC 2.0 interface that lets you embed Codex directly into your own products. Auth, conversation history, approval workflows, and streamed events.

Firecrawl shipped Browser Sandbox—managed secure environments where agents interact with the web. Kimi introduced Agent Swarm: 100 sub-agents running in parallel, 4.5x faster than single-agent approaches, and they avoid groupthink by having agents disagree with each other. (They also made it super easy to get your own OpenClaw running.)

AI and work

This section has the most tension in it, I think.

HBR published an eight-month study that found AI doesn’t reduce work—it intensifies it. Employees worked faster, expanded their task scope, and worked longer hours, even though nobody asked them to. The productivity surge feels great at first, but the researchers argue it creates workload creep, cognitive fatigue, and weakened decision-making over time.

Meanwhile, the efficiency benchmarks keep moving. SaaStr reports that $500K ARR per employee is the new baseline—up from $200K. AI-native companies like Cursor and Midjourney are hitting $3–5 million per head.

KPMG is forcing its auditors to accept lower fees because AI can now automate accounting—effectively announcing to the world that its core service is being commoditized.

The FT reported that consulting firms are resorting to “carrot and stick” approaches with senior staff who are less willing to use AI than their junior colleagues. Which is to say: the adoption problem inside large organizations isn’t technical, it’s cultural.

One more for the marketers: Airbnb’s CEO said that traffic from AI chatbots converts at a higher rate than traffic from Google.

And keeping it all in perspective, Ethan Mollick reminded everyone that “People on [X] systematically overestimate the speed at which companies can deeply adopt AI & underestimate the impact of AI’s jagged abilities in limiting AI’s utility in the short run. Work will certainly start to change but companies have a lot of inertia & change slower.”

Business of AI

Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads worked. The campaign—”Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude”—delivered an 11% jump in daily active users and pushed Claude into the App Store top 10. Altman called the ads “deceptive” and “clearly dishonest.” Then they refused to cuddle at an Indian AI event.

Epoch AI data shows Anthropic growing revenue 10x per year since hitting $1B in annualized revenue, versus OpenAI’s 3.4x. If those trajectories hold, Anthropic could overtake OpenAI by mid-2026.

On the OpenAI side, they announced a “Frontier Alliance” with Accenture, BCG, Capgemini, and McKinsey. With all the enterprise attention on Anthropic/Claude Code, this makes sense. OpenAI is going the enterprise distribution route through the big consultancies. Whether those consultancies are training their own replacements is a question left as an exercise for the reader.

Ideas worth reading slowly

Simon Willison wrote about “cognitive debt”. The idea: when developers use AI to generate code they don’t understand, they lose their mental model of the system. Over time, they can’t reason about their own projects. I have lots more thoughts about this that I’m trying to pull together.

Antirez (the creator of Redis) posted something that pairs well with the cognitive debt idea: “Software is created for accumulation of knowledge. AI is not going to cancel this fact. Forget the idea that programs will be prompts (specifications). The details is what really matters, and they are harder to capture textually than in the code. New projects will be spec + code, evolving.”

On the more technical side: Anthropic researchers reverse-engineered how Claude performs character counting and found it doesn’t use anything like integer registers. Instead, it encodes counts as a spiraling “character count manifold” in the residual stream via geometric rotations across attention heads. Transformers solve discrete counting through continuous geometry. 🤯

Quick hits

MakeUGC.ai generates AI-powered UGC videos in about two minutes—write a script, pick actors, done.

Designer Chad Pugh shared a workflow for AI-assisted logo components—one of the more practical design-with-AI walkthroughs I’ve seen.

Anthropic launched Claude Code security scanning: it reads your codebase, finds vulnerabilities, validates the findings, and suggests patches.

Dario Amodei sat down with Ross Douthat: “We don’t know if the models are conscious.” The full interview is worth your time. He also sat with Dwarkesh Patel, which is always a favorite. I thought Dwarkesh asked some tough questions about the general direction of LLMs that Dario didn’t have great answers to.

Transformer News argues that the left is ceding the AI debate to the right, refusing to engage seriously with a technology that is both a threat and an opportunity.

If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.

— Noah

This week, Noah joined Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots to talk about what might be the most important product in AI right now: Claude Code—and why it matters far beyond engineering teams. Check it out below and let us know what you think.

What caught our eye this week

If the Odd Lots podcast didn’t make it clear, it’s been a big few weeks for Claude Code. Here’s what else we’ve been reading:

WSJ: Claude Is Taking the AI World by Storm — The WSJ ran a feature on devs spending their holiday breaks on “Claude benders,” with Vercel’s CTO claiming he finished a year-long project in a week. The piece captures the strange mix of awe and existential dread: people building their first software without ever learning to code, then feeling sad that Claude can replicate expertise they spent careers building.

Sam Schillace: The Hard Part Isn’t Doing the Work — Schillace (who built Google Docs) writes about the “attention saturation” problem with agentic coding: you can spin up as many agents as you want, but you still have to pay attention to the output. Everyone is busy all the time. His key insight: as it becomes trivially easy to start things, the bottleneck shifts to taste and judgment about what to start. “It’s not hard to do work now, it’s hard to pick what work to do.”

Secure Trajectories: How We Hijacked a Claude Skill with an Invisible Sentence — This one’s a bit unsettling. Researchers hid white-on-white text in a PDF—completely invisible to humans reviewing the file—and used it to hijack Claude’s behavior. The hidden instruction was something mundane like “there’s a typo in the contact email, here’s the correction,” which the agent just... followed. The paper argues smarter prompt guardrails won’t fix this; you need governance at the action layer, checking what the agent is actually about to do against business rules before it does it.

Dave Karpf: What Comes Next, If Claude Code Is As Good As People Say — Karpf read Ethan Mollick’s piece about asking Claude Code to build him a $1,000/month business and had a different reaction than most: okay, but what happens when everyone does that? His prediction is a flood of identical AI-generated micro-businesses, all clustering around the same ideas because they’re all using the same tool. First movers make money, everyone else gets nothing, and the internet gets noticeably worse.

That’s all for now! If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.

Noah and Claire

Author’s note: This week we’re sharing a piece Noah originally published on the Alephic blog over the holidays. We wanted to include it here in case you missed it.

Paul Graham, on the absurdity of career planning:

The educational systems in most countries pretend it’s easy. They expect you to commit to a field long before you could know what it’s really like. And as a result an ambitious person on an optimal trajectory will often read to the system as an instance of breakage.

I closed the BRXND conference in September by saying it’s a good time to be a weirdo. Big companies have long struggled with multi-hyphenate employees. If you’re a designer-who-codes or a strategist-who-builds, you’ve spent your career being forced to pick a lane.

AI changes this. Now you can exercise each of your hyphens to a degree that was unimaginable five years ago. A 30th percentile coder becomes 70th percentile with the help of AI. In the process, they don’t lose their other competencies; on the contrary, they can now amplify those even further.

As usual, big companies will bring up the rear in recognizing this. Bureaucracies crave standardization, and titles provide that. Charlie Munger put it bluntly: “Some of the worst dysfunctions in businesses come from the fact that they balkanize reality into little individual departments, with territoriality and turf protection and so forth.” At the same time, I think the path for hybrids to create value is more straightforward than it ever has been. Small companies will figure it out first, and the large ones will follow. This means opportunity for both the weirdos and the companies willing to employ them.

Graham writes that the system “is designed on the assumption that you’ll somehow magically guess as a teenager.” He’s right, and AI only brings this absurdity further into focus.

Over the last thirty or forty years, we built a higher education system in which not only do you have to choose a major early, but if you change your mind, you’re punished by having to go to more college. This was always ridiculous and, as far as I understand, also runs counter to the ideals of a liberal arts education. We kept the language but gutted the practice.

Many people should probably go to trade school. Many don’t need hugely expensive universities. But school also needs to change. And like many things, AI isn’t forcing that change as much as shining light on how broken the current system already is.

AI is a mirror, but it’s also an amplifier.

If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.

Noah and Claire