Welcome to Week In Review
From new tools transforming creative work, to campaigns reshaped by automation, we track the biggest shifts at the intersection of AI, media, and marketing. This week, Perplexity’s CEO shares major cost savings because of agentic AI, Anthropic reveals marketing jobs are some of most at risk, and IAB Tech Lab reveals framework to prevent unlawful content scraping.
Top Stories of the Week
Perplexity CEO Says Computer Replaced $225K Marketing Tool
AI answer engine Perplexity’s CEO Aravind Srinivas posted on LinkedIn and X that the company’s AI agent ‘Computer’ replaced marketing tools worth $225K per year in the space of a single weekend. ‘Perplexity Computer’ is a general purpose agent that can complete tasks across multiple software tools on behalf of a user.
Why it matters: This claim from Srinivas was shared to demonstrate the company’s new agentic offering and showcases how agentic AI can now carry out multi-step workflows and potentially replace large SaaS tech stacks used by marketing teams today.
Anthropic Study Reveals Marketing Jobs At Risk
AI company Anthropic released a new report on the impact of AI on the labour market. The Labour Market Impacts report found the marketing industry is one of the sectors that has ‘high exposure’ to AI-related displacement. The research highlighted a 14 percent decline in new job postings for entry-level marketing roles, hinting that AI is absorbing junior roles.
Why it matters: The study found that over 60 percent of the tasks currently performed by marketers – primarily around analysing and translating data – can be augmented by AI. This research potentially sheds some truth on not only the fact marketing roles are under real threat from AI, but a specific type of marketing role is especially at risk.
IAB Tech Lab Reveals Framework for AI Content Scraping
IAB Tech Lab, the digital advertising standard-setting body, announced a standardised framework to protect publisher content from being scraped by AI companies without permission or payment.
Why it matters: Publishers and AI companies have clashed over copyright infringement and their content being taken to train AI models without their knowledge. For publishers, this is made worse by the fact their online traffic is declining as online users turn to AI tools for the information they seek. The framework, titled CoMP (Content Monetisation Framework), aims to ensure commercial conversations take place before any content crawling occurs from AI companies.
Quote of the Week
Brands & Agencies
Not All Consumers Trust AI Product Recommendations
New research from Billion Dollar Boy Group found that for shopping, trust from consumers in AI discovery tools is limited. Roughly a third of consumers say AI gives high-quality recommendations to them (35 percent) and a similar amount say it improves their customer experience (32 percent).
Publicis Groupe Acquires AdgeAI
Publicis Groupe announced the acquisition of AdgeAI, a measurement and content platform that uses AI to analyse and predict the performance of creative. The company was founded in Tel Aviv in 2023 by brothers Eyal Ben Shalom and Asaf Ben Shalom, who will continue as CEO and CTO of the company as it integrates into the Publicis network.
Horizon Media Pilots Cultural Trends Tool
Global agency Horizon Media is piloting a new AI tool that helps brands analyse cultural signals in real-time. The solution combines Vurvey’s People Model and Sightly’s Brand Mentality platform to identify shifts in audience attitudes and brand risk.
Virgin Voyages Announces Use of 1500 AI Agents
The luxury cruise liner company Virgin Voyages announced it is using over 1500 AI agents to power operations and marketing. The increase in agents marks a nearly 3000 percent increase in agents the brand has built. Not all of these agents are for marketing – an email agent ‘Email Ellie’ and a web page builder ‘Landing Page Larry’ are two of the company’s most used marketing agents.
John Lewis Invests in AI Product Discovery
UK retailer John Lewis revealed it would be investing heavily into its products being surfaced in AI tools – like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overview and Mode. The company said it would be extending its partnership with commercetools – an AI digital commerce platform. The move is a part of the brand’s £800 million multi-year transformation programme across its tech stack, stores and customer experience.
Media
European Parliament Calls on the EU for Creative Sector Protections
The European Parliament has called on the EU to protect the region’s creative sectors from the threat of GenAI. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have adopted a series of recommendations to protect copyrighted creative work – like music, photography and art – from training AI models. Included in concerns were the news and media sector, where journalistic pieces are taken to train AI tools.
Canal+ to Bring AI to its Streaming App
The French broadcaster Canal+ announced partnerships with Google Cloud and OpenAI to bring AI to its streaming app and provide conversational interfaces for audiences. Canal+ also said it will use Veo (Google’s video generation tool) so teams can previsualise a scene before shooting.
YouTube Expands Likeness Detection
YouTube has expanded a technology that can detect when a person’s ‘likeness’ has been used without their knowledge. Now government officials, journalists and political candidates can all use the technology. This move is an expansion of its deepfake prevention programme, which launched last April, which enabled content creators to ask for videos featuring AI-generated versions of themselves to be removed.
Thousands of Authors Publish Empty Book in AI Protest
Roughly 10,000 authors have published an ‘empty’ book titled ‘Don’t Steal This Book’ in protest of their works being taken without their consent to train AI models. The only contents of the book are the protesting authors’ names. The publication was distributed this week at the London Book Fair.
NewsGuard Creates AI News Detection Tool
The company NewsGuard has created an AI-powered tool to detect publisher webpages creating large volumes of AI-generated content. The tool can scan webpages and identify if content is largely AI-made before human analysts review flagged pages.
Tech
FreeWheel Launches AI Agent Infrastructure
The ad tech company FreeWheel announced the launch of a new AI agent infrastructure, powered by the company’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. This will enable AI agents to interact with FreeWheel’s platform to buy and sell media. Global marketing platform PMG is among the first partners piloting these capabilities.
Verve Group Integrates AI Chat Signals into Ad Targeting
Verve Group, a Swedish ad tech company, announced it has expanded its advertising platform to include intent signals from AI chatbots. This will let advertisers target audiences based on how they’re behaving in conversational AI environments.
OpenAI to Bring Sora to ChatGPT
OpenAI is reportedly planning on bringing its video generation tool Sora to ChatGPT, according to the Information. Currently, the company’s image generator DALLE is available on ChatGPT but Sora is a standalone app.
Seedtag Launches Media Planning Agent Platform
Seedtag, a contextual advertising company, announced the launch of an agentic AI platform for media planning and activation. The platform, called Liz Agent, automates the planning phase of a campaign, with the agent existing as a consultant for media planners.
Startup of the Week
Agentic AI platform Mega has secured $11.5 million in a Series A funding round to scale its marketing platform. The platform uses AI agents to automate SEO, paid ads, website management and other tasks typically handled by marketing agencies. The round was led by Goodwater Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
Number of the Week
The research also sheds light on an AI ‘perception gap’ where advertisers think consumers feel more positively about AI-generated ads than they actually do. Younger generations are also more likely to view a brand using AI-generated ads as inauthentic.
