October 3rd-October 9th // Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

In This Edition!

  • ChatGPT (not X) is becoming the “everything app”

  • You can now build your own agent in under 8 minutes 

  • Intuit's AI puts an end to cumbersome campaign setups

U of Digital’s AI Accelerator is THE go-to course for marketing and advertising professionals looking to get a head start on AI.

The industry’s leading AI DSP, Yahoo DSP, is the exclusive sponsor of the AI Accelerator.

The next Accelerator launches next week, on October 14th. Use promo code YahooDSP for 20% off individual tickets. Email [email protected] for team discounts. SEATS ARE ALMOST SOLD OUT, ENROLL NOW!

#KnowledgeIsPower #HumansAheadOfAI

Top Headlines🔥

OpenAI launches apps inside of ChatGPT
Source: Maxwell Zeff, TechCrunch
October 6th, 2025

Summary: At OpenAI’s Dev Day event this week, the company launched interactive apps directly inside ChatGPT, allowing the platform's 800M weekly users to access Figma, Canva, Zillow, Expedia, Spotify, and others without leaving their conversations. Unlike the previous GPT Store, which required users to visit a separate marketplace, apps now appear directly in ChatGPT responses when users cite them by name or when ChatGPT surfaces them automatically. A forthcoming Apps SDK allows developers to build apps inside ChatGPT, trigger actions, and stand up fully interactive UIs and videos. OpenAI plans to support monetization through features like Instant Checkout, which lets users buy products without leaving ChatGPT. Apps like DoorDash, Instacart, Uber, and AllTrails are also coming soon.

Opinion: OpenAI is transforming ChatGPT from a chatbot into a full blown operating system, creating a new high-intent channel where brands can reach users at the exact moment they need something. This increasingly positions ChatGPT as a threat to Google's search dominance (and Amazon’s retail dominance). When people can book travel through Expedia or find apartments through Zillow directly in ChatGPT, they don't need to Google search and click through to those websites. Brands should monitor which apps integrate with ChatGPT and ensure that their products appear in those platforms' databases, as ChatGPT is becoming a primary discovery interface. 

OpenAI launches AgentKit to help developers build and ship AI agents 
Source: Rebecca Bellan, TechCrunch
October 6th, 2025

Summary: Another product coming out of Dev Day is AgentKit, a toolkit that makes it faster and easier to build AI agents. The offering includes Agent Builder, a visual drag-and-drop tool that Sam Altman described as "Canva for building agents." ChatKit lets developers add chat interfaces to their own apps. Evals for Agents tests how well agents perform; and a connector registry links agents to company tools and systems. To demonstrate how fast the process has become, an OpenAI engineer built two complete AI agents live onstage in under eight minutes.

Opinion: AgentKit simplifies the process for building AI agents without coding expertise. The speed matters; agents that once took months to build now take minutes, so marketing teams can quickly set up agents for customer support, lead qualification, and content creation without waiting (or paying) for engineering resources. Companies that move fast here will gain efficiency advantages before competitors catch up.

New Products & Features 🚀

What It Does: Gemini Enterprise ($30 per person monthly) for large organizations and Gemini Business ($21 per person monthly) for smaller companies help nontechnical employees build AI agents to perform tasks of their choosing. The subscriptions include premade agents for customer engagement, software development, and data science, plus the ability to create custom agents that pull data from products like Salesforce, Box, and Microsoft. 

Quick Take: Google is racing OpenAI and Microsoft to capture the enterprise AI agent market, betting that no-code tools and built-in security features will give them an advantage.

What It Does: Role-based agents embedded within Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications automate marketing, sales, and service processes. Running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the prebuilt agents integrate natively within existing workflows to help users operate faster and make better decisions across marketing campaigns, sales pipelines, and customer support operations.

Quick Take: Embedding AI agents directly into marketing workflows—automating campaign execution, analyzing customer data for segmentation, and optimizing messaging without requiring marketers to switch platforms or learn new tools, will lead to faster adoption.

What It Does: Athena is a ChatGPT-like AI interface that sits on top of its Zeta Marketing Platform, part of Zeta's $100M AI investment this year. The interface lets users build audience segments, refine targeting, and deploy campaigns by typing or speaking commands without intensive training.

Quick Take: Smart move to nudge Zeta's 567 enterprise clients to move from just one use case on the platform to multiple. Zeta is betting that an AI interface can solve the classic marketing tech problem: Many platforms are powerful but too complex for some users to fully utilize.

What It Does: Salesforce added new capabilities for data accuracy, governance, and security for AI agents. Features include Data Cloud Clean Rooms and Data Cloud Context Indexing, which interprets unstructured content like contracts and diagrams. Tableau Semantics translates raw data into universal business language. MuleSoft Agent Fabric registers and governs AI agents across platforms. 

Quick Take: Salesforce hopes to fix the messy reality that AI agents aren’t very useful if trained on bad data or they can't access the right, consistent information. 

AI Use Case of The Week💡

The Setup: New CMO Thomas Ranese wants to reposition Intuit from a tax and accounting software company to one that combines AI and human ingenuity to help customers solve their finance challenges. The first step is to apply AI in every facet of what they do internally.

The AI Solution: Currently, 83% of Intuit's employees are using AI tools at work, a 60% increase from nine months ago. In September, Intuit launched a generative AI tool called Marketing Studio that can quickly create entire campaigns from start to finish. Intuit's social performance and sales teams are using generative AI to plan and create content. 

The Results:

  • Marketing Studio campaigns can now be created in less than an hour, compared to three weeks previously, with 10% greater conversions. 

  • The social performance team has achieved 38% lift in click-through rates and reduced content planning time by 90% 

  • Sales team increased productivity by 25%

Why This Matters: Intuit is building AI tools into the marketing function to compress timelines, increase output quality, and free teams to focus on strategy and testing rather than execution.

Your Action: Map your marketing workflows to identify which tasks take the longest. Build or adopt AI tools that compress those timelines, then redeploy time saved toward testing and optimization rather than production.

Other Notable Headlines📌

OpenAI to boost content owners' control for Sora AI video app, plans monetization - Copyright owners can have more say over how or if their characters can be used in Sora's videos. Disney has reportedly already opted out.

Huge expands AI creative capabilities with Both&Yes acquisition - Huge acquired AI-focused creative agency Both&Yes as it works to become an agency specializing in helping brands create AI-powered experiences.

TikTok Announces Improvements to Its AI-Powered Smart+ Ad Campaigns - TikTok is giving advertisers more control of their campaigns, including how much they want to automate targeting, budget, and creative elements, and additional measurement and creative tools. 

OpenAI and Jony Ive may be struggling to figure out their AI device - Turns out that creating a screenless, “always-on”, conversational AI device isn’t easy…

That’s It For This Week 👋

The U of Digital AI Newsletter is intended for subscribers, but occasional forwarding is okay!

To subscribe visit Uof.Digital/Newsletters or contact us directly for group subscriptions.

And remember, U of Digital helps teams drive better outcomes through structured education on critical topics in marketing / advertising like AI, ad tech, mar tech, privacy / identity, CTV, commerce media, and more. Interested in learning more about how we can supercharge your team? Let’s talk!

Thanks for reading!

Keep Reading