September 25th-October 1st // Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
In This Edition!
Amazon unBoxes AI
Cue Dots Muse
The U of Digital Fall Tour Continues!
Top Headlines🔥
Amazon wants its AI to make more of your media buying decisions🔒
Source: Digiday
September 29th, 2026
Summary: Amazon is giving its AI more control over where ads run and how budgets get spent. At its unBoxed conference this week, it made several major announcements. Amazon Ads Agent is a unified ad-buying platform that combines the Amazon Ads console (for search ads) and the Amazon DSP. Within Amazon Ads Agent, there are three options:
New DSP campaigns now start in a tool called DVA+ (display, video, and audio), where AI works toward either performance or brand goals. Advertisers who want more hands-on controls, like in a traditional DSP, can go into advanced settings.
New search campaigns now start in a tool called Sponsored ads.
New campaigns that combine search ads, display, video, and streaming TV start in a tool called Full-Funnel Campaigns. Advertisers choose the products, creative, and budget, and Amazon's AI decides where the ads run, optimizes toward new-to-brand customers and long-term sales.
Amazon’s new AI ad formats include Branded Conversations, which turns a sponsored prompt in Alexa for Shopping (Amazon's shopping chatbot) into a branded chat that helps shoppers choose products. Sponsored Services shows ads for local service providers from Yelp after an Amazon purchase, like a plumber after someone buys a faucet.
Branded Conversations
Opinion: The launch of Branded Conversations tells us how important Alexa for Shopping is to Amazon. Amazon needs to make consumer-facing AI work, in terms of creating user value AND monetization, in order to continue justifying blocking the big AI platforms from accessing its product catalog. They’re clearly working hard on it. But if ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot continue to grow and become major agentic shopping hubs, Amazon will have to play ball with them to protect its retail business. And if Amazon plays ball with the AI platforms, it would hurt its retail media business! The tug-of-war continues.
If you’re watching this play out as a marketer, especially if you sell products on Amazon, make sure you show up in all the AI that is outside of Amazon. Big picture, you want Amazon to feel the pressure and eventually have to open up its product catalog to the AI companies. You want your products to show up everywhere and anywhere so you can maximize demand.
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New Products & Features 🚀
What It Does: Dots are always-on AI agents inside ChatGPT. They keep working in the background, even when your computer is off, and connect to more than 4K apps. You can contact your dot through ChatGPT, Slack, or Teams. It learns preferences and can bring you finished work before you ask. Dots are rolling out to Pro and Business Premium users. OpenAI also previewed specialist dots, which get their own company login to handle jobs like customer support and email marketing.
Quick Take: Dots and Meta's Muse share the same idea: an agent that learns about you and proactively acts before you even ask. But they're starting from different places. Muse is free to start and built for everyday consumers. Dots require a paid plan and are more focused on work. That said, the lines are already blurring, with Meta's launch of Muse for Small Business (see below). Personal and business agents that learn about you, proactively offer ideas, and do tasks is where AI is headed, away from the one-way AI prompt box.
What It Does: Meta's super popular AI agent Muse now has a version for small businesses. It connects to Facebook Pages, Instagram accounts, and Meta ad accounts, plus tools like Shopify, QuickBooks, and Slack. Owners give it a goal, like finding new customers, and Muse works toward it. Nothing runs without approval. A day earlier, Meta launched Meta Enterprise Platform, a new business unit that will sell its AI tools to companies.
Quick Take: Meta has always built ad tools for businesses. But Meta has never charged for those tools, especially because they’ve only helped businesses run ads on Meta. Will Meta Enterprise Platform help businesses run ads on and off Meta? Perhaps. Regardless, Meta will now be able to double-dip; make money on the ad tools AND the ad spend that it pushes to its own properties.
What It Does: OpenAI's new GPT-6.1 Sol nearly matches its top model, GPT-6 Astra, on coding, computer use, and professional work at one-fifth the price. It's available now for paid ChatGPT users and for developers through the API. OpenAI had also planned to launch GPT-6.1 Astra, an upgrade to its top model, but canceled the release after the model showed higher levels of deception in safety testing.
Quick Take: Near-top performance at a fifth of the price helps make agents affordable at scale.
What It Does: Sonnet 5.5 is Anthropic's new mid-tier model. It runs 30%+ faster than Sonnet 5 and costs up to 30% less per task, since it needs fewer steps to finish the same work. Anthropic says it scores close to Opus 5.5, its top model, on several tests of everyday work. It's especially strong at documents, spreadsheets, and slides.
Quick Take: It's hard to keep all the new models straight. Sonnet 5.5 and OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol launched the same week at the same list price. Both claim near-top performance for much less money. The mid-tier is now where the real AI model competition is.
What It Does: Each Cue agent gets its own email, phone number, and spending budget, so it can send messages, take calls, and pay for things on its own. You can put several agents in a group chat and have them split up a project. Manus 2.0 also adds a video editor for AI-made ads. You can swap the music or drop in your own footage without remaking the whole video. It's the company's first big launch since Beijing ordered Meta to unwind its acquisition of Manus earlier this year.
Quick Take: Meta lost Manus and built Muse. Now Manus is back with Cue, which competes with Muse. Cue vs. Muse vs. Dots!
Each of these personal agents has cute, cuddly mascots. Wonder why …🤔
AI Use Case of The Week💡
Runway built an AI agent to make its ads, and its ROAS nearly doubled🔒
The Setup: Runway is an AI video startup best known for tools that let filmmakers and studios generate and edit video. Runway's growth marketing and creative teams couldn't make ads fast enough. They wanted to run more campaigns across Meta, Google, and TikTok to promote new products and drive subscriptions. Making enough ad creative for every platform became the bottleneck.
The AI Solution: Runway built an AI agent to make and manage its ads. The agent connects to Runway's ad accounts. It uses brand guidelines, past ads, and product images to generate new video and image ads. It also localizes them for various markets and resizes them for each platform. A human approves each ad before it goes live. After launch, the agent pulls performance data from each platform and uses it to make the next round of ads. Runway started using it on its own campaigns in July.
The Results:
• Active ads on Meta and TikTok grew from 77 to about 890
• Return on ad spend nearly doubled
• Conversion rate increased by 34%, while click-through rate held steady
• Cost per subscriber decreased by 41%, even as total spend grew
• Runway says the campaigns helped drive $100M in annual recurring revenue
Why This Matters: This experiment worked so well that Runway turned it into a product. It now competes with Meta, Google, and TikTok, which all offer similar AI creative tools for free. Runway hopes brands will pay for one that works better, and works across all three.
Your Action: Take the best-performing AI-generated variant from Symphony on TikTok and run it on Meta against your current Reels ads. Then take your best Advantage+ creative variant and run it on TikTok. If either one beats the incumbent, your best creative ideas travel across platforms. Which means an AI tool that can optimize creative performance across all platforms might be worth it. If neither wins, each platform's audience might want something different, and the free tools might be the smarter choice.
Other Notable Headlines📌
Google is retiring Gemini's Gems and turning them into 'skills' - The custom AI assistants users built in Gemini will automatically become skills.
Shopify lets AI agents complete checkout on its merchants' sites - Browser-based AI agents can now place orders on Shopify stores, with the buyer's approval, instead of just searching and adding to cart.
Agencies admit they've stopped hiring entry-level talent because of AI🔒 - AI now handles much of the grunt work, one agency owner said at an industry event. But others warned that without junior hires, no one will be ready to replace senior staff when they retire.
Former WPP CEO Mark Read launches an AI conference for marketers🔒 - Called Prompt, the invite-only event connects CMOs and agencies with AI startups, and it’s coming to New York on Oct 6th during Advertising Week.
Salesforce buys AI customer research startup Listen Labs - The startup uses AI to interview customers and simulate how they might react to new products. The reported $2B deal will feed that research into Salesforce's AI agents.
Marketers are rebranding as 'engineers' to survive the AI era🔒 - 'Marketing engineer' builds AI agents to automate tasks like ad buying and competitor research. Job listings using it rose 29% last year.
That’s It For This Week 👋
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