October 16th-October 22nd // Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
In This Edition!
Brazeforce!
Walmart gives Muse the hug it’s been wanting
We’re running a FREE AI Edge Live Webinar on Synthetic Audiences: what they are, how they work, how to build them, and how marketers can use them, featuring guest expert Chad Reynolds, CEO and Founder of Vurvey Labs.
October 29th, 10am PT / 1pm ET. Register here!
Top Headlines🔥
Salesforce acquires AI marketing platform Braze
Source: MediaPost
October 21st, 2026
Summary: Braze is a customer engagement platform that helps marketers respond to customer behavior by using AI to choose the right offer, channel, timing, and content and push in real time. Braze says its technology puts one-to-one personalization within reach of smaller marketing teams. Salesforce's all-cash deal for Braze fills a hole in its Marketing Cloud, which processes data in batches, so campaigns can take hours or days to respond to customer behavior. Braze has about 2,770 customers, including Canva, Instacart, and Venmo. Co-founder Bill Magnuson will stay on as CEO at Braze, which will keep its name. Salesforce will pay $47.50 in cash per share, about 58% more than Braze’s closing price on Monday, valuing the company at $5.66B.
In related news, CDP Hightouch announced that it also offers Braze-like customer messaging capabilities now.
Opinion: Let’s take a look at Salesforce’s recent acquisitions. Listen Labs uses AI to research customers. Braze uses AI to decide what message each customer gets, and when. Loops uses AI to explain why marketing metrics shifted. That’s a full marketing loop: learn, act, explain, repeat. Salesforce has traditionally been where customer data is housed. Now it wants to be the system that acts on that customer data, in real-time, as effectively as possible. In the AI era, that’s where value is moving. Expect a new Salesforce pitch for one fully connected marketing platform. Less wiring for marketers, more lock-in and more share of marketing spend for Salesforce.
Walmart embraces AI agents that shop on behalf of customers🔒
Source: Adweek
October 21st, 2026
Summary: Walmart is opening its online store to AI agents that shop on behalf of customers. Walmart will soon launch Agent Profiles, letting customers give their AI agents profiles in their Walmart account and track each agent’s purchases separately. Right now, agents sign in as the customer. Customers will be able to require approval for every purchase or set a spending limit. Walmart is also testing Agent Gateway, a direct connection into the product catalog that lets agents shop faster and more reliably than clicking through the website like a human would. Notably, Amazon has gone the other way, blocking AI agents like Meta’s Muse from shopping on its platform.
Opinion: Walmart continues to zig on AI agents while Amazon zags. People may never choose Walmart over Amazon. But people’s agents will choose Walmart over Amazon because they’re allowed in. Walmart’s betting that being consumer-friendly by playing nice with AI is better long-term than being protective of its data and retail media business. It’s a smart bet. It’s also a convenient bet for Walmart; its retail media business is much smaller than Amazon’s. It has much less to ‘protect’.
New Products & Features 🚀
What It Does: Evertune is an AI visibility platform that tracks how often LLMs mention a brand and its competitors, and in what light. It also can build and run ChatGPT ad campaigns to fill AI visibility gaps. Until now, marketers had to sign a contract through Evertune’s sales team to use the platform. The new Starter plan lets any marketer or agency sign up online with a credit card and start using it right away.
Quick Take: As AI visibility data becomes more of a commodity, it makes sense for GEO (generative engine optimization) platforms to move toward paid ads. Evertune is doing exactly that by making its GEO platform more accessible, bringing in more users, and hopefully converting them into paid ads buyers.
What It Does: Google’s Universal Cart saves products from different stores in one place so shoppers can buy them later. The cart alerts shoppers about price drops and restocks, shows promo codes, and suggests which credit card to use based on perks. Shoppers can pay inside the cart with Google Pay or check out at the retailer’s website.
Quick Take: Abandoned carts have always lived on the retailer’s site, ripe for retargeting campaigns. Now they can live with Google, which will theoretically be able to see your activity at every store and get first crack at bringing you back. Google continues to try to use consumer-facing AI shopping tools to steal retail media market share.
What It Does: Reddit added three new tools to its ad platform. A campaign planner forecasts reach, impressions, and costs before launch, and summarizes what people are talking about in the subreddits that the advertiser is targeting. An optimization score rates each campaign from 0 to 100% and suggests ways to improve it. A budget tool automatically moves spend to the best-performing ad groups.
Quick Take: Reddit is one of the sources AI cites most. So those subreddit summaries are a preview of what AI will say about your brand and category. Right now they’re being used for Reddit ad targeting. But they also double as AI visibility research, and Reddit will eventually figure out how to monetize that.
AI Use Case of The Week💡
Chime runs its marketing in-house with a stack of AI tools
The Setup: Fintech company Chime was growing fast. It wanted to scale its marketing without adding headcount or relying on outside agencies.
The AI Solution: Chime uses AI tools at every stage of marketing and has no creative agency on retainer. Its in-house team is building Project Apollo, a system that connects its AI tools so one AI agent can hand work to the next, with humans checking along the way. “Simile” creates AI versions of Chime’s five main customer personas (aka synthetic audiences), so the team can conduct customer research without recruiting real people for every study. A creative engine trained on Chime’s best ads produces thousands of ad variations, and feeding in creative performance data makes each round better. Braze’s AI decides which message each customer gets and when, replacing cumbersome A/B tests. AI agents from Sierra and Decagon handle customer support.
The Results:
• Chime's marketing team held at ~100 people while active members grew from 9.5M to 10.4M
• Consumer research runs 10-20x faster
• Thousands of ad variations produced in minutes
• AI agents handle more than 70% of support calls
Why This Matters: Chime built its own version of what Salesforce is building through acquisitions. Research, creative, and messaging are interconnected and strung together in an AI-driven sequence. Most brands already own all the pieces. Gluing it all together is hard.
Your Action: Paste your org chart, descriptions of your team’s roles, and weekly workload into AI and ask: “We want to double our business next year with zero new hires. Redesign this team and its workflow. Infuse AI tools where needed.” How does it change the org structure? How does it shift job descriptions? Where and how does it insert AI?
Other Notable Headlines📌
Meta’s Muse hits 10M U.S. downloads in 40 days, a milestone reached by only 11 other apps - Most of those 11 were mobile games like Fortnite and Pokémon GO. The only other non-game apps were Meta Threads and Disney+. ChatGPT didn’t make the list, with 3.7M US downloads in its first 40 days.
AI startup Minerva built an agentic CDP - Minerva, which just raised $20M, uses AI agents to merge a brand’s customer data with its data on 270M consumers. This helps brands create a full view of their customers, connecting their work email, personal email, phone number, physical address, and online identifiers.
OpenAI expands ChatGPT Ads to 26 new countries as diversification push accelerates - ChatGPT ads are now in 89 countries, and more than 100K advertisers have run campaigns. OpenAI’s ad revenue run rate grew from $100M in March to $1B in August.
AI Actress Tilly Norwood discusses the future of marketing🔒 - Tilly Norwood, a popular “AI actress”, said at ANA Masters of Marketing that tomorrow's AI brand ambassadors will have real personalities, not just scripted ones. Her creator, studio Particle6, uses her to test how to build AI personalities for brands.
AI slop sites are on the rise - Researchers at DecryptAds found more than 2,100 AI-generated recipe sites crammed with ads, including ads from Fortune 500 brands. Many sites list fake authors, use AI headshots, and stolen chef photos. And sometimes even a doctored picture of Emily Blunt.
That’s It For This Week 👋
The U of Digital AI Edge Newsletter is intended for AI Edge Pro subscribers, but occasional forwarding is okay!
To subscribe visit Uof.Digital/Newsletters/ai-edge or AI Edge Pro, 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, mar tech, ad tech, CTV, commerce media, and more. Interested in learning more about how we can supercharge your team? Let’s talk!
Thanks for reading!
