October 24th-October 30th // Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

AI Investments Hit Earnings Reports—With Clear Winners and Losers
Source: CNBC, Yahoo, TechCrunch
October 29-30

Summary: Q3 earnings are revealing which tech giants are able to monetize AI versus just spending on it. Alphabet crushed it, delivering its first $100B quarter. Cloud revenue surged 34% with a $155B backlog from AI infrastructure deals, while search revenue jumped 14.5%. "AI Mode is already driving incremental total query growth for Search," CEO Sundar Pichai said.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's Azure grew 40% with 16 percentage points coming directly from AI services, AWS revenue grew 20%, and AI helped Nvidia become the first $5T company ever. Reddit's AI-powered ad platform and AI data licensing deals helped grow revenue 68%. On the other hand, Meta's stock fell 9% despite 26% revenue growth and $50B in ad revenue, due to a one-time tax-related charge and worries about its plans to spend even more on AI to grow advertising, engagement, and hardware sales. 

Opinion: Meta's shares fell after releasing their earnings report, while Alphabet's rose—largely because it has more cash flow to fund its AI spending and it has core products (search and Google Cloud Platform) that can ride the AI wave. Amazon’s stock also popped after its earnings report, thanks to AWS. Both can clearly show how AI drives revenue today, whereas Meta’s non-advertising AI bets are merely speculative investments, and AI advertising-driven growth on its own isn’t enough.

AI Reshapes Workforces at Amazon and YouTube
Source: CNN, NPR
October 29-30

Summary: Amazon is laying off 14K corporate workers (and perhaps up to 30k in the next few weeks), or about 4% of its workforce, to reduce bloat and shift resources toward AI. A day later, YouTube announced an AI-focused reorganization with voluntary exit packages for US employees, though the company says no role eliminations are currently happening. YouTube's successful subscription business🔒is also a big factor and will result in a dedicated senior leader overseeing the unit.

Opinion: Part of the promise of AI has been its potential to change how we work, and now we're seeing those changes play out in real time at some of the largest tech companies. The human impact is tough. Smart move for professionals is to become AI-savvy people who manage AI tools rather than the people AI tools replace.

Meet Pomelli, Google’s AI Agent That Turns Websites Into Marketing Campaign Generators

What It Does: Pomelli analyzes a business's website to create a "Business DNA" profile that captures things like brand identity, tone of voice, and fonts. The AI agent then generates tailored social media campaign ideas and on-brand, multi-channel marketing assets. The free tool is launching in public beta in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Quick Take: Here's another AI marketing tool for SMBs who can't afford agencies but need to run professional campaigns, at lightning speed.

LG Launches Agentiv AI Platform for CTV Ad Automation

What It Does: Agentiv runs over 20 AI agents that automate advertising workflows, including a media planning agent that generates campaign feasibility reports and a creative review agent that manages ad approvals. LG will also beta test a data collaboration agent that combines advertiser customer data with LG's CTV data.

Quick Take: LG continues trying to make it easier to buy CTV ads within its ecosystem. Last week it integrated with Databricks to combine its ACR data with advertisers’ first-party data. 

Adobe Floods Creative Cloud With AI 

What It Does: Tools include a new AI Assistant in Photoshop that can make recommendations or handle various tasks. The Generative Fill tool integrates models from partners like Google to follow editing instructions through simple prompts. Other capabilities include AI-powered resolution enhancements, faster editing, and identification of the best images among massive photo collections. 

Quick Take: Time will tell whether these updates can address real creative bottlenecks—sifting through massive photo libraries and upscaling resolution—rather than just flashy AI features that look impressive in demos but lack practical use. We’re optimistic.

Permutive's Halo Agents to Scale Direct Publisher Buying 

What It Does: Halo's AI agents automate the direct-to-publisher buying process, from audience management and campaign planning to optimization and reporting. The agents learn from performance data, suggest optimizations, and execute tasks while keeping first-party data secure. Already running across hundreds of millions of dollars in spend, Halo agents aim to overcome the Open Internet's fragmentation problem and help publishers compete with walled gardens.

Quick Take: By automating direct buying at scale, Halo could reduce ad tech middlemen that currently take up 50%+ of ad spend, letting more money reach publishers while improving advertiser results through better data collaboration.

Semrush One Unites Traditional SEO and AI Search

What It Does: The platform combines traditional SEO tracking with AI visibility measurement across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other LLMs, monitoring 90M prompts to show brands where they appear in AI-generated responses and offering optimization recommendations.

Quick Take: There are a lot of AI visibility platforms out there, but not many also include SEO tracking. This could be extremely helpful as consumers continue to migrate from traditional search to AI.

Amplitude's AI Visibility Connects AI Search Mentions to Revenue

What It Does: The platform tracks brand appearances across major AI platforms and ties those AI mentions to actual conversion and revenue data within Amplitude's analytics platform.

Quick Take: Brands desperately need to know how they're showing up in AI search and how that affects their bottom lines. AI visibility should tie to actual outcomes, after all.

The Setup: Mondelez worked with Publicis Groupe and Accenture to build a generative AI tool to reduce the costs of developing ad creative. 

The AI Solution: Mondelez spent more than $40M developing the tool, which creates marketing content for social media and e-commerce platforms that can be customized depending on the consumer segment being targeted. The company is using AI-generated content for Chips Ahoy in the US, Milka chocolate in Germany, and will expand to Oreo product pages on Amazon and Walmart in November. 

The Results:

• Marketing content production costs down 30% to 50%.

• Animated video, which would normally cost "hundreds of thousands" now cost "orders of magnitude" less. 

• Tool expected to produce short TV ads ready to air by next year's holiday season, potentially for the 2027 Super Bowl

Why This Matters: The 30-50% cost savings are substantial, but the real strategic shift is speed and personalization. Creating multiple versions of content tailored to different consumer segments was often too expensive for most brands. AI makes mass personalization economically viable. 

Your Action: Calculate what 30-50% savings on creative production would mean for your marketing budget. Start with lower-risk content like social media posts and product pages before moving onto more sophisticated creative to gauge what's possible.

Trade Desk Partners With Shopsense AI to Make Publisher Content Shoppable🔒- The DSP is making it easier to place sponsored product ads alongside publisher content across the open web, using AI to identify the right context to stick shoppable ads. 

Pinterest experiments with new AI-powered personalized boards - Pinterest wants to turn the boards into a more personalized way to explore, shop, and find outfit inspiration. It's all part of Pinterest's goal of becoming an “AI-enabled shopping assistant.”

PayPal partners with OpenAI to let users pay for their shopping within ChatGPT - PayPal is working hard to become the payments partner for multiple companies’ AI-enabled shopping experiences.

OpenAI completes shift to becoming for-profit - OpenAI completed its restructuring to become a public benefit corporation, with nonprofit OpenAI Foundation holding a 26% stake ($130B) and Microsoft holding a 27% stake ($135B). Now an IPO is on the table that could value OpenAI at $1T.  

Paris Hilton Has Been Training Her AI for Years🔒- Hilton's GPT chatbot has ingested every interview and song she's ever done to help her come up with new ideas.

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