February 20th-February 26th // Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
In This Edition!
AI <3 Consultancies
AI visibility is deeply Profound
“This course is a must for any marketing leader who wants to understand how to leverage AI to accelerate growth!” -Linda Bethea, CMO Danone
Enroll NOW For The March AI Accelerator, Sponsored By Yahoo DSP. Use promo code PROCRASTINATOR for 25% off! We only have a few seats left!
Top Headlines🔥
OpenAI calls in the consultants because it’s hard to scale enterprise AI alone
Source: CNBC
February 23rd, 2026
Summary: OpenAI has formed "Frontier Alliances" with Accenture, BCG, Capgemini, and McKinsey to help companies deploy Frontier, OpenAI's enterprise platform. Frontier stitches together an organization's data and systems to feed AI agents that are then able to perform various tasks. The consulting firms will provide implementation expertise and draw on their existing enterprise relationships to speed up deployments. They'll also build dedicated teams certified on OpenAI’s technology.
Opinion: Remember when everyone said that AI is going to kill consultancies? LOL.
The speed of technological advancement right now is unprecedented. Humans and the companies they work for are in chaos and disarray. This creates a massive opportunity for consultancies (yes, human, service-based businesses) to come in and create structure and roadmaps to unlock opportunity out of the chaos. Enter big consultancies.
Consultancies already have CxO relationships at the world's biggest companies, so OpenAI is also getting access to distribution.
Frontier Alliances are a win-win. OpenAI unlocks enterprise upside. Consultancies get a new problem to solve.
Profound raises $96M to help brands control how AI talks about them 🔒
Source: Fortune
February 24th, 2026
Summary: Profound hit unicorn status this week after closing a $96M Series C round at a $1B valuation. Profound is an “AI visibility platform” that helps brands monitor and optimize how they show up in AI chat platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Its new Profound Agents product can generate marketing copy and automate the work that goes into shaping how AI models talk about a brand. Just 18 months old, Profound already works with 10% of the Fortune 500, including Target, Walmart, and Figma. It’s raised $155M to date.
Opinion: As consumer behavior shifts from traditional search to AI search, AI visibility monitoring and optimization is going to be huge. We had SEO (search engine optimization) for search. We have AEO, AIO, GEO for AI.
SEO is a good comp, but AI is a totally different beast from traditional search, and so optimizing a brand for AI visibility requires a totally different approach. There's no “deterministic” algorithm to crack (like Google PageRank) that will deliver the same exact results every time it sees a keyword. AI models are constantly morphing and evolving, the sources they cite shift dramatically over time, different models draw from different sources entirely, user history and context windows matter, and outputs can be positive or negative because AI literally has a “mind of its own”! Type in the same query into an LLM 10 times and see how many different answers you get!
This all gets complicated, fast. AI visibility companies like Profound have a massive opportunity to help brands.
New Products & Features 🚀
What It Does: Google has released Nano Banana 2, an updated version of its image generation model. The new version runs faster while adding real-time web search for more accurate image rendering, precise text generation, and the ability to keep characters and objects looking consistent across a series of images.
Quick Take: With Nano Banana 2 already plugged into Google Ads, the path from text prompt to live creative asset is getting shorter with every update.
What It Does: The update adds connectors to Google Workspace, Gmail, DocuSign, FactSet, and a dozen other platforms, so Claude can work inside the tools employees already use. Companies can build private plugin marketplaces tailored to specific departments and control which plugins each team can access.
Quick Take: AI that can pull context from your Gmail, your Drive, and your financial data simultaneously is much better than a ‘dumb’ chat window. For marketers, that means Claude could work from your actual briefs, past campaigns, and brand guidelines, helping you shortcut past a lot of grunt work and ensuring your outputs are on-brand.
What It Does: Treasure Data launched Treasure Code to help teams use its CDP with natural language instead of SQL or custom scripts. Built on Claude Code, it allows users to build data pipelines, configure customer segments, and automate workflows by describing what they want in plain English. About a quarter of Treasure Data's customer base adopted it within days of launch.
Quick Take: When a marketing ops team can spin up a new segment or modify a customer journey without filing a ticket or clicking lots of buttons in a UI, they can move faster, and that speed can compound over a campaign cycle. Sounds like a win.
What It Does: Opal is Google's vibe-coding tool that lets users build mini web apps with text prompts. Google has added an agent step that automatically figures out the path forward after users describe their end goal. Previously, users had to manually configure each step of a workflow.
Quick Take: As with all AI tools, Google's advantage is its ecosystem lock-in. A tool like Opal that natively taps into Drive, Sheets, Search, and Veo is easier to build with than standalone tools that require integrations.
AI Use Case of The Week💡
How Anthropic's 1-person growth marketing team used Claude Code to run paid media
The Setup: A solo growth marketer at Anthropic running paid search, paid social, mobile app stores, email, and SEO had a scaling problem. Producing enough ad variations to meaningfully test across campaigns required volume, which required more engineering resources.
The Solution: The marketer used Claude Code to build a set of automated workflows. One tests and iterates new ads at scale by ingesting existing ad performance data, generating new copy variations, and using separate agents for headlines and descriptions to stay within character limits. Another plugs directly into Figma, producing batches of ad creative by swapping copy across templates. A third connects to the Meta Ads API so performance data is accessible within Claude without toggling between dashboards. The fourth tracks what ad creative has already been tested, feeding prior results back into new rounds of generation so the system improves over time.
The Results:
• Ad copy creation time shrank from about 2 hours to 15 minutes
• 10x increase in creative output across paid social channels
• The marketer can now perform tasks that once required a larger team
Why This Matters: This case study shows what's possible when marketing teams use AI to build infrastructure. Workflows that generate more variations, track what worked, and feed that back into the next round get more valuable over time. With agents that can quickly be spun up through vibe-coding tools, the barrier to achieving this is lower than most teams assume.
Your Action: Audit your last two weeks of work and flag anything you did more than three times that followed a predictable pattern. The best candidates share three traits: high volume (you do it constantly), rule-bound (there's a right and wrong way to do it), and API-connected (the platform you're working in has one). For many growth marketers, that's ad copy generation, creative resizing, performance reporting, or audience segment builds. Try spinning up some simple agents to start handling these tasks.
Other Notable Headlines📌
Koah raises $20.5M to bring contextual ads to AI apps - The startup helps developers drop ads into their AI apps. The ads appear in the conversational flow but are clearly labeled. Koah is pitching itself as AdSense for AI.
WPP and Adobe take aim at marketing’s efficiency crisis - WPP and Adobe are expanding their partnership to combine Adobe's AI tools (like Firefly) with WPP's marketing solutions (WPP Open).
Meta and other tech firms put restrictions on use of OpenClaw over security fears - Personal agent creator OpenClaw was a viral sensation. But many worried it was also too unpredictable and a security risk. And now its part of OpenAI.
Traffic falls but conversions are holding steady despite new zero-click reality 🔒 - Advertisers' organic search traffic is falling due to features like Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Somehow, conversions have remained steady. That may not last.
Anthropic says Pentagon's 'final offer’ is unacceptable - Anthropic doesn't want its AI models to be used for fully autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance of Americans. The US government doesn’t seem to care. It is threatening punitive action if Anthropic doesn’t comply.
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 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, 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!
