March 13th-March 19th // Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

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Thursday, March 26th | 1pm ET / 10am PT | Live on Zoom

As it eyes an IPO, OpenAI bets big on enterprise 🔒
Sources: Wall Street Journal, Adweek, CNBC, LinkedIn
March 13th-March 18th

Summary: OpenAI is pivoting hard to reposition ChatGPT as an enterprise productivity tool as it guns for a Q4 IPO. In a recent all-hands meeting, CEO of Applications Fidji Simo told staff the company is "orienting aggressively" toward business use cases and coding, which is dominated by rival Anthropic, and will deprioritize "side quests." OpenAI has had its hands in many consumer-facing cookie jars, such as releasing the video-generator Sora and web browser Atlas and exploring hardware devices and ecommerce. The news comes as reports suggest that OpenAI is also testing an Ads Manager 🔒 as part of its ChatGPT ads pilot, which launched last month. The tool is limited, with some comparing it to a CSV dashboard. Early results are trickling in, with one retail client's click-through rate coming in at 0.91%. That's well below the ~6.4% benchmark for Google Search in the same category, though that's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison. Per Neil Patel, ChatGPT ads conversion rates, lead quality, and ultimately CPA, is very strong thus far.

Opinion: OpenAI is telling investors what they need to hear before an IPO, and the "enterprise pivot" is a better story than "we have 900 million users who mostly pay us nothing." On one hand, we get it. Google is coming hard for their user base, and Anthropic added $6 billion in revenue in a single month, almost entirely from enterprise. On the other hand, we’re confused. OpenAI is walking away from dominant market share in a sector that will be huge over time and will give the company a real shot of being the next Google / Meta / Amazon. Owning the consumer market would enable OpenAI to build a real ads business. Those 900 million free users are the inventory. Kill the consumer flywheel and the ads pitch dies with it.

Claude's Dispatch turns your phone into a remote control for Cowork

What It Does: Dispatch lets you assign tasks to Claude's desktop Cowork app from your phone, then come back to finished output. Pair your phone with the Claude desktop app via QR code, send Claude a task, and it runs on your Mac using your local files, connectors, and plugins. It's worth noting that because your phone is triggering real actions on your desktop, a bad instruction or unexpected input could have consequences that are hard to undo.

Quick Take: Dispatch is a research preview rolling out to Max subscribers now and Pro subscribers in the coming days, so rough edges are expected. Early chatter suggests it's a 50/50 shot whether a given task actually completes, and it's reportedly slow at this point. Regardless of how well this works now, yes, of course, an AI agent that you talk to that is connected to all the information in your life will surface what you need in real-time and conduct tasks on your behalf anywhere and everywhere. This is clearly the future.

Google Maps wants to talk to you

What It Does: Google Maps launched two major updates. Ask Maps is a Gemini-powered chatbot that answers complex location questions, plans road trips, and personalizes results based on your search and save history. It's accessible through a button near the search bar. Immersive Navigation is the biggest visual overhaul to Maps' turn-by-turn directions in over a decade, with a new 3D view built from Street View and aerial imagery, smarter zoom, natural voice guidance, and real-time route tradeoff alerts.

Quick Take: It’s about time maps and turn-by-turn navigation are reimagined. Brands need to start thinking about how to optimize their content and online presence to become more visible for consumers that are using AI on the go.

Meta connects Manus to Ads Manager, Instagram, and WhatsApp Business

What It Does: Manus' AI agents can now connect directly to Meta's business tools. New integrations let it pull Ads Manager performance data and turn it into presentation-ready reports. They can search Instagram's Creator Marketplace to find and vet influencer partners, and manage Instagram content from ideation to publishing. A separate integration brings Manus into the WhatsApp Business app, letting small business owners draft responses, check calendars, and manage projects without leaving the app.

Quick Take: Manus being able to natively handle Meta campaign reports, creator discovery, and other tasks could be a major time-saver for marketers that are bogged down by using Meta’s Ads Manager. Meta acquired Manus at the end of December and is already unleashing it to improve its ads business. Meta has already enabled other agentic AI platforms to access its ad platform (such as Claude), but it’ll be interesting to see if this sustains long-term as Manus becomes more and more integrated into the company’s tools.

Google's Stitch brings 'vibe design' to the masses

What It Does: Google Labs has overhauled and relaunched “Stitch”, its AI-powered design tool, to enable users to "vibe design" and build high-fidelity app and website interfaces from natural language. New features include a Figma-style infinite canvas, AI design agents that can manage multiple concepts at once, voice controls for real-time feedback and edits, and instant interactive prototypes with a single click.

Quick Take: Google is going after Figma's core market (and, lo and behold, Figma's stock dropped 🔒 significantly on the news). Stitch won't replace professional design work overnight, but it doesn't need to. If marketers and founders can go from idea to working prototype without an expensive designer, the demand for early-stage design work changes.

The Setup: Slate's branded content and sales division needs to move quickly on advertiser outreach, content production, and data management. Manual prospecting, messy contact lists, and tedious content follow-up tasks were eating into time better spent on strategy.

The Solution: Slate built a suite of AI-powered agents through Zapier to handle the grunt work. To scale branded content creation, one agent connects Google Sheets with ChatGPT to enrich blog posts with SEO metadata, social copy, and video outlines. Another agent scours the internet for qualified advertiser leads based on Slate's target personas and drops them into Google Sheets for review or automatic CRM upload. Another agent cleans and reformats messy legacy contact data in the background.

The Results:

• 2,000+ qualified leads in a single month 

• ~50% response rate to cold email campaigns

• Hundreds of hours saved from automated prospecting, content formatting, and data cleanup

• Dozens of hours shaved from each campaign

Why This Matters: Slate's story reframes automation as a force multiplier for content creation and sales. For lean marketing teams doing advertiser or B2B outreach, using AI agents that handle prospecting and data enrichment is the fastest way to scale their pipelines without increasing costs.

Your Action: Try building a personalized prospecting agent. Write a brief that describes your ideal advertiser or customer, including industry, company size, job titles, and what makes someone a good fit, perhaps based on profiles of your best customers. Use that brief as instructions for the agent and let it run across the internet. The more specific your brief, the more useful the output. Instruct the agent to drop results into a Google Sheet or other format for review. Several tools support this approach: Zapier Agents and Lindy can search the web for matching contacts, Apollo.io and Vibe Prospecting can search existing B2B databases, and Claude Cowork can handle enrichment and outreach once you have a list.

Walmart and Target take opposite approaches to AI commerce 🔒 — Walmart is building its own AI tools in-house, including its Sparky shopping assistant that it will embed directly into ChatGPT and Gemini. Target is betting on partnerships, making its products shoppable natively through ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode, and selling ads in ChatGPT via its retail media arm, Roundel.

Brands are treating customer reviews as an AI search strategy 🔒 - With AI platforms like ChatGPT recommending products based heavily on reviews, brands are aggressively soliciting them by offering discounts, employee contests, and donations to charity. Then they're posting the reviews across public forums like Reddit and Yelp where AI engines are most likely to find them.

Shopify merchants' products will soon be discoverable inside ChatGPT as OpenAI retreats on Instant Checkout 🔒 - Shopify is rolling out agentic storefronts later this month, automatically making merchants' products surfaceable and buyable inside ChatGPT conversations without any additional setup. 

Adobe and NVIDIA are partnering to build faster, more powerful AI creative tools — NVIDIA's computing infrastructure will power the next generation of Adobe's Firefly AI models, with a focus on speeding up content creation, campaign production, and marketing workflows for enterprise customers.

Costco is adding AI-powered ads to its website through a new retail media partnership — The retailer is teaming up with ad tech firm Moloco to serve personalized ads on Costco.com based on members' purchase history, with the goal of optimizing for sales rather than clicks or impressions.

Peacock is building an AI avatar of Andy Cohen to guide viewers through Bravo's library — The avatar will recommend shows based on viewer preferences and answer questions mid-episode about what's happening on screen. Al Michaels has his own AI avatar for Peacock's 2024 Olympics coverage.

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