May 29th-May 4th // Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
In This Edition!
Anthropic's going public!
Meta tries to sell something other than ads (again)
Check out the latest AI Edge Podcast episode with Dr. Cecilia Dones, Founder of 3 Standard Deviations and AI Professor at Columbia University!
We discuss the latest AI developments, including Google’s AI search overhaul and ChatGPT CPA ads. We also get into the generational divide on AI and how marketers should be thinking about it.
Top Headlines🔥
Summary: Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on Monday, potentially setting up a public offering as soon as this fall. The company's revenue run rate crossed $47B in May, fueled largely by AI coding tools. That narrow focus on enterprise productivity is what got Anthropic here. Unlike OpenAI, it did not launch consumer-facing products like a browser, image generation, and commerce capabilities. Anthropic joins SpaceX and OpenAI in what could be the biggest wave of tech IPOs in a generation. SpaceX, which merged with Elon Musk's xAI, has set a fixed price of $135 per share at a $1.77T valuation for its IPO, with a Nasdaq debut targeted for June 12th. OpenAI is preparing to file its IPO in the coming weeks. As Anthropic preps for the public markets, it also called on top AI labs🔒 to slow AI development, warning that models may soon be capable of improving themselves without human intervention. Some AI researchers consider that threshold to be a point of no return, when the pace of AI advancement becomes impossible to predict or control.
Opinion: With Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI all heading to public markets, the pressure to grow revenue every quarter will increase. That likely means more price increases, more aggressive enterprise upsells, and of course, more advertising. Don’t be surprised if Anthropic launches some kind of ad business after going public!
Meta has struggled at selling anything other than ads. Will AI be different?
Source: CNBC
May 30th, 2026
Summary: Meta wants to diversify beyond ads, announcing a business AI agent, new AI subscriptions, and a potential cloud computing business, all in the same week. The agent handles customer inquiries, recommends products, and books appointments across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, and is part of a new subscription service called Meta One. Meta’s AI efforts are not all going smoothly: A developer API for its Muse Spark model still hasn't launched nearly two months after Meta's chief AI officer said it was coming "soon," raising questions about how quickly Meta can monetize its massive AI investments.
Opinion: Meta’s ad business is a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it’s wildly successful and keeps printing money. On the other hand, Meta can’t make anything else work because it’s hard to justify spinning up new business lines that sap resources away from the ad business. Another issue for Meta: consumers haven’t quite gotten comfortable paying Meta for its products directly.
New Products & Features 🚀
What It Does: Salesforce launched several AI agents to help marketers with execution. A new Prospecting Agent called Hunter finds leads and runs outreach independently. A Marketing Goals Agent lets marketers define an objective and budget, then handles building and optimizing the campaign. Salesforce will also acquire Contentful, a content management platform, to give agents a shared content layer across channels.
Quick Take: The pitch sounds great until you take a closer look at your Salesforce data hygiene. Most marketing orgs using Salesforce don't have clean, unified customer data in the platform; they have years of migration debt, duplicate records, and incomplete fields. The agent is only as good as what it's working with.
What It Does: Snowflake launched new AI tools at its annual Summit designed to let marketers use AI on top of their existing customer data within Snowflake rather than moving it to separate platforms. Cortex Sense gives AI enough business context to produce more reliable outputs. Cortex Agent Sharing lets brands give agencies access to AI-powered audience tools without sharing the underlying customer data. Snowflake also brought Claude directly into the platform via an expanded Anthropic partnership.
Quick Take: Snowflake is positioning itself as the neutral Switzerland of AI infrastructure—the place where your data stays put while the AI models come to it. That's a smart wedge against both the hyperscalers (who want your data in their clouds) and the AI platforms (who want you to export to them).
What It Does: InMobi Advertising partnered with Scope3 to make its mobile and CTV inventory accessible to AI-powered buying agents. This includes InMobi’s own app, Glance, a retail-focused consumer experience with 300M active devices. AI agents can browse, match, and activate inventory without human involvement. What previously required days of manual setup can now happen in minutes.
Quick Take: We don’t have one. Must we always have one? Okay, fine. Agents…
AI Use Case of The Week💡
Inside Coca-Cola’s use of AI to sharpen marketing spend
The Setup: Coca-Cola's marketing investment decisions were slow. Different teams were working from the same data but reaching different conclusions. When a competitor ramped up pressure in the sugar-free soda category, for example, Coca-Cola would typically spend a lot of time deciding whether to respond with TV, digital, or in-store ads. By the time a decision was reached, the market had shifted.
The AI Solution: Coca-Cola built an internal platform called Fuel Light 360 that uses AI and scenario modeling to evaluate potential investments in real time. Instead of arriving at meetings with conflicting interpretations of the same data and spending time reconciling those interpretations, teams now work from a shared view that moves the conversation directly to decisions about where to spend.
The Results:
Decision cycles dropped from two weeks to one hour
Meeting time shifted from debating data to making decisions
Why It Matters: Decision-making stalls when different teams interpret the same numbers differently. Coca-Cola's approach attacks silos and poor internal collaboration by giving everyone a shared analytical starting point. AI is helping the company eliminate debates that delayed decisions. Good decision-making is arguably the most valuable, high-leverage activity within an organization.
Your Action: How can your company make decisions faster? Map out your decision-making process. Where does it slow down? Getting clear on the specific decision-making bottleneck will tell you what kind of tool you need.
For example, are teams working from different data sets? That's a data unification problem. Is there no agreed-upon framework for weighing trade-offs? That's a scenario-modeling problem. Find the bottlenecks and use AI to open them up.
Other Notable Headlines📌
ChatGPT ad delivery struggles are testing advertiser patience🔒 - Advertisers in ChatGPT's ad pilot are reporting significant under-delivery, with some not spending even a tenth of their budget.
UK orders Google to let publishers opt out of AI scraping for search summaries - The UK's Competition and Markets Authority ruled that Google must give publishers tools to prevent their content from being used to power AI Overviews and other AI search features, and it must properly cite content it does use.
Publishers quietly cut ‘six-figure’ deals via Snowflake’s AI licensing platform🔒 - Snowflake is positioning itself as a marketplace where enterprises pay publishers for licensed access to their content to power AI tools. The Washington Post, AP, and USA Today Network are among 17 publishers that signed on.
Anthropic scales Claude Mythos to critical infrastructure in 15+ countries - Anthropic's Mythos model can scan codebases and identify security vulnerabilities at scale. It's expanding to 150 new organizations across power, water, healthcare, and communications, including NATO, Samsung, and the EU's cybersecurity agency.
Hasbro is licensing its characters to AI experiences with the original voice actors - Hasbro launched an AI studio called Sixth Wall that lets companies license characters like Optimus Prime and Cobra Commander for interactive AI experiences.
That’s It For This Week 👋
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