Personal AI Agents vs. Brand Agents: The Next Battle in AI Commerce
The AI Marketing Companion
What happens when your personal AI agent starts shopping with a brand’s AI agent? Sandy Carter talks with Diaz Nesamoney, CEO of DaVinci Commerce, about the shift from GEO to Agentic Commerce Optimization, why “mentioned is not bought,” and how personal agents, brand agents and richer product context could reshape the customer journey. They explore what Meta Muse, OpenAI Dots, ChatGPT and the rise of agentic commerce mean for marketers, and what brands need to do now to make their products understandable, trusted and recommendable by AI agents.
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Where Should Your Next Marketing Dollar Go? | Al, Budgets & the CMO's Dilemma
The AI Marketing Companion
CMOs are putting more than 15% of their marketing budgets into Al. But 70% say their own marketing processes aren't ready for it. Where Does Your Next Marketing Dollar Go? Before you spend your next marketing dollar on Al, look at what Gartner found when it asked 401 CMOs about their budgets this year. They are putting more than 15 percent of the marketing budget into Al, and 70 percent of them say their own processes aren't ready for it My guest on this episode of The AI Marketing Companion has an explanation for that gap. Marie Bahl is the CMO of Uptempo, whose software helps marketing...
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New Research! What’s WRONG with Content Marketing Today
The AI Marketing Companion
Andy Crestodina has asked more than a thousand content marketers the same questions every year since 2014, which makes him the only person holding a twelve-year record of whether content marketing works. This year's answers are the worst he has ever published. Only 13.9% of marketers report strong results from their blog, down from a range of 20% to 30% that held for nine straight years. Another 18.9% say they no longer know whether their blog works at all. What makes it stranger is everything that happened alongside it. Posts got 115 words shorter. Time spent per post fell by 50...
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40% of Marketing Budgets Are Moving to Creators. Here's Why
The AI Marketing Companion
Creators are dead. Long live creators. The experimental era of creator marketing is over, and 40% of marketing budgets now flow to creators. The brands still treating that spend like a test are already behind. Jeff Barrett has lived every side of the creator economy: Shorty Award winning creator, creator partnerships lead for Fortune 500 brands like Adobe and Oracle, It's No Fluke columnist on Yahoo Creators, and board chair of the Creator Guild of America. In this episode of The AI Marketing Companion, Jeff and Sandy Carter get into why trust is pulling budgets toward creators, how creators...
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The real AI Status Symbol
The AI Marketing Companion
What is the real AI status symbol in 2026? It may not be what you think. Artificial intelligence is changing how we work, create, communicate and compete. But beyond simply using AI tools, there is a bigger shift happening in how people and businesses think about AI, productivity and the future. In this video, we explore the real AI status symbol and what it reveals about the changing relationship between people, technology and artificial intelligence. You'll discover why AI adoption is becoming more than just a technology trend, what separates people who use AI from those who truly understand...
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Shira Lazar: 5 Creator Lessons for Marketers
The AI Marketing Companion
TIME Top 100 creator Shira Lazar shares her creator playbook. Before "creator" became a career path, Shira Lazar was already building one. In this episode of The AI Marketing Companion, Shira shares the lessons she's learned from more than 15 years of building media brands, identifying trends, and helping creators navigate a rapidly changing digital landscape. Timestamps 00:00 Introduction and Shira's journey from early digital media to the creator economy 04:25 How to recognize a real trend before it reaches peak popularity 10:18 Why follower counts don't tell the whole story when selecting...
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The Devil Wears Prompts | Cathy Hackl on the Brand You No Longer Control
The AI Marketing Companion
Cathy Hackl on what AI is doing to brands. Fewer than 10% of the sources AI assistants cite rank in Google's top 10 for the same question. Your brand equity moved and nobody sent a memo. Cathy Hackl has spent a decade being early. She was calling the metaverse before most boardrooms could spell it. USA Today named her one of the best predictors of tech behavior in the world, Newsweek named her a top AI visionary, and she is the number one voice on LinkedIn for spatial AI. As CEO of Future Dynamics, co-founder of Journey, and Futurist in Residence at Nokia, she has guided Nike, Walmart, Louis...
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We're All in the Diaper Business (And Mark Schaefer Explains Why)
The AI Marketing Companion
The biggest disruption in marketing history isn't coming for your job. It's coming for your customer. In this episode of The AI Marketing Companion, Sandy Carter sits down with bestselling author, keynote speaker, and marketing thought leader Mark Schaefer to explore one of the biggest shifts happening in business today: AI isn't just changing marketing—it is fundamentally changing the people we market to. Mark explains why we're "all in the diaper business," shares the surprising Betty Crocker lesson that every brand needs to understand, and explores how AI companions, cognitive offloading,...
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How a 24-Year Army Veteran Built 360K LinkedIn Followers by Telling Stories
The AI Marketing Companion
America turns 250 this year. Every brand on the planet is reaching for the moment. And most of them are about to miss it completely. Michael Quinn has spent years studying why, and what to do instead. He is a 3x LinkedIn Top Voice with a following above 360,000, a Forbes Coaches Council member, and the founder of Tenova LLC, with a monthly social reach that exceeds two million people. He knows what makes content land, what makes brands earn trust, and what the difference looks like between honoring a moment and just borrowing it. In this conversation we get into three ideas that every marketer...
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Your Brand's Soul Isn't Dead, It Just Needs AI Done Right | Tatyana Kanzaveli
The AI Marketing Companion
A few weeks ago, I was talking with a marketing leader who summed up the challenge facing most teams in a single sentence: "We need to create three times more content with the same number of people." I suspect that sounds familiar. Every platform wants more. LinkedIn wants consistency. Short-form video is consuming marketing calendars. Leadership wants greater visibility. Customers expect faster responses. Somehow, all of that has landed on teams that aren't dramatically larger than they were a year ago. So marketers do what marketers always do. They look for leverage. Right now, that leverage...
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