Welcome to Artificially Intelligent Marketing,
a weekly podcast where we stay on top of the
latest trends, tips, and tools in the world of
marketing AI, helping you get the best results
from your marketing efforts. Now let's join our
hosts, Paul Avery and Martin Broadhurst. And
welcome again to Artificially Intelligent Marketing,
episode 52, but the first episode of 2026. Paul
Avery here, joined as always by Martin Broadhurst.
Happy New Year, Martin. How are you doing? Great,
Paul. And to be perfectly honest, I'm not even
sure if it is actually me here or if it's one
of the many agents or sub -agents that I have
operating for me and on behalf of me at any given
time at the moment. It's been a busy start to
the new year, testing out all of these new AI
tools, more of which later. Well, as far as I'm
concerned, across the camera here, you are oozing
charisma. So I know for sure it's one of your
agents. Well, it's the start of 2026. Of course,
we have the obligatory Friends and Predictions
episode. So for all those people who've probably
already listened to 50 of these of different
types, here's another one. We've got some interesting
takes, potentially a few contrarian takes in
here as well. So I think it's hopefully still
going to be worth your time, dear listener. So
why don't we just get straight on into it then?
What do we think AI is going to look like for
marketers by the end of 2026? What's your first
prediction, mine? So mine is that the small AI,
scrappy little startup, you might have heard
of them, they're known as Google. of chrome with
a fully agentic browser experience akin to perplexity's
comet or flawed for chrome i think this one is
just so obvious the way that the whole market
is moving they don't have one at the moment but
the gemini platform could so easily Jump right
in there. And to be honest, having been using
these tools for a while now, both Perplexity's
Comet and Claude for Chrome, which I've been
playing around with for the past couple of weeks,
I just think that it's a must -have, essential
add -on to the browser experience. And for marketers,
well, let me tell you, if you can get to grips
with understanding how to prompt and instruct
these agentic browsers, there is a massive unlock
for individual productivity to be had. Yeah,
I'm pretty excited about Google having one specifically,
just because I would expect the capabilities
in a bunch of work -driven platforms to be way
better. You know, we're a Google Apps organization,
so Gmail, Google Drive, Google Slides, Google
Docs, you know, the ability to say, go search.
a bunch of these files and then write something
in this document and then update this spreadsheet
and then mark the trello card done like that
would be really quite nice if we could get some
level of agentic behavior built into chrome knows
a lot about us already whether we like it or
not in terms of the websites we visit and should
be logged into a bunch of stuff that we want
to be able to do things in automatically and
yeah it feels like a no -brainer but They've
been a bit notoriously slow. I mean, if I had
to guess, I'd say this capability exists within
Google already and it just hasn't been launched.
So why the hold up? Yeah, I would agree. They're
probably testing this extensively internally
because they want to get it right. Every new
product release that comes out of Google is scrutinized
probably more heavily and more closely than competitors.
perplexity can throw out comet and people go
oh that's cool and it does some tasks over a
short time horizon but if google were to launch
a similar product that had a similar short time
horizon people might go oh it's a bit crap so
i think they'll probably want to get it right
to the point where it can run and execute tasks
over the long term and maybe manage sub -agents
so they can show something that's like really
impressive and makes people go oh yeah this is
this is special and i think you're right the
integration that they've got with the google
workspace environment the authentication that
they have through google authentication tools
and just the vast amount of user data that they'll
have on behavior will make their agent a step
above the competition i dare say and i say that
as someone who has started using claude for chrome
and been really impressed with its abilities
and can see that a native gemini one in chrome
well it would be a true disruptor in the browser
field for sure i guess it'd be quite easy to
know if this is a done or not done eos style
uh in terms of whether we got this prediction
right or not because obviously it will get launched
but what do you think are like The practical
ramifications for marketers here, is there anything
that we should be thinking about or doing in
the lead up to this potential launch? Yeah, I
think if people can get their hands on something
like Claude or Chrome or have a play with Perplexity's
comic browser, just get used to briefing in these
agents. It's really interesting to see them operate
and how they get stuck. They work really well.
with very well -specified tasks, even to the
point of sometimes saying, then click on this
button. So directing them through the UI. And
what's interesting is I can see a world where
it's almost like the skills .md, the skills markdown
file that they recommend using for cloud code
agents now. The more granularity and specificity
that you put in a task, the more repeatable and
predictable it's going to be. And I can easily
see marketers that are regularly pulling stats
from, you know, maybe it's an SEO tool and you
want to pull keyword ranking reports or you're
doing Google Analytics reporting and moving data
from here to there. Having the steps of that
task really well documented and then sticking
that into one of these browser agents, that's
going to be the thing that makes them go from.
interesting tool but makes a lot of errors to
oh actually this is something i'm going to use
on a weekly daily even basis yeah i think that's
a really good suggestion i think the other thing
when this comes as we expect it to to google's
product suite It's going to open up access to
people, especially in a work environment that
might not have the freedom and flexibility to
use whatever tool they want to have a play around
with. Maybe, you know, you can still follow Martin's
advice because there's nothing to stop you doing
this on your own personal computer and getting
to grips with these tools, but actually using
them for work. You might be in an environment
where everything's Google based. And if Gemini
doesn't do it, then I'm afraid you can't use
it. Whereas obviously that would open this access
up. I guess by extension, we can probably expect
to see. co -pilots maturation within edge and
probably similar capabilities for people who
are tied to the microsoft system yeah i think
they've more or less confirmed that these kinds
of abilities are coming to edge and are being
rolled out slowly in the coming months i'd expect
that probably to be in most people's browsers
by q2 but it'll be interesting to see how how
much of this ability they give people and in
the copilot 365 environment do the users with
copilot 365 chat which is the free version of
copilot do they get access to this or is it only
for people that have the 365 pro license as well
that'll be an interesting question because certainly
if you're using low cost or free based versions
of these tools once things get agentic they eat
tokens for breakfast and lunch and dinner and
they snack all day and they eat millions of tokens
um makes it much harder to deliver that stuff
for free although i've got some ideas and some
of the trends and predictions i'm going to make
as to how they might still make money from from
those things but um nice one martin that's a
great first prediction martin and i kind of did
this independently so some of our predictions
overlap a bit but actually they're surprisingly
not different, but take different angles. So
my first prediction is actually about generative
engine optimization, answer engine optimization,
whatever you want to call it. I think we're going
to see, I think we think we've seen the explosion
in people trying to get good at this. And I don't
think people have even begun. Now, I've been
somewhat critical of companies piling on the
AEO, GEO bus. I think people are right. They're
just a bit too early and they're probably not
doing it the right way, which is I do think we're
going to need this. We do want to come up in
AI answers, but whether or not there's some crazy,
amazing AEO, GEO specific tactics that you need
to deploy or rather you just be really good at
what was good for SEO and a lot of it ends up
being good for AEO is maybe something we can
discuss in a bit. But I was actually on a LinkedIn
live. The reason I put this one in is I was on
a LinkedIn live yesterday. And we had our head
of paid ads as part of Supreme Optimization,
which is the paid ads specialist within Supreme
Group. And she was telling us how we haven't
seen any reduction in Google ad clicks and spent.
And we had a really good discussion. And the
conclusion that we came to is that at the current
point, people are maybe using AI to better understand
the product landscape, self -educate. learn at
the different options available but then they
still google the product category or the product
name and then they go and visit the website to
read about the product and then they buy it there
which has all sorts of attribution nightmares
associated with it to be honest but what i predict
over the course of 2026 is more and more people
turn to ai we it maybe gets slightly better at
driving traffic to product pages and so maybe
we can track that a bit more so i think most
people will start to see their traffic directly
from perplexity chat gpt gemini increasing but
i also think we'll start to see the ability to
purchase in these chat bots as well which i think
will be where aeo geo starts to become really
important right because you're missing out on
purchases if you're not in the answers and i
want to talk about that as as part of a separate
prediction maybe in a little bit but um what
i think that means is for marketers we're probably
going to be shifting towards the types of top
of the funnel content that's like comparisons
or the best x for y some of this we've talked
about already on the podcast martin things that
aren't a common problems um that by personas
might be facing and again anybody who's done
inbound marketing over the last 10 years this
probably sounds quite familiar right so if you're
already doing this stuff you're probably already
doing quite well in an aeo and geo and then i
think it might also just change a little bit
how people try and measure this i mean you've
got hrefs and um semrush and all these other
platforms trying to offer share of ai voice tracking
which I suspect it's not that useful right now
because of just how dynamic these systems are
even compared to search. But I think people are
probably going to still be desperate to figure
out if their brands are being mentioned in AI
answers. So maybe we see some platform development
there. Maybe we see, you know, ChatGPT offering
the equivalent of a Google search console so
that we can actually better understand how our
brands are being. are being mentioned when people
are searching for you know problems and solutions
related to what we do um and then i think we'll
continue to see people lean into high quality
content to try and make sure that theirs is the
brand that gets cited especially you know in
a world of low quality ai filler and i think
it will be things like original research proprietary
information that you can't really get elsewhere
i think humans find that valuable and i think
ai chatbots will realize that humans find that
valuable and that's what they'll look for to
surface a lot of the educational type content
that they provide in their answers so what do
you reckon martin on the uh continued growth
of interest in geo let's call it for simplicity
well it's not going away that's for sure every
workshop that i have has people saying oh how
do i need to optimize for visibility in this
but i guess following on from that then paul
do you think the seo role will just expand to
encompass this or do you think it's going to
be a new role a new specialism in and of itself
yeah that's a great question i think the simple
answer is it's the same role with some additional
strings required to add to the bow do you know
i actually think it potentially makes life exciting
for seos again maybe they've always considered
their life a bit challenging and exciting but
I think they're already very used to trying to
reverse engineer and figure out what we needed
to do to be top of Google search. And now they're
having to do that to make sure their brands get
cited in AI answers. And I suspect that a lot
of the tactics and tools they've already used
to using still apply. And I also expect there
to be the ebb and flow of the currents, right?
There's going to be an opportunity. We've talked
about this on the pod before. If we get loads
of product reviews and ChatGPT is obsessed with
product reviews and it thinks the best products
are definitely the ones that have the most reviews
and the highest average review. And that's the
one that it recommends every time. People obsess
about reviews and then ChatGPT and OpenAI will
be like, oh, we need to dial that down a bit
then because that's been gained. And I expect
to see all of that play out. And who better to
face that challenge than people who've been doing
it in a slightly different form for the last
decade? I don't know. What do you think? Well.
forget what i think i'm really interested to
know how we measure this in 12 months time what's
the metric what's the what's the done not done
in eos terms paul like whether or not it came
true or not yeah i think that's a really good
question so i think what we should expect to
see is an increase in the amount of traffic that
we're getting from ai chatbots so if you're not
tracking this already it's fairly easy to do
you should be able to see referral traffic from
example um ChatGPT, you should be able to see
referral traffic from Gemini, Perplexity. A lot
of the brands that I have access to, I can see
that there's a small amount of that traffic and
it's going up. And interestingly, so Biostrata,
the agency I co -founded, we currently get 8
% of our traffic from AI chatbots, which is actually
pretty huge, I think, compared to a lot of other
brands. Most of the brands, Hayler on the podcast
I was on yesterday, we were talking about, she
said most of the brands she's looked at recently
is more like 1%. So it's still very, very small.
But we should see that grow if this is true.
Assuming that there's a mechanism that makes
it easier for you to click through, which we
don't know for sure. And I do think people are
going to try and find a way to measure some sort
of AI share of voice. I really don't believe
the platform is there to do it yet. we would
need to see a much better platform released,
in my opinion. But I think people are going to
want to try and measure it. It will end up being
the equivalent of trying to track your keyword
rankings, right? And trying to see how often
you're mentioned in relevant queries. But I think
the gold standard is going to be more referral
traffic, at least to begin with. We'll talk about
that as part of a different prediction in a moment.
And tracking the conversion rate of that traffic,
like do those people actually go and buy something
from you? Good old marketing fundamentals, right?
Are we getting good volume and is it converting
into something of value? Yeah, it's like you
said, so much of this stuff is going to be about
applying fundamentals. I think where it will
get actually crazy is when things become more
agentic and you type something in chat GPT. And
it doesn't even show you the product recommendations.
It finds the three products that it thinks are
best. It engages in a price negotiation of the
agent of one of the merchants. And then it buys
it for you. And then it turns up at your house.
As a marketer, how are you going to measure that?
Is that traffic? Is that conversions? How do
you measure an AI agent conversion versus a human
conversion? So I think all of these things hold
true for now. Well, I think they'll probably
hold. true until the end of the year asterisk
we'll speak later um but yes focus on the fundamentals
for now maybe the world gets a bit shaken over
the next 24 months oh what have you got for us
on your prediction number two mine so mine is
moving into the world of model development and
my prediction is that there will be no new flagship
number jumps so to speak from any of the major
model labs. So I don't think we're going to see
OpenAI launch GPT -6. I don't think we're going
to see Gemini release Gemini 4, or should I say
Google release Gemini 4. And I don't think we're
going to see Lord release Opus 5. However, I
do think we'll see Lord Haiku 5. Will we get
a new Grok? I'm not paying attention to that,
to be perfectly honest. We might hear that there
is a new Grok. Elon will tell us that there is
one coming in the next six days that's going
to clean your car and fly you to the moon. It
may or may not happen. I choose, due to my own
personal set of values and principles, to ignore
that side of the AI landscape. for the time being
this really hamstring your ability to create
inappropriate nude pictures then i'm afraid martin
but um that's probably for the best what what
makes you think this do you think we're just
outside of the cycle or yeah it's as simple as
that to be perfectly honest if you look at how
long it took for them to go from four to five
i think we'll see the the point gains um progressing
so i think we'll see 5 .2 maybe turn into 5 .5
I think we'll see a Gemini turn into a Gemini
3 .5 at some point in the year. If I was really
pressed, I could see Google launching Gemini
for flash maybe. Um, and doing one of the smaller
models in a number leap. But I just don't see
it. I think the cycle will tip over. They'll
give each of these 18 months to run. And that's
partly because I don't think we've got close
to saturating the use cases for where they're
currently at. I think that there's still quite
a lot of runway for them. And I know that all
of the model providers, they talk about reserving
the big... leap for some new capability and at
the moment i think the agentic piece the computer
use metric is the one that is really interesting
across the board like all the the leap in gpt5
the leap in flawed and all of them have seen
big leaps in computer use and that hasn't really
rolled out into the world yet so i think once
that actual application of it and people are
going oh my god this this new skill that it's
got is actually pretty good um and then people
start going when's the next one coming we need
more of this because you know the general knowledge
and intelligence of these things is already typically
exceeding what i would say 90 of use cases 90
plus use cases really needs so yeah i think once
the the computer use that element is being more
rolled out and more seen and felt widely by consumers
and enterprise, then they'll say, right, now
it's time for us to take the next numerical leap.
I think I agree with you, but in the interest
of making this a dynamic conversation, the only
reason I can think, there's a couple of things
that spring to mind. The first one is some of
the bigger GPU clusters, when they start to come
online, I think maybe I shouldn't mention this
now because I don't want to trigger you again,
but I think Elon's got one coming online in the
next like month or two, hasn't he? I'm sure he
has. I'm sure he's told you that a week ago and
it's just like self -driving cars. It's just
around the corner. He's going to be living on
Mars in 2026. I'm sure he said that in 2015.
Just need to dial it back. Yeah, chill. And be,
you know, be calm. Yeah, there'll be gigawatt
clusters coming online, loads of GPUs, incrementally
every training run, assuming they're still even
bothering to try and train new models, because
I think they've sucked up a lot of the high quality
data that's available, if I understand correctly.
But let's say they're still doing big, ever bigger
training runs. One assumes in theory, maybe they
could go faster if they had 10x, 100x more, I'm
going to call it GPU power, because of course,
we're also getting better GPUs, not just more.
GPUs. So in theory, that might allow a training
run to get done before the end of the year. I
still think you're probably right. The other
thing is your point about giving models new numbers
when they do something cool they can't do now.
And we already saw some of this with what should
have probably been GPT -5 wasn't. It was GPT
-4 .5 probably because its capabilities were
not quite what was hoped for. And then OpenAI
always also had that weird naming convention
when thinking came out, right, where we had the
O series of models. So maybe there's a research
breakthrough and we get a new capability or,
you know, agents become much better and we get
GPT -A1 or something, which is something completely
different that does other cool stuff. Without
being able to see inside the machine, I think
that's quite hard to predict. I think probably
your prediction's safe. What does this mean for
marketers? What do we have to keep an eye on
here? I think it means that you can, for the
time being, and this would be my advice, regardless,
really focus on squeezing as much value out of
the tools that are in front of you today. The
capabilities of these models is... amazing, the
agentic capabilities in particular. But if you're
still playing around with these models for content
creation and maybe helping draft awkward emails
or ideation, you are barely scratching the surface
of what these tools are capable of. Lord. on
its own has an amazing set of skills now for
document creation. In fact, GPT 5 .2 has a similar
thing as well. For the first time this week,
I asked it to create a PowerPoint for me, something
that I've been doing with GPT, well, since it's
had Code Interpreter, really. And it's been able
to create quite basic looking powerpoint files
they were very blank and it had used the basic
template yesterday in a workshop i asked it to
create a powerpoint file after 10 minutes of
watching it in thinking mode still going i said
oh don't worry we'll come back to that later
on we broke for lunch when we came back it had
finished thinking for 50 minutes and it created
a powerpoint that was fully designed with graphics
with pngs embedded within it created its own
layouts as a powerpoint file it was way beyond
what i had seen it do before now i can easily
imagine a world where if i had known it could
do that and i had specified things like the look
and feel the style guide of the powerpoint template
it would have done it to the to the style that
i instructed But that's where we're going. These
can actually execute tasks on, again, that was
a 50 minute thinking exercise. It was, it's definitely
the longest phase of thinking that I've seen
ChatGPT do for me. That's so cool. Cause that's
like quasi agentic, right? It's done a load of
stuff for you, but it's not what we're currently
thinking is agentic in terms of tool use, like
almost like. overt tool use mcp browser agents
that click on things for you it's like it did
a load of extra work for you and gave you this
amazing output that's super interesting okay
i agree there's loads of power there to uh to
tap into before we get more model numbers um
all right next trend so my next prediction not
trend prediction is by the end of 2026 You'll
be executing purchases inside chatbot. So you'll
search for, give me some ideas for a product
for this. It'll make some recommendations. You'll
click on the one that you want to buy and it
will just be purchased. You won't go to a website.
You won't fill in checkout information. It will
just buy it for you. And it's interesting because
this is a prediction show, not a new show. But
this week, Google did actually launch. a new
open sort of open source set of um tools and
and protocols for this type of experience that
they call the agent payments protocol that they
built with like shopify etsy wayfair target walmart
um and you know american express and mastercard
and stripe all these people as you know all of
these important merchants and payment gateways
have all said they're going to support it so
i do think by the end of the year that we'll
have that and oh go on no go on mine what's your
thought i was going to say i think this one's
a slam dunk in so much as google have made that
announcement and on the 8th of january co -pilot
checkout and brand agents was announced by microsoft
as well in partnership with paypal shopify and
stripe And yeah, I, I think this is going to
become the de facto standard for online shopping
experiences. I would also say that the, the brand
agent element in particular is an interesting
tool to watch out for if you're a marketer, because
they are launching within the. So Microsoft Clarity,
the analytics and user experience tool that Microsoft
has given away for free for a long time, it's
a kind of competitor to Hotjar. It's that kind
of a tool for anyone that hasn't used it before.
Within the Clarity brand experience and product
experience, they are launching this brand agent,
which is basically a way of integrating a co
-pilot assistant that understands your product
range. and can have an interactive chat with
somebody on your website and integrates with
the likes of Shopify. So you can just integrate
seamlessly your product stream and then have
an AI assistant guiding customers towards the
checkout. And that was something that they announced
last week. I think you highlight a load of really
important things there that marketers are going
to need to be. thinking about in order to be
able to be ready for this shift maybe less so
in the b2b world that you and i tend to operate
in but certainly in b2c i think it's i think
it's going to have ramifications i'm going to
extend my prediction even further then i'm going
to say there is going to be purchases made where
people don't review the products i'll give you
an example i am going to say this is not a great
example but it's the one that instantly comes
to mind ChatGPT, buy Martin a product for his
birthday and send it. And I'm not going to look
at the products, not going to enter any data.
It's going to buy it and it'll arrive at your
door and my credit card will be charged for it.
Because I think we're going to start to enter
the world of agentic purchases where we identify
the broad outcome for certain. requirements and
product types and we don't even approve the purchase
and there's going to be a bunch of stuff that
needs to go with that right like i'm thinking
yeah you'll have to probably approve a bunch
of purchases for a few months just so the system
can learn how often it gets your preferences
when it you know this is the product i would
have bought is this the product you would have
bought and you have to tell it yes or no so we
can learn you know a bit more about you um And
there'll be other things like budget caps and
stuff like, no, I can't just go and buy something
for you that's like, you know, $5 ,000. You know,
to begin with, I think the way that we'll all
get comfortable with this is, oh, my toothpaste
is running out. Go get me some more toothpaste.
And maybe it knows what toothpaste you've had
in the past. And so it just goes, buys it for
you. Or maybe it finds out that there's a better
toothpaste that's currently on sale. And then
it buys that for you instead, because it knows
that cavity protection is the most important
thing for you based on. The last bit of toothpaste
that you bought. And I think we're going to start
to see a bunch of this stuff emerge. So how will
we know if it's true? I think you'll be able
to click. Firstly, you'll be able to click buy
now in an AI chatbot experience like ChatGPT
or Gemini. And it will just say, bing, done.
And if the second prediction is true, we'll see.
it select the product and you say go buy me something
like this and then it just says bing done and
it's not you didn't even select the product you
just gave it like an overall brief what do you
think about that second part martin do you reckon
that's gonna happen yeah i like that and i like
if i think about that from a consumer perspective
i can see the way that platforms like the payment
gateway stripe paypal they are probably going
to end up holding a lot of the the preference
data I can see them storing purchase profiles
of you as a consumer that they then basically
plug into the agents on different commerce platforms.
And interestingly, and I did wonder what was
going on there. This week when I went into PayPal,
they offered me a PayPal debit card, which is
linked. to my main bank account. So it's just
going to debit my ordinary account, but there's
a kind of cash back. I think it's 1 % cash back
incentive to it. And I thought, Oh, that's interesting.
I wonder what the play is here. And it's making
me think that, Hmm, that's a great way for them
to harvest data, um, to get you to spend all
of your money through. paypal rather than just
the online transactions at certain uh certain
retailers but every time you go to a store in
person you go to the cinema every time you tap
and pay on the underground or anything like that
they can build that profile of you yeah i mean
there's a load of second order effects to this
right because it hasn't happened this way because
we can see this news coming out this week already
but imagine that this agentic payment payment
framework emerged and it was being led by paypal
and no one else offered it for you know six months
and just how much paypal could then come to dominate
the payment gateway market especially for maybe
tech savvy consumers who want to be able to pay
like this and it doesn't surprise me that hasn't
happened because everyone's like whoa we cannot
afford to be missing that train I think it also
brings a bunch of other second order consequences
in line with what you said, because even if we
look at supermarkets and their loyalty cards,
right, tracking what people buy is not new. But
in order for this system that I've predicted
to work, the technology is going to need an ever
more granular understanding of our buying habits.
And to be honest. the richest understanding they
can get of us the better because the better they're
going to operate the more seamless it's going
to be we're not going to trust a system that's
too error -strewn right so having that data becomes
critical and everybody's going to do whatever
they can to get as much of it as possible and
this is paypal's play my guess would still be
That your tool of choice, like the pursuit of
ChatGPT and Gemini to be your assistant of record
is critical. Because that's where they can build
up this massive picture of you. I think the assistant
is going to know a lot about me and a lot about
you and a lot about hundreds of millions, if
not billions of people. So they can do all of
the aggregate. predictions that probably ai will
be quite good at sorting through all of that
data to try and figure out you know i'll start
seeing things turn up at my house that martin
buys because it thinks that i'm just like martin
and so i probably want that thing as well for
those of you that know martin that is an extremely
scary thought for me you want to make sure you
open those packages away from anyone else in
the household do you know it would just be all
of the uh tech that you buy on a kickstarter
that maybe becomes massive and maybe it'll be
another one that meta buys and you'll just get
your money back oh that is an important point
and an important clarification in the last episode
i did say that after limitless were acquired
by meta i wouldn't get a refund from my investment
i'm going to call it an investment in the pendant
ai but they did they refunded me in full so hats
off to them And I take it all back. I love Meta.
They're a very responsible consumer -first company.
Oh, ye of little faith. So what can marketers
do? If you work in B2C, you should be starting
to borderline obsess about this now because I
do think it's coming probably quite quickly.
Once that payment capability is built in, I can
see certainly certain age demographics, I can
see their behavior change quite quickly. potentially
um so yeah i think probably making sure that
your i'm going to call it your website but i'm
sure there'll be a time when it won't be your
website it'll probably be handled by apis that
maybe know your stock levels and stuff like that
but just making sure that you have all of your
product information machine readable easy for
AI chatbots to understand what would be the appropriate
product for an appropriate requirement. Certainly
the days of really unhelpful product names or
names and identities based on number strings
that don't mean anything. Like I can see that
would be a problem if that's how you still manage
your product inventory, for example. And then
I think just starting to try and measure some
of that. Again, where's that going to be done?
I think you'll probably be able to see the number
of purchases in your, let's call it ChatGPT search
console or whatever it may be. Yeah, ChatGPT
Merchant Center. Right, right. Yeah. I would
imagine we're probably going to need to see that
emerge actually as a platform and a tool because...
People are only going to, I mean, people are
going to invest in this if they're confident
it can grow bottom line revenue. But you're going
to want to be able to track this and measure
this and show ROI. Like, yeah, we work really
hard to make sure our products are on ChatGPT.
And hey, look at how many purchases we have.
That seems like a bit of a no brainer for them
to build that in, doesn't it? It does. And I
think that will come alongside the launch of
ChatGPT ads, which this isn't a prediction, but
they'll be coming very soon. You know what? That
might just be my next prediction, Martin. But
before we get to that prediction, let's do your
next prediction. So my prediction had to change,
actually. I had to revise my prediction because
after I wrote the prediction, it came true within
hours. I originally predicted that Anthropic
would launch a mainstream desktop agent for knowledge
workers. much like they have clawed code for
programmers and software developers. Um, and
I put that down in my prediction list and within
a few hours of me writing that down, flawed cowork
was announced, which is exactly that a, at the
moment it's only available on Mac OS, but it
is a flawed based agentic assistant that is capable
of executing tasks. And it doesn't require you
to use terminal or anything like an IDE if you're
a programmer or a software developer. So if you
haven't tried that yet, yeah, check it out. It's
available for Mac users. And if you've got a
Mac's plan on Claude, then go get stuck into
that. But that is not my prediction. My revised
prediction is associated to Anthropic and really
comes off the back of that particular product
launch. I predict Anthropic will launch a dedicated.
agent plan for teams. So this is, I'm expecting
them to release a separate subscription plan
branded and marketed as an agent plan for teams
or organizations distinct from their existing
pro max or the team and enterprise plans already.
And this is designed specifically around agentic
task execution. And there will be metrics of
things like how many tasks it can run, how many
sub -agents you can run. And I think it will
be really tied to a new product line. But that's
what I expect. And busy marketing teams will
be able to subscribe to this plan and there'll
be ready -made templates out of the box. And
we'll see this already coming through the likes
of... flawed code and flawed co -work where people
are creating skills documents um i think we'll
see a similar thing but it'll be released under
a new plan this is a super interesting one i'm
kind of glad that um clawed co -work or whatever
it was called got released because um i think
this is a wonderful speculation especially because
I think there's a lot more space here in terms
of possibilities than meets the eye. And I give
an example. Do you remember when we were watching
a Google AI launch event? It was probably May
this year. And they had an example of people
collaborating with agents as co -workers in their
Google chat platform. But I just sort of thought
Slack, right? You'd Slack an AI co -worker. As
if you were slacking a human co -worker, like,
oh, where's this project? And then the co -worker
would come back and let you know. So I wonder
if we might see the ability to hire agentic co
-workers. So whether there's an agent plan or
you pay $500 a month and you get, I don't know,
an intern that's capable of X, Y, Z. They can
project manage like this. They can do research
like this. And they can execute tasks like this.
And you hire them like you would a person. And
that's what you get. And that's the way they
frame it. I hadn't really thought about that
until you said what you said. I don't know. What
do you think? How do you think that will play
out? I think the market will be fumbling around
to try to find the right pricing structure to
begin with, most certainly. And I think every...
one of those kinds of propositions and pricing
structures will be tried um hire a team and it's
the iron marketing team and they give you one
coordinator or one strategist agent one coordinator
and then a creative an editor aid media specialist
whatever it may be and you pay two thousand dollars
per month and you get this cluster um but i do
think it's coming these organizations have got
to to monetize they need to get more uh art well
or should i say higher value subscriptions from
companies they're the ones that are going to
be paying it was a probably 18 months ago that
we first heard chat gpt had spoken to investors
and said they were preparing for a world where
there is a $2 ,000 a month subscription and even
a $20 ,000 a month subscription. And those haven't
come to pass yet. We've got a $200 a month pro
plan available across the board. You've got that
in ChatGPT, Claude and Gem and I have all got
equivalent plans around that value. Where's that
$2 ,000 a month plan? And what's that doing?
And I think this is the year that we'll see it,
whatever shape or form that looks like, but I
think it will be around you. by a team or an
individual agent with sub -agents this is where
we're going it's goldmine i think you're right
i think they'll fumble around different companies
and platforms will try different things to see
what resonates with the market um yeah it's interesting
what you mentioned about obviously we're both
marketers so that's why you think about hiring
a marketing team in that way i wonder if the
reality would be Once you have an extremely capable
agent, I wonder if it ends up like a chatbot.
I think it was Bloomberg tried to fine -tune
or even create their own model based on all of
their available finance data. And then it turned
out to not be better. I think it was based on
GPT -3 and it turned out to not be better than
GPT -4. So you did all that training and you
end up with a product that's worse than the next
iteration of models. So one question would be,
If you get a really good agent, isn't it just
the same agents doing all those jobs? And therefore,
in theory, couldn't you just hire one agent?
But, and I think to your point, in order to monetize
this effectively, this is how these platforms
need to think, right? They'll want you to hire
five team members or, you know, or... or six
different divisional capabilities or whatever
so they can charge you six times instead of one
time and i do think as we see the monetization
of the models and the agents over time trying
to build an ever bigger gap between the cost
of the tokens to get stuff done and the outputs
and, dare I say, outcomes offered by the agents
in terms of what their commercial value is. Obviously,
the platforms want that to be as big as possible.
And I think we'll see that get stretched from
both ends. I think token production for different
types of tasks will drop. Maybe the systems will
auto route to cheaper. faster models when the
task allows for it but you as the consumer don't
necessarily get the benefit of that but they
just get to deliver cheaper at the same time
as finding commercial outcomes that are worth
a lot of value or money to a business and then
charging based on the value not based on the
tokens yeah absolutely they've got to position
them not just as it's this price per million
tokens in and per million tokens out they have
to price it as hey look uh the value that we
are delivering for your organization how we package
that up and bundle it that's our secret sauce
don't you worry about that but this to your point
that was one of the things that i found really
interesting when we saw the launch of flawed
opus 4 .5 was its ability to achieve these frontier
state -of -the -art benchmarks But its token
efficiency compared to the previous iterations
was vastly improved. Basically, it didn't have
to think as much. Therefore, the actual cost
of execution was far lower. And that's exactly
what we're talking about, isn't it? The model
providers want it to be as cheap to deliver as
possible, but the value at the front end for
you as a consumer. remains high and if they can
squeeze that token use down while still saying
look we've got this agent that will deliver amazingly
it uses the frontier model that's where they're
going to start putting in that that extra bit
of margin yeah i mean i'm quite excited the rumors
are floating around for deep seek version four
and for listeners that you know i've been listening
to the podcast or you know paying quite a lot
of attention to ai you'll know that some very
big companies like nvidia their share prices
took a wobble when deep seek volume version 3
was released out of china because it was an open
source model that you could effectively use for
free that had frontier model capabilities at
the time it was right up there with the best
chat gpt and and anthropic clawed models built
basically with very um like low training costs
slow information requirements and deep sea version
4 is going to come out and there's a lot of rumors
already swirling about how they're going to make
that better and one of the i think when historians
write about this period and i think they will
and when we all watch the movie which we i suspect
i thought the whole movie was going to be about
when sam altman got fired for 10 minutes at open
ai but i actually think this movie is now a 10
part Netflix series because of all the different
twists and turns that we've seen and I think
we will see more of. But the fact that high -end
NVIDIA chips were restricted to Chinese researchers
and a bunch of these other factors that then
pushed them to make innovations that they might
not have had to have made if they'd have had
access to the latest tech and the sort of trade
wars that we've seen between China and the US.
Then China taking a much more open source approach
to AI. All of these things are all playing in
together and they're all sort of compounding
on each other. And I wouldn't be surprised if
there's some really interesting stuff in DeepSeek
version four that has some of the things you
described by like a model that almost as a, I
don't know what the word I'm looking for is like
an emergent capability gets a better answer than
any other model, but somehow doesn't. half the
tokens than any of the other models would have
done and distillation and all these other things
i think yeah i think we're going to see more
and more of that um and i think we're going to
need it because we're all running if we've got
agents running around after us doing all this
stuff for us the turk all the token burn is like
going to be absolutely insane if we think um
the amount of ai intelligence required right
now is a lot like it's nothing compared to everybody's
got a hundred agents they don't know they've
got a hundred agents they've just got a gemini
assistant on their phone but they've basically
got a hundred agents running after them all the
time we're going to need all of those innovations
anyway um nice one that's a cracker right my
next prediction and this is going to be this
finishes my uh ai chatbot holy trinity is that
ads come to the ai chatbots It's been so many
rumours through 2025 that this was coming. Supposedly,
ChatGPT was very close to launching some sort
of ad experience or certainly testing an ad experience
towards the end of last year and opted not to
let it out too much into the wild. We're going
to see, I think we're going to see ads. We see
all these people trying to make sure their brands
show up in generative search answers, whether
that's when you search on Google or whether you're
searching on ChatGPT. And as we have seen, one
of the great ways to shortcut making sure your
brand shows up in those searches and in those
conversations is to pay. And what a fantastic
way for all of these platforms to make some of
the money back, given the huge amount of costs
associated with training and managing and inferencing
models. You mentioned it earlier, Martin, seems
like you're very much in the camp of ads are
coming. Absolutely, 100%. In fact, it was reported
last week, I think I saw that OpenAI is actually
trialing their ad product internally with their
staff. They're obviously trying to get a feel
for the user experience and try to make it work
in a way that is not particularly annoying for
people. Because let's be honest, as we've discussed
in the past on the show, ads change the user
experience. in quite a fundamental way particularly
when you're dealing with a chatbot that you go
to for advice you look for feedback on the best
product in this scenario and when you're giving
your uh you're you're having communications with
it in a way that is quite different to the way
that you would with say a normal search engine
and it knows an awful lot about you you have
a different Trust threshold with that product.
So they're gonna have to Move quite cautiously
through this terrain. I feel the moment that
the ads start to Make people trust The product
less I think that will be a a huge kicker for
it and I think They are aware of this. I've seen
Sam Altman address this directly in podcasts
and interviews in the past. But it's one thing
being aware of it. It's another thing actually
making an ad product, which A, doesn't destroy
trust in the brand, but also B, does deliver
the promise to advertisers. I do know it's spot
on. I sort of flip back and forth on this. On
the one hand, It feels like the stakes for getting
this ad experience right when in an AI conversational
format are much higher than they were for getting
ads right in a search box, right? So for Google
ads, Google search ads, for example, for the
reason you said, right? Like people are developing
quasi personal relationships with these chatbots.
There's a level of trust that comes with the
interactions that they just can't afford to ruin.
through the ad experience. So they really do
have to get that right. And I think that's why
we're also seeing, you know, that people aren't,
you know, platforms are experimenting with this
already. You've mentioned, you know, some of
the stuff that ChapGPT and OpenAI have been doing,
but Perplexity has been having some experiments
as well with things like sponsored follow -up
questions and answers. Microsoft is looking at
some co -pilot native ad formats like showroom
ads that like live inside the conversation. They're
not sort of on the side of the conversation and
i think we're going to see the platforms have
to experiment a lot to figure out what is an
appropriate way to deliver a sponsored experience
inside these platforms without just making people
really mad because i think the stakes are higher
and to that point actually i saw a really interesting
business model it was i don't know the name of
the company and it's going to bug me now but
ad sponsored inference Where you Get So this
is for people using it for development. They're
actually selling access to the frontier models
like Claude 4 .5 But they are Running out so
they're giving you $300 a month worth of tokens
at the moment in this sign up But then they are
selling you ads over your token use and inference
through their platform. Interesting. So if I've
understood, I probably understood incorrectly,
but the first thing that springs to mind is basically
this is just another surface to show banner ads
on and you can have your AI. chatbot cheaper
if you're willing to have ads on the left and
the right hand side of the search experience
is that what you're suggesting and the ads are
somehow contextually relevant but it's mostly
so you don't have to pay a hundred dollars a
month yeah that seems to be that seems to be
the pitch at the moment and i think the people
are going for them the audience is predominantly
very techie uh developer types so no doubt the
advertisers that are working with this particular
brand offering this ad sponsored inference they
are probably brands targeting that particular
community i'm not sure the intricacies of it
but it's an interesting model to to see start
um launching to the market yeah well imagine
something even like even i say worse it's hard
for me to imagine that this ad experience is
pleasant and anyway and i and i really think
that people will clamor for an ad free experience
that they're willing to pay for think five dollars
a month for netflix with ads twenty dollars a
month for netflix without ads um like spotify
style you can't have on keep your conversation
going unless you have this ad pop up in chat
gpt for 15 seconds then you can click the x to
get rid of it and then you can continue a conversation
just like the mobile gaming watch this video
oh my god i can't think of anything worse that
would yeah well there's a reason i subscribe
to to so many services and it's so i am so ad
uh allergic i don't know i'm not sure That's
a terrible way of phrasing it, but yeah, I will
steer clear of ads in any way that I can. Imagine
if the ad play, because I'm pretty sure this
is Netflix's play too, if the ad play is just
a way to make the ads so annoying that people
are like, you know what, this is worth $30 a
month to not have to part with this experience
anymore. And they don't actually intend to make
any money out of the ads. themselves they just
want to push people to actually sign up for a
paid version of the platform i mean that's another
possibility i guess that's certainly the way
that youtube seems to have gone and let me tell
you that youtube premium subscription is the
last subscription that i would ever give up you
will claw that out of my cold dead hands you
know i couldn't agree more you're trying to watch
like a video and you're right into it and then
without warning it just goes with volume that's
like 30 higher than the actual thing you're watching
usually an ai voice now as well doing the voiceover
it turns out if i only click on that ad i can
finally win at crypto um yeah so what does it
mean for marketers on this one ultimately i think
begin preparing for being able to buy your way
into this generative answer experience keep a
very close eye on it um but in the same way as
there was a a juxtaposition between seo and ads
i think that will be here as well i think if
you can find that there are aspects of important
conversations that you would want to be part
of that for whatever reason your brand isn't
getting mentioned you're going to have to pay
to shortcut your way in there whilst constantly
looking for optimization capabilities to try
and make sure that your products and brand is
the one that ai is mentioning let's call it natively
or you know as the genuine organic result if
you will And I think one of the things that could
be interesting is how we bid for these placements.
If it's banner ad style, I think it will work
exactly like it does now to a certain extent.
But if they really double down on trying to make
sure the product recommendations are really good
and natural and fit with what the person would
genuinely want to buy, having great products
is going to be important, right? And having...
I would hope honest, authentic, easily machine
readable, comprehensive product information that
made the AI feel, in inverted commas, safe or
accurate, making that recommendation to the human
because they had enough information to base their
decision on. So lots of content around case studies,
data, and just basically supporting information
that makes the AI feel like it's making a good
recommendation is going to be critical. another
thing i would say for advertisers thinking about
this as a future play is um thinking back to
the things that gary vee has often said about
google ads early on and how undervalued they
were that these will be uh places where there
is some short -term arbitrage where you can get
great value because there will be a slower shift
from the competition as well. So I think there'll
be a bit of quick wins for people that move onto
these platforms and adopt early, although that
gap will soon close. But yeah, don't be afraid
to shift some of your media spend onto them when
they initially come about. That's really interesting.
I'm probably way too inside the system to...
to know but my gut feeling is because of the
gary vaynerchuks of the world i think a lot of
marketers are nervous and are kind of annoyed
and feel like probably they missed some of those
early arbitrage opportunities whether it was
google search ads sponsored content on social
and everybody that i speak to seems way more
primed for like knowing that this is going to
be a thing thinking i need to get in there early
while there's a lot of value to be had you speak
to way more marketers than i do martin am i too
inside the system is nobody really thinking about
this or yeah i think you are to be completely
honest um i think there will be a six month one
year two year window and then part of that will
come about with if people are happy with their
media spend at the moment they'll be reluctant
to to reallocate budget i think there's just
going to be a slow shift agencies that are delivering
this are going to have to be figuring out how
to use the systems so yeah i just think there'll
be there'll be a period where might be a good
place to to play in the paid media space that
is a very fair point i'm also not particularly
risk averse when it comes to speculating on new
channels um and It's very easy to forget all
of the new channels that people speculated on
and invested time in that came to nothing. What
was that one? There was one at the start of the
pandemic. I can't remember what it was called,
where basically it was like you could dial into
a call that everybody was on. Do you remember
what that was called? It was something house,
wasn't it? Yeah, something like that. And everyone
was like, yeah, this is the new channel which
everyone's got to be on. And it was like super
hot for like two months. And then it was... disappeared
into the ether so yeah you can double down on
channels and not win it does happen reasonably
frequently as well so yeah i guess maybe that
could put people off as well um i don't think
this is going to be one of those to be honest
but people might feel like that um let's go on
to your next prediction then mine following on
from what you said earlier about this is not
a particularly newsy episode but also there was
some news in December that was very relevant
to this next prediction, Meta acquired my favorite
agentic tool, Manus. Manus is a tool that I've
been using for, well, for months now. I've got
the subscription. I've been stress testing it.
I've made some great little fun apps. I've had
it execute entire workflows for me. I've been
incredibly frustrated with it at times. I just
started to feel like I was getting the hang of
how to instruct it specify tasks to it and all
of that kind of stuff and then meta came along
and gobbled it up although importantly they do
say they are going to run it as a standalone
app but this acquisition did make me think about
the future of the meta marketing suite so with
that in mind my prediction is meta will launch
an agentic Support agent via messenger or WhatsApp.
And this will be a customer facing business interfacing
agent that will be able to plug and play with
almost any platform that your business operates
with. So I'm expecting the computer use functionality
to be used from Manus. they'll basically use
this technology stack to basically offer to customers
and to small business owners a customer support
agent or whatever it may be and it will be able
to go on to the websites and answer questions
you'll be able to upload knowledge documents
and it'll be powered in the back end by the new
iteration of the llama series of models or whatever
the the next iteration is in the closed source
future of large language models from meta but
yeah i expect them to to have a bot that is an
official meta product it can take actions so
order lookups returned bookings not just through
official partner integrations but i expect it
to go a bit beyond that and it can hand off to
humans while maintaining context Yeah, that's
an interesting one. I mean, I assume they have
a strategy, but I think probably Mark's strategy
is we'd love to have Martin as a customer. So
let's buy the company that issued his pendant.
Let's buy his favorite agent because he spends
so much money on lifetime deals. Like we need
this guy to be. you know, an active customer
in, and he's got a very famous podcast as well
about AI and marketing. So I think they're just
coming after you, but it's a bit of a shame for
you to have another one of your things bought
up by the least trustworthy company in many people's
eyes, allegedly, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah.
So sorry about that, Martin, that you've had
to go through that again, but hopefully you'll
still have good access to Manus to try and do
the things that you want to do. And super interesting
that. Because it will bring those capabilities
more quickly to people who wouldn't be willing
to go play with a Manus. I think they'll be able
to turn it into a easy to use interface. They'll
be able to productize it. They've just got so
many more heads available to think about that
rather than a small team of engineers thinking
about how to make the thing work. They'll be
able to plug it into their existing. ai suite
you know they've got so many ways ai is powering
the advertising platform but when they can then
plug this into the interfaces where people are
already chatting so whatsapp and messenger i
think it's just going to be a huge amount of
unlock um for end customers they'll be able to
productize this agentic experience and in some
ways what i'm describing here is What I expect
from Google with a productized agentic suite
and flawed with an agent plan that we talked
about earlier, I just think this will be bundled
into their existing product offering. And the
way that they'll monetize it will be through
advertising because you'll be spending more money.
They won't be charging on token costs. They know
that it will be based on spend more advertising.
across our suite of platforms where people are
already hanging out and uh yeah we'll manage
the transactions we'll manage the customer service
we'll manage the sales process don't worry about
that hand off to us and we'll do all the integrations
in the back end as well You could see the attraction
of a platform like that. I think you're right.
I know we're going to leave our big agent discussion
to the end because 2026 being the year of agents,
as it almost certainly will be. But seeing as
we're on this topic of Manus, I think you're
absolutely right that this has to be productized
and brought to market in a way that sort of early
adopter hobbyists, early adopter hobbyists are
willing to take a certain approach, but most
people are not going to be. And to bring this
to life. I tried a new platform this week called
Do Anything. It's basically like Manus. It's
a chatbot. You give it a big picture outcome
that you're trying to achieve rather than like
ask it a question. And then it comes up with
a plan. It spins up some sub -agents that can
do different things. And then it goes off and
it tries to execute your plan. $20 a month. I
thought I'd give it a try for a month. My $20
of credit lasted for 55 minutes. The outcome
that I chose was one of the stock outcomes that
it suggests that you try, which was to create
a monetizable newsletter that has 2000 subscribers.
So the first part of the process was kind of
fun. It was like, here are some topics that are
trending right now. Which of these are most interesting
that you might want to start a newsletter on
or suggest your own? So I chose something. Then
it came up with its plan for how it was going
to execute. It tried to create a, I think the
way to pronounce it is Beehive, but it's one
of the newsletter platforms like Substack. It
went to try to create an account for me and just
got stuck and just was burning credits trying
to help me help it set up an account. And all
I could see was it trying the same thing again
and again and again. And I'd be like, should
we take a step back and have a think about whether
this is working or not? Which it did try and
do several times. But one of its... ways of getting
around this frustration was to go execute some
of the other steps in the plan that i would have
preferred come later so it started creating all
these lead magnets it came up with this outreach
strategy to bloggers that it was going to try
and get them to subscribe to our newsletter by
promising to subscribe to theirs or some other
strategy which if I can't even get the newsletter
live because the system doesn't work, I certainly
don't need all that stuff. By the way, this is
consuming credits like mad in the background.
And it started sending pitch emails. Yeah, I
didn't get to check the pitch emails because
part of its value prop that makes it slightly
different from Manus is it has its own email
address and you get to choose its name like it's
a person. So this newsletter is not by me. It's
by, I had this crazy name, like Carlton Nightingale
or something like that. Because it gave me options
and you just keep hitting next and it just gets
more and more creative the more times you hit
next. And there was something about Carlton from
Fresh Prince with the idea of having like Nightingale.
That just seemed right to me. Didn't make it
more capable though. So yeah, I started pitching.
And I was like, you're pitching a newsletter
that doesn't exist because you can't even log
into the system and create the newsletter, even
though this is the stock thing that they recommend
that you try. So, yeah, I didn't invest in any
more credits. And the reason for this story,
Martin, is that is a hobbyist's playground. That
is a not a commercially ready approach by any
stretch of the imagination. And so to your point,
they have to productize that in a way that people
can actually use it. And then the second point
is when this gets good enough, my goodness, are
we going to get deluged with crap content? My
goodness. Because if you imagine, so the whole
value proposition here is I should have come
back and I had 2000 subscribers. So 500 odd people
who really didn't deserve to get pitched by this
bot would have got pitched. and a load of content
about whatever the topic was that added probably
no unique value because it was a regurgitation
of stuff that's already available on the web.
It's getting sent out to people. By the way,
not accurate, probably. So because I'm interested
in science, it was a science -based one. What
if it's telling people absolute tosh? That's
incorrect. Yeah, so I think there's quite a sizable
gap to traverse before this prediction's possible.
Well, I think that goes to, well, first of all,
Paul, actually, let me just say, I wish I hadn't
told that story because you're going to make
people think that agents aren't very good. And
actually some of them are really good. And we
need people to understand that to make agents
really good, you need to know how to specify
correctly. And they can do that by speaking to
the likes of me and you. Correct. Not me. But
this was just an experiment. Come on, people,
it was just an experiment. The system promised.
And that's why I was like, well, show us what
you can do then. that does go to the the point
about you know it's ai slop it's bots speaking
to bots it's bots pitching to bots that are signing
up to bots reading bots regurgitating bots it's
just a bot hellscape but taking it back to to
meta just for a second and i can see a world
where that even with the customer service side
of things like having seen how how Manus actually
works and having experienced some of the major
frustrations of trying to get things all working
inside the Meta platform, particularly when you're
dealing with myriad different e -commerce platforms,
CRM platforms, marketing automation platforms,
lots of small business owners trying to plug
together all of these different bits is really
hard. Whereas I can see a world where Meta actually
deploys the Manus bot as a do it for you agent
you know we will you tell us your uh your login
for your crm or you take over the computer use
and we'll hook up your meta advertising platform
to your shopify account and make sure that all
the reporting is correct and we'll do that for
you and they're not using a team out in bangladesh
or whatever it is that's running their customer
service they're using empowering it with the
Manus bot agent. Yeah, I think the interesting
thing about the value prop of getting this do
anything app to do that was it kind of misses
the point of how this will really need to be
rolled out, which is human in the loop. It's
automation and autonomy in low risk areas that
don't have a big impact. That's why I was like,
why have you just sent a pitch email? what are
you doing like if i hired you if i hired a junior
and they started sending pitch emails about running
them through me they'd be hell to pay like i'm
not going to let an ai hallucinating bot do it
um yeah so that's not how you deploy these things
you find those use cases you you carve them up
and you and you stress test to make and you start
in the safe places where a mistake is not going
to be have that you know too big of ramifications
and i think you're right that's exactly how they
will then they will then bring that offering
to people and it will have to evolve and it will
have to mature and i would be extremely skeptical
of any platform that went from where we are now
to describe the business you want and check your
bank account in a month right like no not going
to be like that Right, in the interest of time,
because we've had our listeners on for a while
now, I'll move on to my next prediction. But
I'm going to speed this up and go through the
quick version, Martin, and then maybe let's talk
about agents a little bit at the end. So a couple
of other quick predictions that I had was that
I think AI memory is going to get solved and
that persistent personalisation becomes the default,
one of the big problems with... AI models right
now is you start a chat and you're starting from
fresh. It doesn't know anything about you. It
doesn't remember anything else that you said.
Everything's based on stuffing a load of stuff
into the context window, which has pros and cons.
It's extremely compute intense to do that, burns
more tokens. And the agents are only, sorry,
the chatbots are only so, so necessarily pulling
the right thing from their context at the right
time. As an aside, I'm seeing a lot of the moment
of when I create, like a custom gpt or a gem
or even a project the obsession of the chatbot
to use every single thing in its context in the
answer it's like the user gave this to me it
must be important it's like you've got 20 documents
this question is actually only about one of the
documents be smart enough to realize you don't
have to reference what's in all the other documents
it's not relevant anyway this is supposed to
be the quick one um but it's been some interesting
newsy stuff this week because There was a couple
of papers, one of which looks like a new capability
for memory that we might see in DeepSeek version
4, which is interesting. And then MIT released
some research for a new memory capability. We
know the labs are all over this at the moment,
but obviously it becomes a fairly massive game
changer for lots of use cases when AI can start
to remember things and access memories in a much
better way than it does now, both in terms of
as a consumer. capturing all of this insight
about you over time that Martin and I have talked
throughout the podcast, but also as a business
user, not have to constantly explain certain
things about your products, your customers, your
business, and just having that information available
and accessible in a way that the chatbot remembers
in a smart way. So I think we'll see memory get
solved. Thoughts on memory, Martin? It's the
missing piece of the puzzle. And some people
argue that cracking that is basically the key
to... cracking AGI. So yeah, if they get there,
that will be quite something. In fact, it's interesting
you mentioned about memory and the use of it.
I find as much as ChatGPT, I don't think it is
the best model. I prefer Claude, particularly
for professional tasks. So if I'm doing stuff
in CRM or if I'm coding a little thing together.
very much prefer Claude, but my daily driver,
the thing I turn to, the thing that is on my
second screen at all times is ChatGPT. And why
is that? I think it handles memory and personalization
better than any of the others at this moment
in time. Case in point, yesterday I put a prompt
into it and it referenced something that I haven't
given it in its custom instructions. It referenced
something from a... from a chat that I'd had
with it a long time ago about clients I'd worked
with over the previous six months. And it pulled
that information into the chat because it was
able to search across. Now that's using the RAG,
the Retrieval Augmented Generation method of
managing memory. But it did a really nice job
of it. And I can see that when they do correct
this infinite memory piece, not only will it
be good for those kinds of contextual understanding,
but it will facilitate learning that's beyond
just kind of in context learning. Great. I mean,
that unlocks so many self -training capabilities
of AI as well. I mean, we could go deep down
the AI rabbit hole here, but I think you're right
as a user. And I think, what does this mean to
marketers? This is where personalization at scale
in your marketing becomes possible, is if platforms
understand your target customers in that level
of detail. Some critical questions that come
up is, how can you capture as much information
as your customers as possible? We talked about
PayPal trying to get some of that, but how can
you do that? Will the chatbots sell or rent this
information in some form to brands as part of
their paid offering? You don't know who all of
the 20 people who would like your product are,
but we do. And that's actually what becomes part
of serving relevant ads to people is just having
that crazily deep understanding of them. So,
you know, we've talked a little bit in the past
about how important it is for brands to really
focus on their first party data that they're
capturing on customers and how they might use
that. Because the other side of this will be
then using AI to execute hyper -personalised
campaigns at scale in a way that humans couldn't
do. So there's those sort of two parts of the
pie there, really. But yeah, I just feel like
memory, as you said, is going to be one of those
critical pieces. And I feel like it's going to
fall this year. What was your last prediction,
Martin? Oh, this is one. It's a fun one. I'm
opting out of this as well, Martin. You just
tell the listeners what you think. So this is
a bold one as... Someone who is in and around
the industry. But my prediction is that UK marketing
agency headcount will fall over the next 12 months.
There's a difficult one to measure. The best
metric that I can find is from the Institute
of Practitioners in Advertising who have an agency
census. And they have their 2024 figure that
I found, which was 26 ,787 employees across their
members. I predict that number will fall. I think
we will see more companies doing more in -house.
So they'll make their marketing teams more efficient.
But I also, that's client side. And I also think
agencies. will themselves be able to do more
with less. And as such, through the use of things
like agentic teams, I think there will be reduced
demand for headcount. Over to you, Paul. Obviously,
as someone who works within a marketing agency
group, I don't have an opinion, but obviously
I always have an opinion regardless. Do you know
what I can't decide? is with more capabilities
to get stuff done, to reach customers better,
to enter new markets, that as long as demand
keeps up, and there's a big if on that, honestly,
but if it does, or if it were to, I could see
a world where expectations, workloads and output
scale with the new capabilities. So rather than
cutting headcount, it's like, cool. you folks
can now better market to these groups of people,
help us be more successful in all of these verticals.
And by the way, we're going to enter some new
markets because we've, you know, now we can do
these things at a scale across our entire business,
to be honest, not just marketing that we couldn't
do before. I think eventually demand runs out
when you go down that route, but in the short
to medium term, especially for early movers,
I actually think the ability to like 10x the
impact of your competitors is actually what makes
you grow. So client side, if you're able to out
-compete the market through effective marketing
by using agent teams, I think you'll grow. And
I think you'll hire people to help you do even
more of that. The same for agencies. I think
for agencies that stick their head in the sand
or for client teams that stick their head in
the sand, at some point, they'll be asked hard
questions and... I don't know that, you know,
businesses will then have to try and adopt AI
and whether they'll outsource to get that in
the first instance, which has happened a lot
over history, which again would suggest agencies
getting more work, not less, at least in the
short to medium term. So I don't know. It's difficult
to predict. But the one thing that's true, I
think, is that you're not getting replaced by
AI yet, but you will be replaced by someone who
uses AI if you don't. that's the kind of second
part of my prediction. And I wasn't sure which
one to lead with really, because frankly, that
prediction that I've made there could very well
come true and it could have absolutely nothing
to do with AI and everything to do with a changing
economic landscape, right? There could be an
economic crash. And you know what? Across the
board, headcounts fall in all sorts of industries.
So yeah, that is a difficult one to pinpoint
exactly on AI. to that though about um replaced
by people doing ai and using ai and being ai
literate and an additional part of my prediction
with regard to the agency space is that i expect
we are going to see a significant increase in
the number of job vacancies or placements whatever
it may be that are head of agentic or similar
both client side and agency side. Yeah, I agree
with that. I mean, we had a dedicated section
on agents, but I think we've touched on them
enough throughout the podcast so we don't have
to subject the poor folks to too much more on
it. But I do think that 2026 is the year where
we start to chip away at some of those agentic
use cases in a sort of manageable fashion like
we've both talked about and that marketers who...
get to grips early with using claude code or
core co -work or manus and or and gemini's equivalent
that they you know they have their i can't remember
what it's called but they have their like workflow
work streamed type solution that's kind of zapier
meets agentic capabilities i think we'll consider
continue to see that emerge and i think in the
first instance As marketers, we'll have to be
proactive in seeking out those solutions, testing
them and being early adopters and finding where
those arbitrages are that we can just like get
a load done through agents and have a bigger
impact. And then eventually it will be baked
into Google Gemini or in ChatGPT or whatever
in a way that brings it to the masses because
it's much easier to do. The equivalent of send
your agent co -worker a message in Slack. type
stuff but i think in the first instance it won't
be that it will be people playing around with
cloud code or cloud co -work to figure out what
can it reliably do for me in my specific context
and that people who are able to do that to your
point will be absolutely in massive demand they
will be the jobs the job specs that go up and
those will be the people who are getting hired
who are people who know how to orchestrate agents
to get stuff done against the capabilities that
are happening today and also enough on the pulse
to evolve as the systems evolve it's not the
head of human resources is the head of agent
resources and that's the role that we'll see
in 2026 Well, thanks for sharing your predictions
with me, Martin. That was the first time I got
to hear them as well, dear listener. I enjoyed
them. I hope you enjoyed them as well. And I
love hanging out with you on these podcasts,
Martin, so I shall look forward to speaking to
you again soon. Can't wait. Speak to you soon.
Thank you for listening to Artificially Intelligent
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