The AI Edge Podcast

Ep 27. The Platforms Know Your Brand Strategy Better Than You Do — And That's a Problem, with Dr. Cecilia Dones, 3 Standard Deviations

Google just announced the biggest overhaul to search in 25 years. The blue links aren't going away — they're just being buried. AI mode is now the default. Agents can be dispatched from the search bar. Native checkout is live. And five new ad formats launched alongside all of it. Meanwhile, OpenAI is quietly moving toward a CPA pricing model for ChatGPT ads, Anthropic just hit $47 billion in ARR and may turn a profit this quarter, and Meta wants you to pay a subscription fee to escape the attention economy it built. Make that make sense.
This week, Shiv and Myles sit down with Dr. Cecilia Dones, founder of Three Standard Deviations and professor of AI and strategic communications at Columbia University and NYU. Dr. Dones helps organizations move from AI adoption to AI advantage — and she brings an academic rigor to the conversation that reframes some of the biggest stories in the industry in ways most people haven't considered.
Dr. Dones breaks down why Google's AI overhaul isn't just an ad product story — it's a governance story. As more brand strategy, planning, and creative decisions migrate inside platform walls, the algorithms will eventually know a brand's identity better than the brand does. She also explains why ChatGPT's pixel is a fundamentally different data asset than anything Google has ever had — because it doesn't capture what people searched for, it captures how people actually think. And she delivers the most actionable advice in the episode in one sentence: audit your brand in AI today, because it looks nothing like your SEO did.
They also get into why Meta charging a subscription fee to avoid ads is an oxymoron and a trust problem wrapped in one, why the measurement industry is quietly shifting back toward econometric modeling as platform attribution gets more opaque, and why "set it and forget it" always creates a PR disaster eventually.
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Ep 26. AI Bias Is a Business Problem — Not Just an Ethics One, with Stefanie Beach & Nadia Koski

Amazon just killed Rufus. The upfronts just tried to sell data like it was primetime inventory. And every streaming platform announced an AI tool that sounds exactly like every other streaming platform's AI tool. Meanwhile, the industry is barreling toward agentic commerce built on data that excludes half the world — and most marketers haven't noticed yet.
This week, Shiv and Miles welcome two guests who are doing something about it. Stefanie Beach is the founder and CEO of The Marketeer Group and host of the Digital Marketeer Podcast. Nadia Koski is a 15-year ad tech and publishing veteran, American expat living in Florence, and the founder of a new podcast launching this week. Together, they're producing a panel at Cannes Lions focused on AI bias, inclusive data, and what the industry needs to do before it's too late.
They break down why Amazon sunsetting Rufus in favor of Alexa is actually a smart long game — and why agentic commerce will cannibalize commerce media in the process. They also get into why the upfronts are in their awkward teenage years, why selling data on an upfront timeline is a structural contradiction, and why every streamer announcing an "AI personalization tool" this week needs to actually show who's buying it and why.
Then the conversation gets more serious. Only 52% of the world's data is represented in today's AI systems. An AI crop app built for African farmers failed female farmers entirely because the training photos were all taken by men. Roughly 1 in 4 women feel that using AI at work is cheating — men simply don't carry that hesitation. And if agentic commerce gets built on this foundation, brands risk alienating Gen Z and Gen Alpha — the largest spending generation of the next decade — before they ever get a chance to reach them.
🎙 Check out Stefanie's podcast: The Digital Marketeer Podcast https://bit.ly/4uhs5oj
🎙 Nadia's new podcast launches Tuesday, May 19th — Still Human: Real Talk in the Age of AI Listen to the trailer here: https://bit.ly/3RMqCrJ

Ep 25. The MarTech Chrysalis: Why Marketing Is in a Messy Middle — and What Comes Next, with Scott Brinker, Chief MarTech

The MarTech landscape just flatlined for the first time in 15 years. Not because AI killed it — but because the companies that were always going to lose finally ran out of time. Meanwhile, marketers are building software without knowing they're building software, SaaS platforms are going headless, and the new constraint isn't data or budget or creative. It's context.
This week, Shiv and Miles sit down with Scott Brinker — aka Chief MarTech, founder of the Chief MarTech blog, former HubSpot ecosystem lead, and the person who has been tracking the MarTech landscape since it had 150 companies on it. Scott just dropped his annual State of MarTech report — 125 pages, a decade and a half of pattern recognition, and one central thesis: we are in the chrysalis stage. Things have dissolved. The butterfly hasn't formed yet. And anyone who tells you they've figured it all out is lying.
Scott breaks down why peak MarTech finally arrived — and why the companies exiting aren't the AI wrappers everyone expected but the legacy 2010s players that never won their categories and have been on life support for years. He also explains why the build-versus-buy question has exploded into build-and-buy-and-build-some-more, why marketers are creating software without realizing it, and why the entire order of operations most marketing teams are using with AI is exactly backwards.
They also get into why context is the new constraint — and what it means that human bridges between company context and customer context are disappearing as agents start talking to agents, why SaaS platforms that go headless are making the smartest long-term bet in the industry, and why the data layer players like Snowflake and Databricks are quietly racing up the stack.
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Ep 24. AI Is Making Ads Better — But Where Is All That Money Actually Going? with David Danziger, Dstillery

The New York Times says AI is making digital advertising boring. Meta just posted its biggest earnings quarter ever. Google's CapEx story is looking smarter by the day. And OpenAI is quietly building toward a $100 billion ad business while the three-headed AI monster — Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT — keeps getting more tangled by the week.
This week, Shiv and Miles sit down with David Danziger, SVP of Partnerships at Dstillery, one of the leading independent targeting companies in advertising. David has spent his career at the intersection of data, partnerships, and the open internet — with stints at LiveRamp, The Trade Desk, and Yahoo — and he brings a practitioner's eye to a week full of big numbers and bigger questions.
David breaks down why the NYT's "boring" framing is ironic at best and wrong at worst, why Meta's CapEx story looks very different from Google's when you factor in the infrastructure play underneath it, and why the open internet is going to see real AI benefits too — not just the walled gardens. He also explains why a wrapper on an LLM isn't enough anymore, why ChatGPT ads are essentially search ads with more granular intent signals, and why the companies with real data assets underneath them are the ones that will win.
They also get into how MCP is replacing what APIs used to do — faster, easier, and already happening in production at Dstillery — why multimodal AI means any input can produce any output and what that actually unlocks for targeting, and how a workflow that used to take two days of back-and-forth emails now takes fifteen minutes inside Dstillery's agentic tools.
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Ep 23. AI Native or Dead: What It Really Takes to Transform a Business, with Mark Josephson, Executive Coach

OpenAI launched GPT-5.5 and called it a step toward a super app. Anthropic dropped Claude Design and quietly kept building what might be today's version of G Suite. Google launched a native agent builder in Gemini Enterprise. And Meta got caught secretly tracking employee keystrokes to train AI — then told the employees who objected: no.
This week, Shiv and Myles sit down with Mark Josephson — three-time CEO, former head of Bitly, and now an executive coach working with founders and senior leaders on how to actually transform their businesses with AI. Mark has a front-row seat to what's working, what isn't, and what separates companies that are going to make it from the ones that are quietly running out of time.
Mark breaks down why Anthropic has a clarity of purpose that OpenAI still hasn't found, why the real Google competitive battle isn't against Claude or ChatGPT but against AWS and Azure at the cloud layer, and why the future is simply binary — companies will either be AI native or they'll be dead, the same way print was always going to die once digital arrived. He also shares the story of a founder who cancelled every meeting on a Monday, handed his entire company Claude Code, and committed to two hours of daily AI training until they got there.
They also get into why Meta secretly tracking keystrokes is a warning sign that should make everyone think harder about who they're trusting with this technology, why smart regulation matters more than the performative policy theater coming out of OpenAI, and what it actually means to be an AI native leader — not the person doing all the building, but the person who understands what's possible.
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Ep 22. AI Is Eating the Ad Industry — Who Wins and Who Gets Squeezed? with David Berkowitz, AI Marketers Guild

OpenAI wants to be a $100 billion ad business by 2030. Meta just overtook Google as the largest ad company in the world. Anthropic launched a new model, built a design studio, and is now worth more on the private market than OpenAI. And Allbirds — yes, the sneaker company — rebranded as an AI infrastructure company and watched their penny stock spike 600%.
This week, Shiv sits down with David Berkowitz, longtime marketing leader, community builder, and founder of the AI Marketers Guild at Marketecture, to make sense of a week where everything moved at once.
David breaks down why OpenAI's $100 billion ad ambition is a hell of a magic trick that requires nearly tripling their user base, why Meta's flood-the-feed strategy might not be as tenable as their revenue numbers suggest, and why Google — with nine billion-user-plus products and a 15-year head start building AI — is playing a much longer game than anyone is giving them credit for. He also explains why the seed and early-stage AI companies that felt safe six months ago should now be getting nervous, and why the "anti-AI" brand positioning trend is mostly companies talking out of both sides of their mouth.
They also get into what marketers should actually be doing with ChatGPT ads right now, why the organic vs. paid AI debate is just the Google search debate starting all over again, and how the industry has moved from Walmart calling a basic chatbot a "super agent" to an era where your audience is building their own agents and calling your bluff.
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Ep 21. The AI Ad Economy Is About to Explode — Are You Ready? with Debra Aho Williamson, Sonata Insights

Sam Altman is either a visionary genius, a pathological liar, or both. OpenAI wants to be a $100 billion ad business by 2030. Anthropic dropped a mysterious model called Mythos that's apparently too powerful for the public to use. And the AEO/GEO industry has officially jumped the shark.
This week, Shiv and Myles sit down with Debra Aho Williamson, founder and chief analyst of Sonata Insights and writer of the fast-growing Substack The AI Ad Economy. Debbie spent nearly two decades at eMarketer building and leading their social media research practice — she was one of the first analysts to identify social media as a force that advertisers needed to take seriously. Now she's doing the same thing with AI.
Debbie breaks down why the organic reach window in AI platforms is closing faster than most marketers realize — and why Facebook's playbook of giving brands free reach and then taking it away is about to repeat itself in AI. She also shares why she bought a product she'd never heard of after ChatGPT recommended it, what that means for brand discovery, and why the explosion of AEO and GEO vendors is a sign the space has already jumped the shark.
They also get into whether OpenAI's industrial policy paper is genuine concern or brilliant PR, why Trade Desk's new Performance Mode is starting to look a lot like the black box ad networks that came before it, and why Time Magazine pitching branded content as an AI visibility play is either genius or a harbinger of chaos — depending on who you ask.
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Ep 20. Who Actually Controls the AI Ad Stack? with Joe Root, Permutive

OpenAI just raised $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation — and apparently that only gives them 18 to 24 months of runway. They bought a live streaming network for over $100 million. They're building conversational ads with Smartly. Amazon is quietly opting every search advertiser into sponsored prompts inside Rufus. And Walmart is going the opposite direction entirely, building a native app inside ChatGPT.
This week, Shiv and Miles sit down with Joe Root, co-founder and CEO of Permutive, a data collaboration platform that sits at the intersection of media companies, agencies, and advertisers. Joe has a front-row seat to how AI is actually reshaping the ad stack — not in theory, but in the workflows his customers run every day.
Joe breaks down why AI is a tailwind for Permutive by dismantling the old agency margin model, why over half of his customers are now letting agents run tasks on their behalf — up from just 5% eighteen months ago — and why the real shift isn't replacing software, it's changing how humans interact with it.
They also get into why live content is the one thing AI can't replicate and what that means for publishers, why the native ad format for conversational AI is still completely unsolved, and why Amazon's sponsored prompts in Rufus might just be a repackaged version of a search arbitrage play that never really worked the first time around.
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Ep 19. AI Won't Save Your Brand If Agents Don't Know Who You Are, with Melissa Grady Diaz, Measured Wellness

OpenAI killed Sora. Disney pulled its billion-dollar commitment. The headlines called it proof that AI video is dead. It isn't. But the breathless takes — in both directions — are a pretty good sign that marketers are still figuring out how to think about all of this clearly.
This week, Shiv and Tameka sit down with Melissa Grady Diaz, former CMO of Cadillac and now a senior leader at health-tech startup Measured Wellness, to talk about what's actually changing for brand marketers right now — and what most people aren't paying enough attention to yet.
Melissa breaks down why performance marketing is about to have a real problem as agents take over the discovery layer, why brand building outside of paid media is becoming more important than ever, and why you should never fully hand your marketing over to a platform that's optimizing for response instead of brand health. She also gets into what it was like to experiment with AI at the CMO level at Cadillac, why incremental AI adoption can actually make things worse, and the right way to think about building from scratch versus improving what already exists.
They also cover Apple's surprising decision to open Siri up to any AI model, what it means that ChatGPT has become the Kleenex of AI — and why that brand equity might be slipping away — and why agentic commerce is happening whether the skeptics like it or not.
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Ep 18. The Ad Tech Plumbing That Makes Agentic Advertising Actually Work, with Brian Tomasette

Mark Zuckerberg says just tell AI what you want to sell and it handles the rest. Brian Tomasette — 25-year ad tech veteran, former Amazon DSP product leader, and current PhD researcher — says that's high school physics without friction. The business rules, privacy constraints, and data ownership that make advertising actually work don't disappear because the model is powerful enough. They just need better tools to operate them.
This week, Miles sits down with Brian to get into the real plumbing behind agentic advertising — what's actually being built today, how far off the utopian vision really is, and why the tools aren't going away anytime soon. Brian is currently researching neuro-symbolic AI at Drexel University and contributing to the IAB Tech Lab's AAMP framework, which is building the buyer and seller agent infrastructure that could eventually reshape how media gets bought and sold.
They break down why AI agents will use DSPs more optimally rather than replace them, what the IAB Tech Lab's buyer and seller agent SDKs actually do, and why Andrej Karpathy is right that it's not the year of agents — it's the decade. Brian also introduces the "AI vampire" phenomenon — the way vibe coding becomes as addictive as TikTok and drains you faster than actual genius work ever could — and why the right move is sometimes just closing the laptop and going for a hike.
Links from this episode:
AAMP — Agentic Advertising Management Protocol https://iabtechlab.com/standards/aamp-agentic-advertising-management-protocols/
IAB Tech Lab Buyer Agent Documentation https://iabtechlab.github.io/buyer-agent/
IAB Tech Lab Seller Agent Documentation https://iabtechlab.github.io/seller-agent/
Andrej Karpathy: "It's Not the Year of Agents, It's the Decade of Agents" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlVnGXEzFow
The AI Vampire — Steve Yegge https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampire-eda6e4f07163
Beads — Steve Yegge's Claude Code library https://github.com/steveyegge/beads
Neuro-Symbolic AI Research Paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05486
HAZ Lab at Drexel — Brian's Research Lab https://zharry29.github.io/hazlab/
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