The AI Edge Podcast

Ep 7. Live from CES: Meta, Manus, and the Ad Tech Shake-Up, with guest Sarah Caputo

Meta spent $2 billion on a company most people have never heard of, and it might be their smartest move since Instagram.
A special episode recorded live from CES 2026, hosts Shiv Gupta and Myle Younger sit down with Sarah Caputo, independent consultant and former CDO, to figure out what Meta's really up to with this acquisition. Sarah's got theories: protecting their small business revenue, making a play for wearables as the next big ad platform, and maybe finally figuring out what people actually want AI to do.
They also talk about why every ad platform now has basically the same "AI does everything" product with a slightly different name, why being operationally efficient isn't special anymore, and Sarah's take on how OpenAI should actually make money (spoiler: not by copying Google's playbook). Plus, why these new autonomous tools might shake things up for DSPs and what agencies better start doing if they don't want to become irrelevant.
You don't want to miss this one. Straight from the CES floor with perspectives you won't get anywhere else: practical, honest, and built for marketers. New episodes every Monday. Get your AI Edge here.

Ep 6. AMA Episode: Agency Jobs, Sycophant AI, and Data Snake Oil

No guest this week, just Shiv and Myles answering listener questions in their first-ever mailbag episode. And the questions got deep.
Will agency jobs disappear or are we headed back to a Mad Men era?
What does a fully AI-enabled agency actually look like (and which ones are about to fail)?
How do you trust AI to build client profiles when ChatGPT is basically a sycophant telling you everything's brilliant?
Your hosts unpack this and so much more.
Then things get existential: How can we tell if AI is speeding up good judgment or slowly eroding it? And what AI workflows do Shiv and Myles actually trust enough to use every day at U of Digital?
Shiv confesses his secret Claude projects, Myles admits his "workflow" is just opening another browser tab, and they both tackle whether we should be measuring the quality of human judgment before worrying about AI making it worse.
Plus: synthetic audiences, B2B data garbage, and why anti-sycophancy technology might be the thing nobody's talking about.
New episodes every Monday. Get your AI Edge here. 

Ep 5. The AI Platform Wars Are Over, featuring Simon Poulton of Tinuiti

Simon Poulton searched for toilets in Google's AI Mode and saw his first AI-generated ad. That moment confirmed what he's been saying for months: Google's already won the AI platform wars, and OpenAI has 12 months to prove otherwise.
This week, hosts Shiv Gupta and Myles Younger sit down with Simon Poulton, EVP of Innovation & Growth at Tinuiti, to break down the AI platform wars and what's actually happening behind the hype.
They dig into why Google's distribution advantage beats model quality, what happens when ChatGPT remembers your furniture preferences from six months ago, whether agentic advertising is real or just a stunt, and why brands keep building AI tools they don't actually need.
Plus: Simon's take on vibe coding, the rise of "agentic deference," and what marketers should actually be doing right now instead of chasing every shiny AI object.
Link to Tinuiti's 2026 AI Trends report we referenced in this episode is available here.
New episodes every Monday. Get your AI Edge here. 

Ep 4. The Great Agentic Commerce Discussion, featuring Andrew Lipsman

Myles wrote a piece saying agentic commerce is coming fast. Andrew Lipsman rebutted, calling it a "collective hallucination." The discussion got interesting, so we brought it to the podcast.
This week, hosts Shiv Gupta and Myles Younger sit down with Andrew Lipsman, Independent Analyst & Consultant in Retail Media, to hash out whether AI agents shopping on our behalf is real, or just another overhyped trend like Facebook Shops and Google Shopping.
They also dig into Disney's $1B OpenAI bet (licensing Mickey Mouse to Sora), Criteo piping commerce data into LLMs, Google bringing ads to Gemini in 2026, and the big question: if agentic commerce takes off, does retail media collapse?
The episode ends with "Convince Me," where each gets 60 seconds to sell the other. Good stuff. You don't want to miss it. 
New episodes every Monday.

Ep 3. The AdTech and MarTech Divide Is Dead, featuring Heather Macaulay, President, MadConnect

Black Friday 2025 was the inflection point: AI shoppers converted at double the rate, AI traffic surged 805%, and brands finally learned that if AI can't see you, you don't exist.
This week, hosts Shiv Gupta and Myles Younger are joined by Heather Macaulay, President of MadConnect, to break down what the Black Friday data actually means, unpack Scott Brinker's massive 2026 Martech Report, and tackle the elephant in the room: the decade-old divide between AdTech and MarTech is finally collapsing...and most marketing teams aren't ready.
Heather also unpacks why integration is harder than it looks, what Amazon's walled garden strategy means for other retailers, and where most brands are getting AI readiness wrong. Plus the big hard truth: AI won't fix bad data; it amplifies it.
If your org chart still separates AdTech and MarTech, this episode is your wake-up call.New episodes every Monday.

Ep 2. Synthetic Audiences and the $50B Question, featuring Chad Reynolds, CEO Vurvey Labs

The big questions: Are we teaching AI to tell us what we want to hear? If AI only knows the past, who discovers the future? And what happens to the $50 billion market research industry?
This week, Shiv Gupta and Myles Younger dive into the biggest AI announcements shaking up advertising right now, including the Amazon vs. Google AI agent wars and what happens when ad platforms automate the work agencies used to do.
For the main event, Chad Reynolds, Founder & CEO of Vurvey Labs, talks synthetic audiences: what they are, how brands are using them to test ideas without recruiting real people, and why Vurvey's approach is different. Chad's building AI models powered by actual human data from 3 million people, not scraped internet content. He reveals where synthetic audiences work (and where they spectacularly fail), how to validate AI-generated insights against real behavior, and whether we're headed toward a world where market research happens entirely without humans.
The question isn't if synthetic audiences will replace traditional research, it's when. You don't want to miss this one.
New episodes every Monday.

Ep 1. AI Edge: Where AI Meets Pop Culture, featuring guest Krish Raja

Welcome to Episode 1 of The AI Edge Podcast!Hosts Shiv Gupta and Myles Younger kick off the show with guest Krish Raja, AI expert and founder of AI Literacy, to break down the biggest AI stories shaking up marketing and advertising right now.This week: Coca-Cola doubles down on their controversial AI-generated holiday ad (yes, the one with the sloths), Sam Altman hints (again) that ChatGPT ads are inevitable, and Amazon and Shopify reveal drastically different strategies for AI in e-commerce, with huge implications for how we'll all shop and advertise in the future.The conversation gets real about job security, the risks of making big AI bets too early, and why marketers need to think critically about their relationship with AI tools. (Spoiler: if you're not improving yourself with AI, you're just improving AI.)Whether you're trying to keep up with the AI revolution or just want to cut through the hype, this episode gives you the clarity you need to navigate what's next.New episodes every Monday. Let's get you your AI edge.