In recent years, advertising agencies have adopted the AI narrative to demonstrate their continued relevance, as these disruptive technologies threaten their historic value proposition: workforce.
Today, AI startups – led by agency veterans and ex-Big Tech executives – are beginning to enter the fray with increased competition in the promise of “AI agents,” and some brands start listening.
Last week, a new startup called Palona launched with $10 million in seed funding and plans to create AI agents that help consumer brands with their sales efforts, customer support and interactive insights .
Palona’s co-founders – former executives at Meta, Google and Samsung – hope to give AI agents higher emotional intelligence while personalizing them with brand-specific guidelines and safety guardrails. Palona also developed what she describes as an AI “supervisor” to help control hallucinations and ensure conversations stay within a brand’s guidelines. Palona’s first customers include West Coast pizza chain Pizza My Heart (to order pizza) and home security company Wyze (to learn about camera and subscription options).
“Our product goal is gentle, non-aggressive persuasion,” said Maria Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Palona, speaking about brand AI agents’ conversations with consumers. “We have made this very clear, and all our customers want to be gently persuaded as well. Nobody wants that kind of annoying salesman.
One of Palona’s first clients is MindZero, a wellness center based in South Carolina. It recently began using an AI agent to reduce response times from a day to just seconds, said David Semerad, CEO of MindZero. In addition to answering customer questions, the AI agent also integrates with MindZero’s reservation system. Semerad believes this will be particularly useful as MindZero grows from 1 to 10 locations in the United States over the next year.
Palona is just one of several startups launching in recent weeks to help brands create AI agents. Another is Anthrologic, founded by former executives of MediaMonks, the next-generation agency led by industry veteran Martin Sorrell.
However, rather than just creating agents, the startup also offers other data solutions and AI consulting services. One of the first clients is fashion brand Anthropologie, which is working with the startup to improve the use of downstream data while using AI agents to improve employee workflows.
By focusing on specific projects rather than massive budgets, Anthrologic aims to take a more targeted approach with its clients rather than asking them to write big checks for everything. Tyler Pietz, co-founder of Anthropic, said traditional three-year roadmaps with systems integrators — and the expensive budgets that accompany them — don’t work with today’s AI landscape.
“Why would you want to throw $350 or $500 million into a campfire and hope the smoke will make you healthier? » said Pietz. “What is very clear is that every week there will be something that changes the whole game. Not always at the highest level, but with a new approach to this or that.
Working with small teams can help brands navigate the forefront of innovation, said Jon Halvorson, global vice president of consumer experience and digital commerce at Mondelez. They are also often less threatening to existing partners than larger consultancies that might compete with agencies for business. However, he noted that this doesn’t mean clients should choose to work only with startups.
“Any time you embark on these massive change management projects, you can’t always have all the talent in-house from day one,” Halvorson said. “A lot of talent specializing in this field doesn’t want to be with you from day one. So you need split expert resources.
Speed, efficiency and trust are all essential when it comes to AI, Halvorson said: “Every day when the world changes, you need a trusted source to listen to you. »
Preparing businesses for AI agents is not always an easy task. Depending on the application, this could require a major overhaul of how companies collect, clean, store and access their data. Other tasks include new considerations for data governance to define who should have access to various data sources.
“The models that are coming out and people are all excited and excited about the use cases,” said Erin Foxworthy, head of marketing and advertising at Snowflake. “What I think is missing a lot in the industry is the data layer. You want to rely on a neutral, agnostic database so that you’re not tied to something that you don’t know is going to change later.
The week in AI research
It was another week for generative AI research among tech giants, smaller competitors and even a new startup.
OpenAI previewed its long-awaited AI agent “Operator” tool with preview research partners in e-commerce, travel, news and — eBay, Etsy, Target, Instacart, StubHub, Reservation.com – and some editors like Thomson Reuters, The Associated PressAnd Axios.
Perplexity announced a new integration with Basic Crunch to enable users to research financial data, conduct market research, and research leads. Other updates this week include today’s release of a new mobile assistant for Android and Tuesday’s launch of a new search API called Sonar.
Other updates this week came from the browser Bravewhich released a new feature called Rerank that allows users to customize their search algorithm to prioritize and deprioritize page results. In the meantime, Microsoft previewed the new AI search features that are rolling out to Windows 11 users first before later expanding to public availability.
Prompts and Products – Other AI News and Announcements
- More brands are integrating AI into their Super Bowl ads, with GoDaddy planning to promote its Airo platform and Meta purchasing an ad for its Ray-Ban Smart glasses.
- LinkedIn has become the latest tech giant to face an AI problem. trialafter LinkedIn Premium customers alleged that the Microsoft subsidiary trained AI models using private messages without consent.
- President Donald Trump has reset AI regulations in the United States, after revoking a 36-page executive order on AI signed by then-President Joe Biden in 2023. In its place, Trump has issued a new one-page executive order promoting American innovation while urging AI systems to avoid “ideological biases or engineered social agendas.”
- Infinite Reality, an immersive technology company, announced plans to acquire e-commerce startup Obsess, which helps brands create virtual shopping experiences using AI.
- Mozilla and EleutherAI have released a new research on using open source datasets to train LLMs. Published in collaboration with more than two dozen researchers, the paper provides best practices, policy recommendations and aims to show how open datasets can make AI models fairer, more transparent and more accountable.
- Anthropic made his debut a new feature called Citations, a new API that allows its Claude models to anchor answers in source documents.
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