“At Sierra, we only charge customers when the AI autonomously resolves the problem. That means if we escalate to a person, it’s free.”

”I’ll give you my rationale for this. I actually think it’s very similar to the evolution of the web browser and subscription-based software as well, which is — let’s go back to 2000 or so, whenever Marc [Benioff] invented software-as-a-service…”

“… if you put a piece of software in a web browser and you serve it from your own servers, it means everyone has the same version of it. The business model of a perpetual license just doesn’t really make sense because: when do you buy the new version? How do you hold back the features? It was a technology-led thing, but it almost necessitated a different business model, which is this idea of ‘there’s one version and you’ll subscribe to it.’”

”What’s exciting about agents is – rather than just augmenting us with letting us become more productive – they can actually solve a problem [and] accomplish a task. Most salespeople get paid a commission, because when you can quantify the value of a task, the best way to pay for it is to incentivize the precise thing that you want. If you think of a Harvey agent doing an antitrust review or a Sierra agent answering a phone call, the natural way to pay for that is the job well done, to pay for the outcome that you’re looking for.”

”’How do you explain to AI what deliciousness is like?’ says Will Hanschell, CEO of Singapore-based Pencil, a software company that Clorox hired to help with AI. ‘Is it about how moist it is? Is it about color? Is it about crispiness?’”

“Clorox’s leadership says its AI push isn’t being driven by a desire to cut staff. For example, the company is using AI-generated ads so that it can make more than would have been affordable without the technology. So far, a company spokeswoman says, using AI at Clorox hasn’t led to any layoffs.”

“Scoop: Google has told publishers that it is staffing up its publisher-side ad tech unit Google Ad Manager to market it better to big advertisers, who have been more likely to use rival adtech platforms in recent years, publishers say. That’s driven ad prices down for publishers using GAM. Google giving extra investment to publishers’ ad business come as publishers frustration with the search giant reaches an all time high over AI overviews and search traffic.”

“…Resonance can seem utterly random; it’s more likely a complex interaction of features that are imperceptible to the human brain. I’m exploring AI-driven approaches to creative hypothesis testing — more on that coming soon! — but I haven’t seen intuition-driven analysis lead to meaningful performance improvements. What works best is simply thorough, extensive experimentation.”

“From the Marketecture Media stage at Cannes, Hershey’s Vinny Rinaldi shared how custom AI drives sales lift for The Hershey Company, season after season.”

”Use case: What does shelf data + zip-level sales + AI add up to? A smarter media strategy that actually moves product…”

“So you could imagine a version where Cloudflare effectively negotiates on behalf of all of the content that sits behind us with the big AI companies. People can opt in or opt out of being a part of that pool.”

”The more content that’s part of that, the more valuable it is the AI companies. And then we would look at how we could split that up across how much crawling is actually done across that. I think one of the real keys will be how can we give hints to the AI companies on what is the content, which is the most valuable to them (…).”

“And so what we have to do is (…) on an LLM, or an AI model by AI model basis, be able to give them signals back that say this is the sort of thing that you should be paying attention to, that you should be indexing, that you should be actually scraping and paying for. And the same way that in the music industry, we’ve got reviews, we’ve got different types of music that people are, you might be into country, you might be into classical, and it kind of allows you to compartmentalize that.”

“I think that robots don’t click on ads. And so the [business] model – that part of the revenue stream to support these services- has to come from somewhere.”

”And if today, you know, Uber is able to monetize the time where I’m waiting for a car to come by showing me an advertisement, that means that they can effectively charge me less for the ride. And so it may be that if that ride is booked through an agent instead, and they don’t get that advertising experience. And again, I don’t know enough about Uber’s business model to know how important that is to them.”

”But if they don’t get that, then maybe there’s some sort of premium that an agent booked ride receives versus a human booked ride. And again, we’ve got to figure out what that looks like. I think that’s going to be less up to Cloudflare.”