the doom boom

John Ebbert

the doom boom

Over the weekend, voices “for” and “against” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s (formerly of OpenAI) statement that 50% of the white collar workforce would be eliminated in the next 1-2 years, were out in force.

DOOM TIMES: Former Conversant (née ValueClick)and Tremor Media exec Deb Friar, who today works as an AI consultant according to her LI, summarized the view that CEO Amodel’s AI “bloodbath” was already occurring and cited as proof AI blackmail on May 23 as well as recent layoffs at Microsoft, Walmart and CrowdStrike. Read it all.

BOOM TIMES: On the “All In” podcast released Saturday, current White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks disputed Amodel’s statement. Sacks saw opportunity ahead (to put it very simply) and politics in play. First, he alleged Amodel’s view was serving the interest of Anthropic’s need to raise capital. Then, Sacks claimed that the negative view on AI may also be connected to current members of the Anthropic exec team who came from the Biden Administration that – Sacks believed – had a regressive view of AI. Hear the podcast (starts at 11:15).

of interest:

  • The “AI Existential Risk” Industrial Complex (Jan. 25) – AI Panic

  • Opinion: “AI Is Learning to Escape Human Control” (June 1) – written by Judd Rosenblatt whose company, AE Studio, is on the “AI Existential Risk” Industrial Complex landscape – The Wall Street Journal

AI event

Rembrand CEO Omar Tawakol announced on LinkedIn that he’ll be offering a session on product market fit (June 24) at the Impact Genius “AI For Good Institute” event being held at Stanford University from June 9-29. Learn more about the event.

iteration or transformation

With the future of Google Search and its advertising nervous system being transformed by AI, AI Overviews and AI Mode, Nikki Kuhlmann, VP at agency Jumpfly, shared an anecdote she learned from a Googler at Google Marketing Live.

Kuhlmann said on LinkedIn on Friday: “While talking to a Googler today about an account, he offhand mentioned that the only way ads will show on AI Overviews now, and AI Mode soon, is to either be on PMax or Search with Broad Match, and I was gob smacked. NOT something that came up at [Google Marketing Live 2025]. So I looked into it and he was (mostly) correct. The only thing he missed was Shopping, and the not yet rolled out AI Max for Search. This is big big news, and for non-shopping based accounts without active broad keywords or PMax campaigns, puts them at a clear disadvantage.” See the screenshot on LI.

Perplexity AI & ecommerce

Gavin McKew of Shero Commerce reported on LinkedIn on Saturday that “Shopify’s new Catalog API has quietly gone live, with Perplexity AI as the first announced partner. This is a huge deal,” he says.

McKew continues later, “What the Catalog API actually is a single machine-readable feed of every product published on Shopify. Discovery apps like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Copilot can pull titles, prices, stock levels, taxonomy, and enriched attributes in real time. No scraping, no daily lag. The entire product data for every Shopify store in the World.” Read more.

Some thoughts:

  • How long until agency client data gets fed into the AI “magic machine?”

  • The new Catalog API is heading to ad tech creative products everywhere.

  • Seems like an opportunity for retail media networks’ creative capabilities is here.

AI use case: Expedia marketing

Creative in marketing is getting fed a healthy does of AI at Expedia thanks to its partnership with OpenAI.

According to an OpenAI interview, Expedia uses…

  • … “OpenAI APIs to automate the process of identifying and correctly presenting images to customers searching on their travel sites.”

  • … OpenAI’s “ChatGPT across its marketing department to power different creative use cases for its employees.”

Read the May 14 interview with Expedia CMO Jochen Koedijk.

no more search referrals

The concept of “Google Zero” – a.k.a. the day Google Search is “turned off” and AI is turned on with no more referral traffic for publishers – may be approaching faster than some have surmised.

In the May 26 podcast episode of The Rebooting Show, Brian Morrissey interviews Dotdash Meredith CEO Neil Vogel at the Media Product Forum (…) about the Zero day.

Morrissey summarizes the interview: “Google’s AI Overviews are already showing up on a third of Dotdash Meredith’s search queries. The company has seen a decline in clickthrough rates on those results. It’s a challenge, not a reason to get your affairs in order. “What we’ve known for a really long time is we ultimately need direct relationships with users,” [Vogel] said. Read the article.

Hear the podcast episode (May 26).

more stuff

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