The AI Promo Brief: Issue #10

Scent by AI: Amazon's Pop-Up Perfume 

Amazon just turned its re:Invent conference into a custom fragrance lab powered by AI, letting attendees answer a few questions and walk out with a personalized scent—bottled, labeled, and ready to gift. For promo pros, this is sensory branding cranked on high and it taps into two big areas we expect to explode in 2026: experiential marketing that combines AI and personal preference that transforms giveaways into deeply personal brand moments. Here’s the agency that did it, explaining via TikTok.

“World’s First On-Brand AI”

Bloom builds your brand assets. Need social posts, web graphics, or promo assets? Bloom scans your website, pulls your styles, and cranks out on-brand graphics in seconds. No more hunting down that hex code or wondering if your designer remembered your font stack. Tactical tip: Feed Bloom your best-performing visuals first—it learns faster and nails your vibe quicker. Here’s a vid explainer.

Living Profiles: The Future Face of Your Sales Team

Delphi wants experts to bottle their brains—“digital minds” that turn your talks, decks, and docs into a living profile people can query long after the Zoom call ends. For sales, that’s huge: prospects can self-serve detailed answers from a consistent, expert voice 24/7, instead of waiting for your best closer to find calendar space. It also keeps institutional knowledge alive when people move roles, so your “A-player pitch” becomes an always-on asset instead of something that disappears when someone leaves. Tech Times does a deep dive here. And if you want to see how it works, chat with a digital mind here.

We're Hitting Vegas for PPAI Expo (Join Us)

PPAI Expo 2026 hits Las Vegas January 12-15, and commonsku's stacking the week with reasons to show up early and stay late. Platform walkthroughs at Booth #2310. Breakfast Club at Libertine Social. Conference sessions on AI Trends and Maximizing commonsku. Happy hours. We turned Expo into multi-networking opportunities that beat wandering the show floor alone. Here's your week with commonsku at a glance.

The Icebox Formula: Flexibility Over Everything

On this skucast episode, Scott Alterman from The Icebox breaks down what separates promo distributors who grow from those who plateau. His answer isn't just more tools or better margins—it's structural flexibility and speed. He walks through real scenarios where adaptation beats optimization, why his team prioritizes movement over polish, and how to build operations that expand without breaking. No theory, just what actually works from a distributor who's been through multiple industry cycles.

60% of Your Work Could Be Automated - Today

McKinsey just dropped numbers that reframe the entire AI conversation—and they're mind-blowing. Nearly 60% of US work hours could be automated—right now—with tech we already have. But here's the twist: your skills aren't vanishing. Over 70% of what employers want works in both automatable and human-led tasks, you're just using them differently now. Most of the skills employers care about, like communication, problem‑solving, and digital savvy, show up in both tasks AI can do and tasks only humans can do. As AI takes over more routine work, those same skills don't disappear; they get pulled into higher‑value work where people interpret, decide, create, and collaborate. One more stat: The demand for AI fluency has jumped 7x in two years (nothing else comes close), and by 2030, pairing humans with agents and robots could unlock $2.9 trillion in value. Now’s the time for you to own the highest-impact work.

Claude Opus 4.5: Your New AI Project Manager

Anthropic just rolled out Claude Opus 4.5, a frontier model that doesn’t just answer prompts, it runs projects end-to-end—think complex quoting, spreadsheet updates, deck drafts, and follow-up emails in one continuous brain. It breaks work into steps, keeps context across long chats and files, and now plays nicely with enterprise tools like Chrome, Excel, and all three major clouds. Biggest diff against GPT? CNET says ChatGPT tends to answer with longer, feature-rich, list-heavy responses, while Claude’s replies are usually tighter, more natural-sounding paragraphs that feel more like a conversation.

📸 Google’s Complete Guide to Nano Banana Pro: 10 Tips for Professional Asset Production

👀 Need lifestyle shots that look different? Misch’s Nano Banana style tour drops 11 looks you can swipe straight into your next merch deck.

📋 Google just handed every AE a silent coordinator: Workspace Studio’s new AI agents.

💼 This founder treated ChatGPT Pro as a first hire.

🧠 If you ever wondered how Claude can sound so … human, here’s Claude’s soul.

🌈 A riff on “vibe designing” with AI and Figma

💻 Google and Replit are vibe-coding for devs; their collab hints at a future where you brief in a “feel” and agents wrangle catalogs, budgets, and packs behind the scenes.

🤔  Anthropic’s philosopher AMA in this X clip digs into AI, ethics, and identity—the kind of nuance brands expect when you pitch AI-assisted campaigns.

🤖 Going to Expo? See all the commonsku happenings at Expo plus deets for our session on the AI Trends and Tools Every Promo Pro Needs Now!