Adobe Acrobat just leveled up from “PDF graveyard” to full-on content engine. With the new "generate presentation" feature, you can feed it client briefs, spec sheets, and inspo links, then spin out a pitch-ready deck, complete with layouts from Adobe Express. Their chat-based AI lets you talk to a contract or catalog like it’s a teammate: summarize, strip pages, tweak text, lock it down, done. The wild card? Generate a podcast from a PDF: Drop in meeting notes, research, and that 80-page RFP, then listen to a tight audio recap while you’re driving to client visits. For distributors buried in PDFs, Acrobat Studio turns “document chaos” into decks, pods, and shareable client story fuel. Note: In our initial test converting a PDF to preso, it failed miserably, but because it’s Adobe, we’ll give it another chance. (For now, sticking with Gemini, but will be back to test Adobe soon!)
Hume AI is the voice AI startup obsessed with emotional nuance—its models read tone, pace, and patterns of language in real time, then answers back with a voice that feels present, not robotic. Think of it as an “empathy layer” you can plug into any assistant so it knows when a customer is frustrated, excited, or just done, and can adjust how it speaks, not just what it says. Now Google DeepMind is quietly importing that superpower into Gemini by hiring Hume’s CEO and key engineers and striking a non‑exclusive licensing deal for Hume’s tech, a move TechCrunch breaks down in its piece on how Google “snags team behind AI voice startup Hume AI.” For sales leaders, emotionally intelligent AI is a new frontier because everyone knows that sales is 90% empathy!
At the PPAI Expo on January 12th, our own Chief Content Officer, Bobby Lehew, took the stage to unpack what AI actually looks like when you commit to it. Not theory. Not hype. Real examples from real projects, and how creative tools are changing what's possible when you stop treating AI as a sidekick and start weaving it into your entire process. The session drew 400+ attendees—so many that the fire marshal had to turn people away at the door, with lines stacked down the hall. Bobby walked through 10 tools and real tactics you can start using today. If you missed it, we're rolling out a webinar soon—sign up your team and come get inspired by what's actually possible with AI in promo.
Anthropic quietly lit the fuse on the “agents that actually do your work” era by launching Claude Cowork, a desktop AI coworker that's got WIRED, TIME, and the Wall Street Journal buzzing. Unlike chatbots stuck in browser tabs, Cowork lives on your desktop and actually executes tasks in your files—sorting folders, converting formats, drafting reports. TIME calls it "agents that don't just suggest, they execute." The WSJ captured non-technical users getting "Claude-pilled" watching a simple interface do surprisingly competent end-to-end work. We tested it organizing files and receipts—it's legit. Want more? Check out this chat with Claude Cowork creator Boris Cherny and Greg Isenberg. BTW: Big news also dropped Monday from Anthropic: Claude now integrates with Figma, Asana, and Slack. As the workflow experts, our take: Claude should be on your team's essential tools list for 2026.
This one’s for our supplier friends: Jeff Bezos is back in build mode with Project Prometheus, a $6.2B A.I. startup targeting the guts of production and the factories, robots, and lines behind them. This isn’t another text model; it’s called Engineered Intelligence and is A.I. trained on real-world experiments and machine data to tune how things are actually made. Co-led with former Google X and Verily alum Vik Bajaj, Project Prometheus is pulling talent from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta to push “physical AI” into advanced manufacturing. For promo suppliers and manufacturers already investing in robotics, this is your weather report: AI-native plants will move from novelty to norm, reshaping capacity planning, lead times, quality control, and how fast you can spin up new products for your distributor partners.
✏️ Pencil is like having a little Figma or Canva inside your coding tool, so designers and developers don’t have to pass files back and forth, killing the awkward “here’s the Figma, good luck” handoff.
👀 This tiny little job post is stirring up some serious controversy “AGI is on the horizon” from the co-founder of DeepMind. You might have heard about this documentary.
🧭 Still confused on which model to use for what? Try this model recommendation tool.
⏰ Executives say AI is a time-saving machine, but workers are calling BS—this WSJ piece shows a massive gap between C‑suite hype and front-line reality.
📖 Prob our fave tiny-find in a while, a new glossary about AI, no, not technical terms, terms like “culturelag” which means: “Tools change in weeks; behaviors catch up in years.”
⚖️ AI + humans — the good news? “43% of what we do is irreducibly human” the bad news? 2026 is the year our comfort ends.
🎓 Anthropic is raising Claude like a principled coworker—honest when it's uncomfortable, helpful without being a pushover, and willing to ignore instructions (even its own makers') if following them would be clearly unethical or harmful.
🪡 Google’s Stitch (beta) is like handing Gemini a sketchpad and saying “mock up this idea for me”—it turns prompts or screenshots into editable UI.
⌚ Wearable AI gonna be BIG this year.
🎙️ Join Bobby’s “AI + Promo” webinar — invite your team, here!