The AI Promo Brief: Issue #20

ChatGPT Images 2.0: Think, Search, Design

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Images 2.0, and it is not just another image generator, this one thinks before it creates. With thinking mode enabled, it searches the web for references, generates multiple images from a single prompt, and checks its own output for errors before delivering. Sam Altman called it "like going from GPT-3 to GPT-5 all at once," and it immediately hit #1 on Arena AI's image leaderboard. If you have been frustrated by AI image tools that produce beautiful garbage (great art, wrong details), this is the version worth testing. Create a product concept, a social post visual, or a campaign mockup, and for the first time, the AI actually understands what you asked for.

Claude Design Is Here And It Is Not Just for Designers

Anthropic launched Claude Design this week alongside its new Opus 4.7 model, and the promo industry should pay attention even if you never touch code. Describe what you want --a landing page, a product showcase, an interactive prototype-- and Claude builds it in real time. Developers are already flexing with it, for example, Jerrod Lew assembled a personal dashboard OS in two prompts. Exports go to Canva, PDF, PPTX, standalone HTML, or directly to Claude Code for production. The bigger signal here is the design tool wars heating up between AI companies -- Canva shipped AI 2.0, Google launched Stitch with an open-source DESIGN.md spec, ChatGPT launched Images, and the message from every major AI platform is clear: design is the next frontier they are all racing to own.

The Experiment Where AI Closed Deals Better Than Humans

Anthropic ran an experiment called Project Deal: for one week, Claude AI agents handled real negotiations for 69 Anthropic employees in a private Slack marketplace, completing 186 deals worth over $4,000 with zero human intervention during negotiations. Each employee got a $100 budget and a short Claude interview to set their goals, and from there agents took over completely: posting listings, making offers, fielding counteroffers, and reaching agreements entirely in natural language. Nearly half the participants said they would pay for agent-based negotiation as a service, and while Anthropic explicitly warned that policy and legal frameworks for agent commerce simply do not exist yet, the technology clearly works. Sure, it’s B2C specific (if I were eBay I’d be nervous or excited, depending on their POV) but this could be a precursor to how some B2B sales could look within a few years.

OpenAI Just Put AI Agents on Every Sales Team's Payroll

OpenAI launched Workspace Agents in ChatGPT this week -- shared AI agents that teams can build once and deploy across their entire organization through both ChatGPT and Slack, powered by Codex, retaining memory, calling connected apps, running on schedules, and keeping working when you are offline. OpenAI's own sales team uses one for account research, and their accounting team runs month-end close with one. For promo distributors with sales teams spending hours on CRM updates and lead research, this is a direct productivity play. Workspace Agents are available now in research preview for Business and Enterprise plans, free until May 6.

Join our AI Roundtables w Chief AI Officer, Bobby Lehew

Bobby Lehew is commonsku's new Chief AI Officer and if you've read this newsletter, listened to skucast, or squeezed into his packed AI session at PPAI Expo 2026, you know his passion for all things AI. Stack that on top of 25 years running distributorships and you get the rare combo: someone fluent in both AI and promo. To that end, we’re doing what we love to do by building a community around the topic of AI and would love to have you join us! Sign up for our small-group AI roundtables —hosted by Bobby— to share and learn from your peers on what the best of the best are doing with AI!

Claude Now Remembers and Rapidly Expands its Connectors

Anthropic made two moves that push Claude from work tool to daily assistant: first, Claude Managed Agents now have built-in memory, retaining context from every session with memories stored as editable files you can review or update; and second, Claude expanded its connectors including Audible, Intuit TurboTax, Resy, Spotify, Uber, and more while Spotify also launched inside Claude for personalized music and podcast recommendations. For B2B the memory feature is the bigger deal -- imagine an AI that remembers your projects and builds on that knowledge every time you use it instead of making you re-explain your business context every session. The everyday connectors show the direction AI assistants are heading: not just work tools, but personal assistants that handle everything from booking a client dinner (Resy) to planning a team offsite (TripAdvisor, Booking.com). Note that many connectors for promo pros are already in place including Adobe, Canva, Figma, Monday, Hubspot, Slack, and Zapier. 

GPT-5.5 Arrives as OpenAI's "Worker-Class" Model

OpenAI shipped GPT-5.5 on April 23, and this one is different, what OpenAI calls "worker-class," built to finish tasks rather than just answer questions. Every's Dan Shipper found GPT-5.5 feels concise and pleasant in use, and his recommended workflow is to pair it with a planning model as the executor -- a combo that scored 62.5/100 on Every's Senior Engineer benchmark versus low 30s-40s for any single model alone. The pace of frontier model releases has hit a weekly cadence now (Anthropic shipped Opus 4.7 just seven days earlier), and for promo teams using AI in production, the takeaway is clear: do not lock yourself into one model -- test your key workflows on both and pick the best tool for each job.

🛒 Agentic commerce drove $70 billion in Cyber Week GMV through AI agents making purchases on behalf of users, and Shopify has now connected 5.6 million stores to AI shopping channels including ChatGPT and Gemini.

😬 Colgate's AI-generated ad campaign went viral with 2.3 million views after consumers called out obvious AI artifacts and uncanny visuals, becoming this week's biggest cautionary tale for AI marketing.

🤯 SemiAnalysis revealed on Patrick O'Shaughnessy's podcast that one analyst spending $6,000/day on Claude tokens for three weeks singlehandedly rebuilt a product that a 100-person team at a competitor had spent a decade developing.

🔗 Google launched Workspace Intelligence at Cloud Next, connecting Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive into a unified AI knowledge graph with a new "Ask Gemini in Chat" feature and 9x faster spreadsheet generation.

🎨 Templafy enforces brand rules on AI-generated presentations inside PowerPoint, with BDO reporting $1.65M in annual savings and 4M+ users at Adobe, KPMG, and Pandora already deployed.

🎙️ Promo + AI roundtables: commonsku's new Chief AI Officer Bobby Lehew is hosting small-group sessions where promo pros swap real AI plays—25 years running distributorships meets deep AI chops, grab your seat.