The AI Promo Brief: Issue #27

Say Hello to Ask skucast

We built something new for you: Ask skucast, an AI made from nine years of skucast and 350+ conversations with promo's sharpest minds. Bring it your questions, simple or complicated, and get real answers. It's live now, and it's free.

The Watermark Wars Have Begun

Everyone picked a lane on AI watermarks this month. Anthropic began watermarking text from its models, a pattern woven into the word-selection process itself, applied worldwide across Claude and its API. Google went the other direction, letting users turn off the visible watermark on AI-generated images, video, and music, while invisible provenance marks stay in place. For anyone publishing client-facing content, provenance is becoming a real property of your copy and creative. It's worth knowing which of your tools carries a signature. BTW: Here's a great take on this topic by Jeff Jarvis, author of forthcoming book, Hot Type (and thank you Cassia, a brilliant engineer here at commonsku, for that article!)

ChatGPT Quietly Broke Up With Reddit

For two years, Reddit threads were among ChatGPT's favourite sources, the most-cited domain on the web as recently as April. Then, on August 14, Reddit's share of ChatGPT Search citations collapsed 86%, from a steady 3.8% to half a percent, and it's stayed there. Nobody has confirmed why, which is exactly the point: AI visibility can shift overnight, invisibly, for reasons you'll never get a memo about. The durable move is making your own site the source AI systems go to directly — clean pages, clear answers, crawlable content — so your presence in the conversation belongs to you.

Find This Hoodie Is Becoming a Ninety-Second Job

You know the drill: a client screenshots a hoodie from their conference and says, "get me this" and you burn an afternoon guessing at weights, cuts, and which supplier carries the closest match. FashionMix's FIND is reverse image search built only for clothes: upload the screenshot and its model reads cut, color, fabric, and any visible logo, then hunts live product pages sorted by price. Meanwhile, minniie runs seasonal color analysis from a selfie and builds coordinated outfits. Use FIND to pin the reference garment Monday morning, then borrow minniie's color logic to pitch an apparel program — a coordinated capsule with a palette you can defend. Apparel is your biggest category, after all!

Promo's Sharpest Minds, One Question Away

Ask skucast is an AI trained on 350+ skucast conversations with promo's sharpest minds. Bring it a question about sales growth, building a team, or supplier relationships, and it answers in Bobby's voice (host of the skucast), pulling from nine years of what guests have shared on the show. Every answer cites the exact episode behind it, so you can click through and hear the real conversation. Type your question or call and talk it out; the voice sounds so much like Bobby that our own team did a double take! Still not Bobby — but it is free, and it's waiting for your first question.

The Agent Moved Into Your Browser Tabs

Count the supplier and customer websites you hop across in a week and you'll see why this matters. Anthropic rebuilt the Chrome side panel as a full Cowork session — it clicks links, types, fills forms, and navigates using the logins already in your browser, and the session saves to your account so you can start in Chrome and finish on desktop. Same week, Claude's Google Workspace connectors started acting rather than only reading: sending mail, replying in threads, moving Drive files. The gap between "AI that drafts" and "AI that does" closed a little more.

Keep an Eye on Grok

xAI released Grok 4.6 for long-running agents, coding and research, but also (for our promo purposes), a “more ambitious interactive and visual work.” Artificial Analysis scored it 61 on its Intelligence Index, five points above Grok 4.5 and level with GPT-5.6 Sol. Musk says Grok 4.7 is three to four weeks out, already significantly better than 4.6, and being supplemented with a large volume of SpaceX company data. But the big news? Grok Bot. SpaceXAI launched Grok Bot, persistent agents that each get their own cloud computer, sign into a user's existing applications and websites, and keep working with the laptop closed. Bots can be created mid-task, hand work to each other, coordinate in group chats, and turn observed workflows into automations. We’ve been testing it, it’s rad.

📈 Gemini crossed one billion monthly active users, the fastest-growing product in Google's history, generating 150 million images a day.

🏋️ Where does a mid-sized distributorship sit when AI makes big platforms bigger and boutiques cheaper to run? Kasa's chief executive calls it the barbell effect — worth asking whether promo is next.

⚠️ A solid cautionary tale for anyone building with AI — I Vibe Coded a Security Risk.

🚩 LinkedIn added a "Seems like AI slop" report option for posts in the feed — which raises the question: But what we do about the human-written slop on LinkedIn. 😂

🖥️ OpenAI launched Computer History, an opt-in feature that lets ChatGPT recall what you did on your Mac across apps and sites.

👀 Zetik watches a named company, person, or rumor across the internet and pings you only when something actually happens — quiet competitive intel.

🌐 Ploy builds, tests, and revises a marketing website end to end, from landing pages and SEO fixes through visitor identification. 

🗣️ Claude Code has a jargon habit, so a developer shipped Claudish to English, a free open-source plugin that rewrites its output in plain language.

😂 For funsies: an a16z partner built Janie, a fictional AI college student, and ran her through sorority recruitment week — 1,300 followers in a week at $100 in credits.

🎙️ Ask skucast answers your promo questions from 350+ episodes of the show — try it now, it's free!