The AI Promo Brief: Issue #30

Voice is Big and Google and ElevenLabs Make it Easy

Voice is one of the biggest (small) advances in AI recently. Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS designs a custom voice from a plain language description in more than 100 languages and dialects, offers more than 2,000 ready made voices, and can replicate a real voice from a 30 second sample after consent verification, with a SynthID watermark on every clip. ElevenLabs answered with Eleven v4 and a faster v4 Turbo, covering more than 90 languages with instant clones from 10 seconds of audio. Product videos, presentation narration and client explainers can now carry one house voice with no studio booked. The other side of that: 10 seconds of your CEO on a podcast is enough to clone them. Want to see how we’ve been using voice? Check out our ask skucast project here.

Adobe Put 80 Tools Inside Claude and Brought Photoshop to Gemini

Have you seen the AI consolidation with design tools? On September 24 Adobe brought tools from Photoshop, Lightroom, Express and Firefly into Gemini and put Acrobat into its Claude plugin, now more than 80 tools across Acrobat, Express, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, InDesign and Adobe Stock, with Express designs and PDFs editable inside the Claude chat. Instagram followed on September 30 with an AI assistant in its Edits app that reads a US creator's own views, retention and comments, and suggests concepts, hooks, captions and trending audio. Your team's design tools now take instructions from a chat window, and a free Adobe account gets you in!

Shopify Canvas Builds Your Company Store From a Conversation

Shopify debuted Canvas, which builds and changes a storefront through conversation with its Sidekick agent, rendering the store's real code as it goes, so you can test interactions and screen sizes before anything is live. It is desktop only at launch. The company store that used to take a designer, a developer and three weeks is becoming an afternoon's conversation! BTW: Did you know we integrate with shopify?

Join Us Live to See the Agentic Distributorship in Action

What does an agentic distributorship look like on a regular Tuesday? On Thursday, October 29 at 2 PM ET, Bobby Lehew, our Chief AI Officer, and Charlie Moscoe, our VP of Product, walk through the AI shifts landing in promo right now, how market-leading distributors are putting them to work, and which admin tasks you can hand off today inside commonsku. Save your seat here. Holiday orders are piling up, so this is the right week to pick which tasks leave your plate first.

Finally: Easy-to-use bots (OpenAI Dots, Grok Team Bots, Microsoft Autopilot, Meta Muse)

We called it many issues ago: agents with their own identities and inboxes "one to watch"; five products from four companies are all in on bots. OpenAI's Dots run always on with their own cloud computer, reachable in ChatGPT, Slack, or by voice. SpaceXAI's Team Bots, in public beta, give your team one shared bot; Microsoft's Autopilot enters private preview with its own identity and computer (if you use Microsoft product, double down on this); Meta says Muse gets an email address "soon"; and each agent in Manus's Cue, in early access by invite, gets an email, phone number and wallet. Bots are finally easier and team friendly!

Good news for you: Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google in a Price War

Frontier intelligence just got cheaper. Anthropic launched Opus 5.5 at 20% below Opus 5, and Sonnet 5.5 nearly matches it at half the price. OpenAI launched GPT-6 Sol at half the price of GPT-5.6 Sol. Google's Gemini 4 Argon debuted at the same low price (only available to security teams now) but if you've been delaying investing in AI because of cost, now's the time to buy!

📞 Google is testing Call for Me, where Gemini calls businesses for Pixel 11 owners to check stock and book reservations. Your next inventory call may come from an agent.

🎨 Ideogram's 4.5 model is built for repeat edits and claims to hold color and detail across passes. Perfect for mockups that need one more tweak.

💬 DoorDash is testing ordering by text, from cart to checkout in one thread.

✍️ Graphite found Opus is better at writing but 5.5 says "this matters" 116 times as often as humans, though its em dashes are nearly gone!

📦 Stüssy picked Relex's AI planning platform to forecast inventory across stores, ecommerce and warehouses. Expect more apparel suppliers to follow.

🎥 Ask YouTube now turns product review videos into comparison tables. Product video is becoming the new spec sheet.

🧵 Anthropic estimates robots could do 74% of US physical tasks but are cost-competitive for only 0.3% today.

🗓️ On October 29, Bobby and Charlie go live to show which admin tasks you can hand off to AI in commonsku. Grab your spot now!