The AI Edge Podcast

U of Digital
  • 5.0 (7)
  • Marketing
  • Updated Biweekly

The AI Edge podcast is where AI pop culture meets marketing and technology. Hosted by trusted educators in the space: Shiv Gupta, founder of U of Digital, and Myles Younger, ad tech veteran, the show breaks down what’s actually happening in AI and what it means for marketers, agencies, and leaders focused on tech. Each week, Shiv and Myles cover the latest AI news, and dive deep with a guest into topics like the future of work with AI or how marketers should think about building their AI tech stack. If you want someone to cut through the noise, decode what’s really happening, and help you stay ahead, this is your AI edge.

  1. 1d ago

    Ep 37. Ads in AI Are Here — But Nobody’s Figured Out the Right Format Yet, with Roger Dunn, Thrad

    Meta launched Muse Wonder Models to power its personal AI assistant. Google dropped Gemini Argon — faster, better at brand guidelines, better at writing. A startup called TypeSafe launched Jev, a model purpose-built for fast decision-making in multiple choice scenarios. And Character AI — once one of the top sources of AI ad inventory on the open web — filed for bankruptcy and is now being acquired by Disney for $20 million. The math of compute cost versus ad revenue caught up with them. This week, Shiv and Myles welcome Roger Dunn, Chief Commercial Officer at Thrad, joining from Sydney. Roger spent a decade agency side, held a global retail media role at Diageo, and is now on the front lines of one of the most interesting unsolved problems in advertising: what does a good ad actually look like inside a conversational AI environment? Roger breaks down why the comparison between AI advertising and search undersells the opportunity — with search you’re fighting over a couple of keywords, but with conversational AI you have a full multi-turn dialogue with rich pre-qualification already built in. He also introduces a concept most people haven’t considered: in AI, a well-placed ad doesn’t just respond to a conversation, it can redirect it entirely. His marathon runner and supplements example makes it immediately concrete. And he gives the clearest map of where AI ad inventory actually exists beyond ChatGPT — browsers, companion apps, social platforms, vertical agents, publishers with AI interfaces, and retail. They also get into why Character AI was burning $8–10 million a month on compute and why the ad math simply never worked, why polling ads — a sponsored question with answer options — might be the most native format anyone has found so far, and why the $60 CPM that OpenAI launched with was never going to hold. 📅 AI Edge Live — October 29th Join us for a free webinar on synthetic audiences, personas, and digital twins in marketing — featuring a live demo from Verve CEO and founder Chad. Register at uof.digital New episodes every two weeks. Get your AI Edge here.

  2. Oct 5

    Ep 36. Brand Is No Longer a Long-Term Play — Agentic Commerce Is Making It Urgent, with Mike Finnerty, Mutinex

    Amazon rebranded its entire ad platform — there's no more DSP, the default is now a PMax replica, and they're calling it Amazon Ads Agent. Meta's Muse started crawling Amazon and got shut down within hours. OpenAI launched Dots as a small business tool overnight — apparently because Zuckerberg can't beat Sam Altman, not even on a Tuesday. And President Trump signed an executive order renaming AI to SI. Superintelligence. Because it's super. This week, Shiv and Myles sit down with Mike Finnerty, US President of Mutinex — the agentic MMM platform that has spent the last four years doing what the measurement industry has been promising to do for 80 years, but never quite pulled off operationally. Mike breaks down why every walled garden platform grading its own homework creates a math problem that doesn't add up — when you sum the self-reported performance of five or six platforms, the total is always higher than actual sales. It was the ad network problem of 2008 all over again. Mutinex's answer: inject a neutral third-party incrementality signal back into the bidding algorithms so platforms optimize for actual growth instead of their own metrics. And every single time they've done it, platform-reported performance has improved. He also introduces one of the cleanest frameworks in the episode — read vs. write for LLMs. Until recently, everything AI did was read: research, information gathering, journey changes. What's happening now with Muse, Dots, and Amazon's branded conversations is write: actually taking actions on behalf of consumers. Someone's Muse agent negotiated a Facebook Marketplace deal without the other person knowing. The write era has started. They also get into why the conventional wisdom that brand is a long-term investment is about to be flipped on its head — if your consumer doesn't say "I want a Stanley water bottle" before the agent fires up, the agent will just pick whatever's cheapest and available — why this holiday season will be the first where agentic transactions actually show up in commerce data, and why the entire marketing ecosystem should stop counting clicks and start asking one question: how much went in, how much came out? Shiv and Myles will be at Ad Week — send a DM if you want to connect. Ready to level up your AI skills? Join the U of Digital AI Accelerator. Now enrolling | https://uof.digital/ai/accelerator/ Learn more about the AI Literacy Alliance at uof.digital/alliance New episodes every two weeks. Get your AI Edge here.

  3. Sep 21

    Ep 35. The Old World Is Melting — Are You Retooling Fast Enough? with Paul Boruta, Slingwave

    Amazon just partnered with ChatGPT to let advertisers buy AI inventory through Amazon's DSP — and ChatGPT still won't let Amazon crawl its product catalog. Meta charged advertisers a software fee for the first time in company history. Big tech captured 56% of all ad spend this year, up from 53% last year, and AI is the tailwind driving every bit of that growth. And OpenAI's IPO apparently isn't happening this year — which tells you everything you need to know about where they actually are. This week, Shiv and Myles welcome Paul Boruta, Founder and CEO of Slingwave — an independent AI-native marketing decision engine built for eCommerce and DTC brands. Paul started at Overture and Yahoo, built and sold a startup in the YouTube space, and has spent the last several years building what he describes as a closed loop system that puts all of your marketing data — paid, organic, competitive, and contextual — into one model that gets smarter with every campaign. Paul breaks down why the Amazon/ChatGPT partnership makes perfect strategic sense once you map the funnel correctly: Amazon and Google are the cash register, ChatGPT is excellent at the mid-funnel research and discovery phase where neither of them is particularly strong. He also makes a notable admission: 18 months ago he would have told you synthetic data for incrementality testing was too flawed to be useful. That's changed — and changed fast. And he explains why doing it wrong — one person, one deck, no validation, no closed loop — is worse than not doing it at all. They also get into why real-time competitive signals changed the measurement game entirely — because advertising isn't turn-based, you and your competitors are all in market simultaneously — why sponsored AI agents live or die on the neutrality question, and why the old world of deterministic multi-touch attribution is melting fast and everyone needs to be retooling for what comes next. 🎓 The U of Digital AI Accelerator starts Tuesday, September 22nd — a few spots still available. Enroll now: https://uof.digital/ai/accelerator/ U of Digital is proud to partner with the ANA to bring AI education to over 20,000 brands and 50,000 marketers. New episodes every two weeks. Get your AI Edge here.

  4. Sep 7

    Ep 34. The Frankenstack Is Killing Your Marketing — and AI Native Is the Only Way Out, with Marco Matos, Adora

    Salesforce just gave the "Force" suffix to another brand for the first time in its history — and the stock jumped 25%. ChatGPT ads are getting roasted on LinkedIn for underperforming. The Trade Desk launched Kokai Zuma, their most AI-forward interface yet. And Google quietly embedded its most powerful image generation model directly into Workspace. A busy couple of weeks. This week, Shiv sits down solo with Marco Matos — CEO and co-founder of Adora, and a 20-year veteran of building ad tech products inside the walled gardens — for a conversation that moves fast, disagrees productively, and lands on some of the sharpest takes of the season. Marco breaks down why the Salesforce/Anthropic partnership is less about Claude and more about a deliberate business model pivot — from seat-based pricing to token-based consumption — and why Benioff pulling that off at Salesforce's scale is one of the hardest things any tech CEO has done in years. He also makes the case that the "ChatGPT ads are underperforming" narrative is based on statistically meaningless data and a measurement infrastructure that doesn't exist yet — and that last-click attribution being anyone's source of truth in 2026 should be a fireable offense. They also get into why the agentic buying conversation is missing the point — the real unlock isn't using a platform's agentic workflow, it's having your own agent talk to theirs — why the ad tech industry keeps forgetting about creative while optimizing everything around it, and why every marketer building a Frankenstack of point solutions is setting themselves up to lose to whoever builds the end-to-end system first. 📣 A few announcements : U of Digital is partnering with the ANA to bring AI education to over 20,000 brands and 50,000 marketers. More details coming soon at uof.digital and on social. The AI Accelerator starts September 22nd — almost sold out. Get your ticket now! https://uof.digital/ai/accelerator/ And U of Digital will be at Ad Week — throwing a House Party with Unplugged Collective for marketers in media, ad tech, and MarTech on October 7th. Send a DM if you want an invite or register here: https://luma.com/thehouseparty-awny-2026 New episodes every two weeks. Get your AI Edge here.

  5. Aug 24

    Ep 33. Your AI Is Only as Good as Your Data — and Pepsi Just Spent Five Years Proving It, with Stephanie Layser, AWS

    Pepsi is shopping for an AI transformation partner and the whole industry is watching — consultancies or agencies, who wins? Alexa for Shopping now gives you one or two recommendations instead of a page of results, and brands are quietly panicking about how to become the one that gets surfaced. Google bought Spirit Airlines' entire data archive for $10 million. And SpaceX AI paid $60 billion for Cursor, the agentic coding tool, in an acquisition that slipped under the radar until it didn't. This week, Shiv and Myles welcome Stephanie Layser — Global Sub-Industry Leader for Publishers and Advertising at AWS — for a conversation that connects the infrastructure story to the advertising story in ways most people aren't putting together yet. Stephanie has spent her career at the intersection of data, identity, and ad tech — at News Corp, AppNexus, and now AWS — and she brings a grounded, customer-facing perspective on what AI transformation actually looks like when the work is real and the stakes are high. Stephanie breaks down what Pepsi's five-year data and cloud investment actually means in plain English — and why the companies that did that work early are the ones who can actually activate on AI right now. She explains why programmatic supply has historically been dumb pipes, and how the shift to agentic ad operations — including the work AWS is doing with Warner Brothers Discovery — is building the intelligence layer that changes what those pipes can actually do. She also shares what her own workday looks like now versus before AI: who she left on read, what needs her attention, and how writing a strategy document that would have taken weeks now takes a fraction of the time. They also get into why a customer ran the same technology build evaluation two years apart and came back with a timeline ten percent of the original, why Alexa for Shopping going from infinite shelf to two recommendations is a bigger GEO story than most people realize, and why the AI advertising infrastructure being built right now feels bigger — not just similar — to the birth of programmatic. Ready to level up your AI skills? Join the U of Digital AI Accelerator. Enrollment now open for September | Sponsored by Blis, a DSP by T-Mobile Ad Solutions https://uof.digital/ai/accelerator/ New episodes every two weeks. Get your AI Edge here.

  6. Aug 17

    Ep 32. AI Won't Grow the Ad Pie — But It Will Decide Who Gets a Bigger Slice, with Brian Wieser, Madison and Wall

    Time Magazine started selling sponsored FAQ sections to AI crawlers — and Perplexity shut it down, threatened to lower their quality score, and called it a trust issue. Publishers are wondering whether to block AI crawlers entirely. OpenAI quietly filed for its IPO while churning through senior executives. Anthropic is proactively watermarking Claude outputs ahead of the EU AI Act. And Mark Zuckerberg published a sprawling manifesto about open source AI that Shiv summarized with AI because nobody has time for that. This week, Shiv and Myles sit down with Brian Wieser — CEO of Madison and Wall, a former equity research analyst, agency veteran, and the person Frienemies called "the industry's most widely respected marketing analyst." Brian brings a level of analytical rigor to the AI and advertising conversation that cuts through the hype in ways most guests simply can't — and this episode is full of moments where he says the quiet part loud. Brian breaks down why AI will neither grow nor shrink the advertising pie — and why that's actually the most honest and interesting answer you can give. He explains the three real mechanisms through which AI could shift ad spending: changes in competitive intensity, creative destruction, and broader economic tailwinds. He also takes direct aim at Sam Altman's claim that AI can eliminate 95% of what agencies do — and dismantles it with data. Agency revenues are not decelerating. The budget is the budget. And one of his clients at Madison and Wall refused to buy a banner ad because the sponsored post lives in the LLM forever. Which, as Brian puts it, is fascinating. They also get into why media planning line items are quietly shifting from TV and audio to Google, Meta, and Amazon — and what that means for everyone who isn't one of those three — why agencies arbitraging AI tokens is really just the Wall Street research bundling model with a new coat of paint, and why Meta doesn't actually care about advertising even though it funds everything they do. Ready to level up your AI skills? Join the U of Digital AI Accelerator. Enrollment now open for September | Sponsored by Bliss, a DSP by T-Mobile Ad Solutions 20% off now | https://uof.digital/ai/accelerator/ New episodes every two weeks. Get your AI Edge here.

  7. Jul 27

    Ep 31. Autonomous Marketing Is Coming — But Brand Still Wins, with Jamie Domenici, Klaviyo

    A new Chinese AI model called Kimi K3 just matched frontier model performance at half the cost — and nobody saw it coming. Again. Google launched three new Gemini models in one week, each optimized for different tasks. OpenAI is reportedly building a screenless device with sensors, a camera, and a microphone. And Meta's AI creative tools are generating bikes with two sets of handlebars and telling advertisers it's their problem. This week, Shiv and Myles sit down with Jamie Domenici, CMO of Klaviyo — the B2C CRM powering over 200,000 brands and eight billion messages a day. Jamie brings a rare perspective to the show: she's a marketer leading marketing for a marketing platform, which means she's living the AI transformation from both sides of the table simultaneously. Jamie breaks down why the autonomous marketing future is closer than most people think — and why human judgment is still the thing that separates the brands that win from the ones that just move fast. She explains why you can't just turn on an agent and let it rip, why brand guidelines need to be trained into your AI from day one, and why the companies embracing AI right now are already building more, personalizing better, and outrunning the competition. She also shares how Klaviyo used AI to automate their entire product release workflow — from engineering ship to blog post — because the pace of AI-driven releases made the old way completely unsustainable. They also get into why ChatGPT's contextual targeting is fundamentally different from Meta's blunt retargeting, why voice AI hasn't disrupted marketing yet but is about to, and why every marketer needs to start thinking about how their brand shows up in places they've never had to optimize for before — including image search, LLMs, and whatever screenless device OpenAI ships next. Ready to level up your AI skills? Join the U of Digital AI Accelerator. Enrollment now open for September | Sponsored by Blis, part of T-Mobile Advertising Solutions https://uof.digital/ai/accelerator/ New episodes every two weeks. Get your AI Edge here.

  8. Jul 13

    Ep 30. AI Slop, the Voice Box, and Why Averages Lie — with Sam Bloom, PMG

    AI-generated content is back on the rise in ad inventory — and it's not just MFA farms anymore. Reddit deleted 25,000 spammy AI posts in Q1. Google took down 50,000 AI slop networks. And the ANA's latest brand safety report shows the problem is getting worse after years of improvement. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg logged onto X for the first time in years to announce a frontier AI model, an image generator, a video generator, and a cloud compute business — all in one week. This week, Shiv and Myles sit down with Sam Bloom — founder of Camelot Strategic Marketing and Media, now Head of Partnerships at PMG — for a conversation that spans brand safety, Meta's AI ambitions, the future of the agency business, and why the most interesting real estate in AI right now might be something nobody is talking about. Sam breaks down why AI slop isn't a new problem — it's a new weapon in a very old arms race — and why the best defense is still doing basic things well, going deep with trusted partners, and de-averaging your data to find where the fraud is actually hiding. He also makes the sharpest observation in the episode: everyone knows who owns the search box. Nobody owns the voice box. And whoever gets there first changes the whole game. They also get into why Meta embedding AI directly into the advertiser console — and potentially not charging for tokens — could be the most disruptive business model move in the industry right now, why fully agentic end-to-end campaigns are more Tony Stark than science fiction, and why the agency business is quietly moving upstream from media reselling to business transformation. 🎙 Next U of Digital AI Edge Live Session — July 22nd at 12PM PT AI Search: Organic vs. Paid — Featuring an Exclusive Demo of Evertune and ChatGPT Ads ChatGPT now influences a billion people and counting. But how do you influence ChatGPT? Join us for a live look at both GEO and ChatGPT Ads — including an exclusive demo of the Evertune platform — featuring Evertune CEO Brian Stempeck, who spent 14 years at The Trade Desk before launching Evertune to tackle the next frontier of digital advertising. This one is FREE for everyone. Register here: https://bit.ly/4gzPIom

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
7 Ratings

About

The AI Edge podcast is where AI pop culture meets marketing and technology. Hosted by trusted educators in the space: Shiv Gupta, founder of U of Digital, and Myles Younger, ad tech veteran, the show breaks down what’s actually happening in AI and what it means for marketers, agencies, and leaders focused on tech. Each week, Shiv and Myles cover the latest AI news, and dive deep with a guest into topics like the future of work with AI or how marketers should think about building their AI tech stack. If you want someone to cut through the noise, decode what’s really happening, and help you stay ahead, this is your AI edge.

Information

  • Creator
    U of Digital
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    37
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    The AI Edge Podcast

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