This month's AI Brief is brought to you by AI Digital, the AI-native media consultancy.

It's Teacher Appreciation Week, and it's a good time to remember who our teachers are when it comes to AI.

It's also fitting that this week, in AI Marketers Guild's AI Insiders series, we had Ms. Janet Elias as our guest (you’ll find that and all our previous editions on YouTube). She spent decades as a New York City public school technology teacher. My daughter was among her last cohort of students, and when I heard she was about to embark on a new career consulting about AI, education, and responsible technology use, I had to book her. 

Because of AI's pervasiveness, we need a range of teachers. Here are some of the kinds of teachers we need, along with exemplars I appreciate. Who comes to mind for you?

Strategic: Who'll show you the big picture? For me, Jeremiah Owyang's visionary take on agent-to-agent media and commerce has been so influential.

Philosophical: How will AI affect us as a society, and what will it do to our souls? When it comes to the impact of technology on our lives, I think about Douglas Rushkoff (author of "Being Human") and Sherry Turkle (author of "Alone Together"). 

Ethical: How can we apply AI equitably? Timnit Gebru, founder of The Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), has been one such technologist and ethicist who I've quoted most often. And then with AI Insiders, we've had speakers like Catharine Montgomery of Better Together Agency and Idil Cakim, who runs Iris Flex, help us see AI's hidden biases — and our own biases.

Technical: How can you actually use certain AI-powered products? How do you go from signing up for a vibe-coding app, for instance, to becoming a vibe coder? I had a session with my old colleague Randall Noval, for instance, and got the most useful crash course into Claude Code. I'm also constantly chatting with my old colleague Leo Morejon to compare notes on recent AI updates.

Journalistic: How do you keep up with the latest AI news? Some of the better daily newsletters I get are The Rundown, The Neuron, John Ebbert's Tipsheet, and Shelly Palmer's missive. Casey Newton's work with The Platformer goes way deeper; he's an investigative reporter at heart.

Capitalistic: How can you run a business that leans on AI, or that is an AI-native startup? Two of my best mentors are Bryan Wiener and Sarah Hofstetter, who led the agency 360i and recently launched the 37Arc consultancy. I'm inspired by them not because of anything involving AI in particular. What's more important is that they know how to build and sustain businesses during periods of rapid change; the actual cause of that change is irrelevant for steady stewards like them.

Communal: How can you learn from your peers in both strategic and practical ways? Yes, I love AI Marketers Guild for this, including our weekly events (which I call community conversations rather than webinars). Whatever or wherever your tribe is, it's damn good to have one or two these days.

Familial and personal: How do kids and seniors use AI? How do teachers and doctors use it? How do parents and caretakers use it? Maybe you know chefs or authors or Lyft drivers or hairdressers, and you've seen what they do with it. A lot of our most enlightening moments come from people we're close to, and that shapes our perceptions of AI. Seeing my middle schooler cringe at some AI-generated content helps ground me and show me when AI can be a net negative.

Life: Our own applications of AI to our lives (or avoiding AI in parts of our lives) wind up teaching us tons. Suzy CEO Matt Britton came on AI Insiders a while back and talked about how using AI as a patient helped inspire his product roadmap. When I used AI to replace a doorknob and cook Chashu pork (not at the same time), it expanded my thoughts on what AI can mean to people. 

I could come up with a much longer list, especially if I had AI give me dozens more suggestions, but you get the idea. And this piece (like this whole series) wasn't AI-assisted. There are so many kinds of AI teachers that we need, and it's up to us to form our own faculty, mostly informally but occasionally formally too. Sometimes you need to seek out certain ones to address bespoke needs.

Here’s my one mission for you: Reach out to one of those teachers who comes to mind as you read this. Send them an email, text, or DM. Maybe they have no clue that you learned anything (or everything) from them. Yeah, Teacher Appreciation Week should be every week, but it's a great reminder to reach out to one of your teachers, so let's celebrate it properly.

A thank-you note will be way sweeter than an apple — especially if that note is not AI-generated.

— David Berkowitz, Chief Community Officer, Marketecture Media

We're bringing Marketecture Live to Chicago, the beating heart of ad land and hub for brand, retail, and media innovation, where the industry's biggest shifts are happening in real time. Coming off our sold-out flagship conference in March, we're building on that momentum.

Who: Agency Executives, Programmatic Leads, Media Planners, Ad Tech Vendors

What: Omnicom is currently piloting agentic AI workflows designed to automate the media buying process by cutting out certain middle-layer ad tech vendors. The goal is to use AI agents to navigate the programmatic ecosystem directly, aiming for higher efficiency and lower fees.

Why it matters: If agencies successfully use AI to disintermediate the supply chain, the cost of media could drop significantly, but it requires brands to trust AI-driven decision-making.

(Digiday)

Who: CMOs, Video Strategists, Small Business Marketers, Media Sellers

What: The 2026 IAB Digital Video Ad Spend report reveals that digital video now accounts for more than 60% of total TV and video investment. This shift is being fueled by AI-supported audience modeling and identity durability, which allow smaller advertisers to target with the precision of major brands.

Why it matters: The democratization of precision means small- to mid-sized brands are now direct competitors to giants in the CTV and social video space.

(MarTech)

Who: CRM Managers, Marketing Ops, Data Scientists, Growth Leads

What: New data from Salesforce’s Tenth Edition of its State of Marketing report reveals that while 75% of marketers have adopted AI, 84% are still running generic campaigns. The bottleneck isn't the AI itself, but disjointed data that prevents agents from knowing who the customer actually is in real-time.

Why it matters: If your data is a mess, your AI will just send personalized spam faster; the real winners are those fixing their CDP and data architecture first.

(Salesforce)

Marketecture Media is back at Cannes, and this year, we’re doing even more!

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