Flywheel's Hoffman watched unBoxed spend 50 minutes pitching two-person teams, then Acadia's Ross Walker rated Review Requests 10/10 and Ads Agent a 5. OLLY's Summer Jubelirer already reserved 2027 budget for the review unit, and Walker's team called Full-Funnel Campaigns "very mid to low" after running them.
Why it matters: Platform agents raise the floor; the operators in the room still fund the lever that sells units, not the one that spends media.
NP Digital's Rob Tindula had a local client post its highest organic-click month in July while LinkedIn declared organic dead, and an AI-mention study showed only 2.5% of downstream visits carried a trackable AI parameter. 97% landed in Direct, organic, or nowhere, and most first visits happened after day one.
Why it matters: Put a delayed-visit read next to every GEO claim and stop treating the AI Assistant slice as the full impact.
On Marketing Against the Grain, Kipp and Kieran said marketing's share of roles is still about 4-5%, and the 39% of CMOs cutting seats are solving the wrong variable. Zero-to-one marketers run a personal AI stack plus shared context, then sit in mission pods with craft specialists, and token spend behaves like a headcount line.
Why it matters: Staff the pod around the mission and the agent stack, and put inference on the budget before you cut a seat.