AI Marketing Weekly: Building AI Teams, Redesigning Workflows, and the Commerce Revolution
November 9, 2025
Welcome to this week's edition of the AI Marketing Weekly newsletter. This week, the conversation has shifted decisively from simple generative AI to the rise of agentic AI autonomous systems that can act, decide, and collaborate across complex marketing workflows. We've seen major players like Google and OpenAI roll out new tools and partnerships that empower marketers to scale their efforts, from small business campaign creation to enterprise-level workflow transformation. The key theme is clear: the future of marketing is less about using AI tools and more about orchestrating AI agents.
This edition also highlights the critical need for marketers to focus on strategic implementation, data governance, and security as these powerful new agents begin to interact with sensitive customer data and transactional systems. The shift is profound, demanding a re-evaluation of existing team structures and operational models to truly capture the immense value AI agents promise.
This Week's Top Stories:
- Agents for Growth: Why Redesigning Workflows is Key to AI Impact
- Google DeepMind Launches Pomelli: An Experimental AI Tool for SMB Marketing
- Shopify's Agentic AI Strategy Drives 11x More Orders from AI Search
- OpenAI and PayPal Partner to Build Agentic Commerce into ChatGPT
- McKinsey Global Survey 2025: AI High Performers Are Redesigning Workflows
- Getty and Perplexity Sign Multi-Year Deal to Supply Licensed Images to AI Search
- The Rise of Agentic AI: From Tools to Teammates in Marketing
- AI Update: Google's AI Mode and the Need for New Bot Standards
- The State of AI: Most Organizations Are Still in the Experimentation Phase
- Anthropic's Claude Chatbot Can Now Run 'Instant Market Research'
#1/ Agents for Growth: Why Redesigning Workflows is Key to AI Impact
TLDR:
Agentic AI is expected to power over 60% of the value generated by AI in marketing and sales, but realizing this requires redesigning end-to-end workflows, not just adding new tools.
Details:
Agentic AI moves beyond generative assistance to automated reasoning, allowing systems to act, decide, and collaborate in real-time. The value is unlocked by prioritizing the biggest growth problems and solving them end-to-end in a domain. Success hinges on reimagining workflows and embedding agents where they fundamentally change outcomes, rather than bolting them onto legacy steps. High-performing organizations are three times more likely to fundamentally redesign individual workflows to integrate AI. Examples include AI agents optimizing pricing, reallocating ad spend, and tailoring offers instantly based on customer signals. Effective deployment can lead to productivity improvements of 3-5% annually and potentially lift growth by 10% or more.
Why It Matters:
This is a critical strategic insight for CMOs and marketing leaders. The message from McKinsey is that incremental adoption of AI tools will yield incremental results. True, transformative value comes from a complete overhaul of the operating model, treating AI agents as managed talent within cross-functional human-AI teams. Marketers must shift their focus from prompt engineering to **workflow engineering** to stay competitive and capture the estimated 60% of AI value that agentic systems promise.
#2/ Google DeepMind Launches Pomelli: An Experimental AI Tool for SMB Marketing
TLDR:
Google Labs, in partnership with DeepMind, has launched Pomelli, an experimental AI tool designed to help Small to Midsize Businesses (SMBs) quickly create on-brand digital marketing campaigns.
Details:
Pomelli is an experimental platform aimed at making marketing scaling more accessible for SMBs facing time, budget, and skill constraints. The tool builds a "Business DNA" profile by analyzing a business's website to capture its tone of voice, fonts, images, and colors. It suggests custom campaign ideas based on the brand profile, which users can accept or override with their own prompts. The final output is high-quality, on-brand marketing assets for social media, websites, and ads. All AI-generated assets are provided in an editable format, allowing for a final human touch before deployment. The tool is currently available in public beta for English-language customers in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Why It Matters:
Google's focus on the SMB market with a tool like Pomelli signals a major push to democratize sophisticated AI marketing capabilities. For marketers working with smaller businesses or limited resources, this tool offers a pathway to increased content velocity and brand consistency without the need for a large creative team. The ability to automatically capture brand identity from a website is a significant step toward making AI-generated content truly "on-brand," a long-standing challenge for marketers.
#3/ Shopify's Agentic AI Strategy Drives 11x More Orders from AI Search
TLDR:
Shopify's focus on agentic AI, including its commerce-for-agents stack, has resulted in 7x growth in AI-driven traffic and an 11x increase in orders attributed to AI searches since January.
Details:
Shopify has placed agentic AI at the center of its strategy, focusing on commerce-for-agents. The commerce-for-agents stack allows assistants like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity to route discovery and checkout through Shop Pay. Shop Pay processed $29 billion in Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) in Q3, a 67% year-over-year increase. Over 750,000 shops now use the Sidekick AI assistant for nearly 100 million conversations across analytics, SEO, and operations. The company is guiding Q4 revenue growth to the mid/high 20s, indicating strong confidence in its AI-driven momentum.
Why It Matters:
This is a powerful case study demonstrating the direct, bottom-line impact of agentic AI in e-commerce. For performance marketers, the 11x growth in AI-sourced orders is a clear signal that AI assistants are rapidly becoming a critical acquisition and checkout surface. Marketers must ensure their product feeds, pricing, and Product Detail Pages (PDPs) are optimized for agent consumption, as these AI assistants are now acting as the new front door to the purchasing funnel.
#4/ OpenAI and PayPal Partner to Build Agentic Commerce into ChatGPT
TLDR:
OpenAI and PayPal are collaborating to integrate agentic commerce capabilities into ChatGPT, allowing users to complete transactions directly within the AI assistant's interface.
Details:
The partnership aims to create a seamless, end-to-end commerce experience powered by AI agents. This integration will allow users to move from product discovery and recommendation to final purchase without leaving the ChatGPT environment. The collaboration leverages PayPal's vast payment network and OpenAI's advanced agentic capabilities. The move signifies a major step toward making AI assistants a primary platform for transactional activities.
Why It Matters:
This partnership validates the "commerce-for-agents" trend highlighted by Shopify. For B2B and B2C marketers, it means the entire customer journey—from initial research to final payment—is being compressed and automated within the AI ecosystem. Brands must now consider how their products and services are presented and sold within these agentic environments. The focus shifts to optimizing for AI-driven recommendations and ensuring a frictionless checkout experience via integrated payment solutions like PayPal.
#5/ McKinsey Global Survey 2025: AI High Performers Are Redesigning Workflows
TLDR:
The 2025 McKinsey Global Survey on AI reveals that only 6% of organizations are "AI high performers," and they are nearly three times more likely to achieve value by fundamentally redesigning workflows.
Details:
Almost all surveyed organizations are using AI, but nearly two-thirds are still in the experimentation or piloting phase. AI high performers are those who attribute 5% or more of their EBIT to AI use and report "significant" value. High performers are much more likely to report using AI in marketing and sales, strategy, and product development. They are also three times more likely to strongly agree that senior leaders demonstrate ownership and commitment to AI initiatives. A key success factor is the intentional redesigning of workflows, which has one of the strongest contributions to achieving meaningful business impact.
Why It Matters:
This survey provides a crucial benchmark for marketers. The finding that high performers are deeply integrating AI into marketing and sales functions underscores the strategic importance of the technology. The correlation between workflow redesign and significant business impact should serve as a mandate for marketing operations teams. Simply adopting tools is not enough; the organizational and process infrastructure must be transformed to support AI-driven growth.
#6/ Getty and Perplexity Sign Multi-Year Deal to Supply Licensed Images to AI Search
TLDR:
Getty Images and AI search engine Perplexity have signed a multi-year partnership to provide licensed, high-quality visual content for Perplexity's AI-generated answers.
Details:
The deal grants Perplexity access to Getty Images' extensive library of licensed photos and videos. The partnership aims to ensure that the visual content accompanying Perplexity's AI-generated search results is high-quality and legally compliant. This is a significant move to address copyright and licensing concerns in the rapidly evolving AI search landscape. The agreement is expected to extend a wave of licensing deals as AI firms seek to legitimize their content sources.
Why It Matters:
This is a vital development for content marketers and brand managers. The partnership signals a move toward a more ethical and legally sound AI content ecosystem. For marketers, it means that the visual assets used by AI search engines to represent their brand or industry will be licensed and high-quality, reducing the risk of copyright infringement. It also suggests that brands should prioritize licensing and compliance in their own AI content generation workflows.
#7/ The Rise of Agentic AI: From Tools to Teammates in Marketing
TLDR:
Agentic AI is moving beyond traditional support roles to become autonomous, goal-driven systems that act, learn, and collaborate across the marketing ecosystem, fundamentally changing how brands and buyers interact.
Details:
The shift is from simple generative AI to autonomous, goal-driven AI systems that can execute complex, multi-step tasks. AI agents are amplifying marketers' capabilities, directly engaging customers, and even being run by customers themselves. These new intermediaries are changing the dynamics of the buyer's journey, creating both opportunities and challenges. The emerging types of agents include research agents, campaign agents, creative assistants, and optimization assistants. Marketers must adapt their teams and workflows to thrive in this new era of AI-driven marketing.
Why It Matters:
This article provides the conceptual framework for the agentic shift. Marketers need to understand that their martech stack is evolving from a collection of siloed tools to an orchestrated ecosystem of collaborating agents. The strategic implication is the need to define the "goals" for these agents and manage them as a new form of digital "teammate," focusing on governance, data access, and the handoff points between human and AI work.
#8/ AI Update: Google's AI Mode and the Need for New Bot Standards
TLDR:
Google's AI Mode is increasingly influencing business recommendations, necessitating new policies for agent access, attribution, and fraud control, which marketers must coordinate with legal and operations teams.
Details:
Google Search's AI Mode synthesizes signals from reviews, a 250 million place database, and a 50 billion item product graph to answer user queries. Visual search is up 65% year over year, driven by AI-powered features. The visibility of a brand in AI experiences hinges on high-quality content, structured data, and credible third-party mentions. Marketers must strengthen schema, review quality, rich product, and location data to optimize for AI Mode recommendations. The rise of AI agents requires new policies for access, attribution, and fraud control.
Why It Matters:
This highlights the operational and legal challenges of the agentic era. As AI becomes the primary discovery and recommendation engine, marketers must treat AI assistants as a new channel that requires specific optimization (AI-SEO). Crucially, the call to coordinate with legal and operations on **bot standards** and **attribution** is an urgent action item, ensuring that AI-sourced sales are properly tracked and that brand interactions comply with emerging regulations.
#9/ The State of AI: Most Organizations Are Still in the Experimentation Phase
TLDR:
Despite widespread AI adoption, nearly two-thirds of organizations are still in the experimentation or piloting phase, indicating a significant gap between initial use and scaled, enterprise-level value capture.
Details:
Almost all organizations surveyed report using AI, but few have achieved scaled deployment across the enterprise. Only 39% of respondents attribute any level of EBIT impact to AI, and most of those report less than 5% impact. High curiosity in AI agents is noted, with 62% of respondents at least experimenting with them. A majority report qualitative benefits like improved innovation, customer satisfaction, and competitive differentiation. The lack of scaled value is often due to fragmented pilot programs, weak data, and insufficient governance foundations.
Why It Matters:
This provides a realistic view of the current AI landscape. For marketers, it means there is still a significant opportunity to gain a competitive edge by moving beyond fragmented pilots to scaled, strategic deployment. The key takeaway is to focus on the foundations—data quality, governance, and senior leadership commitment—which are the hallmarks of the 6% of "AI high performers" who are already seeing significant bottom-line impact.
#10/ Anthropic's Claude Chatbot Can Now Run 'Instant Market Research'
TLDR:
Anthropic's Claude chatbot has integrated with GWI, allowing users to run "bias-checked" market research and access audience data from real people instantly.
Details:
The new integration connects Claude with GWI, a leading consumer insights company. Users can now query Claude to generate insights based on GWI's extensive, "bias-checked" audience data. This allows for instant market research, providing advertisers with accurate representations of how consumers think, feel, and behave. The feature is a significant step toward making high-quality, proprietary data accessible directly within a large language model interface.
Why It Matters:
This integration is a game-changer for market research and campaign planning. Marketers can bypass lengthy data analysis processes and get instant, data-backed insights on consumer behavior directly from their AI assistant. This accelerates the strategic planning phase, allowing for faster iteration on messaging, targeting, and creative concepts. The emphasis on "bias-checked" data also addresses a major concern regarding the reliability of LLM-generated insights.