FutureWeek

Anthropic Embeds Invisible Watermark Anthropic, the parent company of LLM Claude, announced this week it will be embedding invisible watermarks into text generated by new Claude models starting August 2nd. The move means anything copied and pasted from Claude will include a hidden marker, so platforms and organisations can identify when something has been created by the tool.

Company leaders have often referred to AI as an ‘amplifier’. If you feed AI models bad data, it will produce bad outcomes, and if your workflows are based on flawed or inefficient knowledge, AI can make those weak processes more evident, and simply speed them up. Of course, marketers use AI in varied ways – including large language models (LLMs) like Claude and ChatGPT, automation functionality within a platform they use, company AI agents, and more.

Every generation of media has its existential threat. 20 years ago, it was Google eating into the pie of traditional broadcasters and publishers, or even the rise of the first iteration of social media platforms like MySpace and YouTube which raised fears that brands and media owners would lose control of the conversation. An all too familiar fear of losing human control is now following AI into advertising.

OpenAI Brings Product Carousels to ChatGPT Ads OpenAI has launched product carousel ad formats inside ChatGPT, allowing retailers to display multiple products with images, prices and purchase links within a single AI-generated response. This mirrors a format long used by Google Shopping and Meta’s catalogue ads, and marks a significant step in making ChatGPT a genuinely shoppable surface.

What many soon discovered had nothing to do with safety at all – it was cost. Within weeks, some businesses were staring at bills far larger than expected, and getting an early, expensive lesson in how using the most powerful frontier model can drive up business expense. Ad tech platform Scope3 is one company that quickly realised that despite its power, using Fable was hiking up unwarranted costs.

Drawing on research with C-suite leaders and employees, she unpacks three barriers standing in the way of successful AI adoption: a motivation gap, where efficiency gets read as a threat to job security; a proficiency gap, where using AI tools doesn’t equate to genuine skill; and an ethics gap, where trust and psychological safety are still catching up with the technology.

Time Becomes First Publisher to Serve Ads to AI Agents Time has begun serving ads specifically targeting AI agents, working with AI-powered ad tech platform Mobian to convert its markdown pages — stripped-down, text-only copies designed for AI systems to read — into an inventory surface for advertisers.

Nick Myers, Chief Strategy Officer, OLIVER “The problem with prompting is that people treat it like search, when it’s actually briefing. If you can’t brief well, you won’t prompt well, and vice versa. Good prompting takes clarity of thought and the instincts of a good teacher. I find the Feynman technique helps; explain the task as if to a smart novice, and where you stumble is where the brief is broken. But prompting is also unlike briefing, in a way that matters.

Ninety-five percent of enterprise AI initiatives never make it to full-scale production. Not because the technology fails, but because companies spent years chasing the wrong scoreboard. When LLMs first arrived, enterprises scrambled to implement them, training staff and racing toward the cost and time savings that vendors promised. Efficiency became the metric that mattered: could you get the same output, or better, with less staff time and less spend? It worked, in a narrow sense.

Work methodologies have been used for decades to reinvent and improve ways of working – guiding teams to organise, manage, and deliver projects effectively and successfully. Among the most widely used are agile and scrum, which favour short work cycles and continuous feedback; waterfall, which follows a strict, sequential path to the end result; and lean, which focuses on cutting waste and maximising value. Marketing teams are still testing AI.