I started this newsletter mostly to force myself to keep up with all the new AI marketing news. Things are moving fast! I figured other people might want to learn about it too, so here we are. If there are topics or companies you’d like me to cover, please send them over. I’m a team of one person, so I’ll do what I can. If you want to connect, you can find me running the fractional CMO arm of Foxtown Marketing on most days.

Welcome to today's edition of AI Marketing Geek, your daily dose of the latest AI developments, tools, trends, and actionable insights shaping marketing in 2026. As AI shifts from experimental hype to pragmatic, ROI-driven reality, we're seeing agentic AI take center stage. Autonomous agents are handling media buying, personalization, and commerce, which is wild to watch.

When a department store in the middle of a decade-long sales decline publishes a data point like this, people pay attention. Macy's quietly became one of the most-cited AI retail case studies of 2026 this week, and the number at the center of it is hard to ignore.

During a beta testing period, revenue per visit was 4.75 times higher among customers who used Ask Macy's versus those who did not. Ask Macy's was formally released on March 23 and is powered by the Google Gemini platform. It was introduced via a dark launch internally in December.

The tool is not a standard product search upgrade. The tool functions like a digital stylist, emphasizing full-outfit and "complete the look" recommendations, which helps grow basket size and average order value. In early testing, shoppers who used the assistant spent about four times the amount of money online compared to those who did not.

The chief customer officer's framing of the product is useful for understanding why it works. Macy's chief digital officer described the tool as "curated discovery, not search." The assistant asks about budget, occasion, and style, then surfaces curated recommendations and a virtual try-on feature. If that revenue-per-visit number holds at scale, expect every major retailer to build one.

The broader context matters here. Macy's results are part of a broader industry trend, with 40% of top U.S. retailers now deploying similar AI assistants. The technology represents a race to keep shoppers within a brand's own platform amid competition from external AI services like ChatGPT, which is increasingly being used for product discovery.

That last point is the strategic crux for every retailer reading this. The shopping journey is fragmenting toward AI intermediaries. A customer who starts their product research inside ChatGPT or Google's AI Mode may never reach your website at all. The retailers who build branded AI experiences inside their own apps are betting they can capture that intent before it migrates. Macy's early data suggests that when the experience is genuinely useful rather than just functional, customers will choose it.

Meta's NewFronts presentation this week was less a single announcement and more a signal about where the company believes social advertising is heading: toward AI-generated video at scale, culture-led placement, and a creator marketplace that now approaches 1.5 million discoverable partners.

Meta announced new generative AI translation features including video voiceover and overlay translation into different languages. Meta is also testing automated video generation from catalog listings, a feature that will use AI to generate product videos at scale using the advertiser's existing visual assets. Meta is additionally testing updated catalog product video designs on Instagram Reels that will adapt based on available creative assets, with Meta's ad systems selecting the optimal video layout for each product.

The UGC-style video tool is the most commercially interesting piece of this. Meta rolled out AI video generation from single images in beta, with testers seeing 10% higher click-through rates. The tool generates UGC-style ads with AI avatars and automated voiceover translation, and also auto-converts product catalogs into video.

The context for why Meta is investing here is its own stated destination. Meta has plans to fully automate ad creation on its platforms by the end of 2026. Under that model, advertisers provide a business URL and a budget, and Meta's systems handle creative generation, audience targeting, placement selection, and optimization. These catalog-to-video tools are the production layer being built out ahead of that.

On the creator side, the numbers are significant. Facebook paid creators nearly $3 billion in 2025, up 35% year-over-year. Instagram's creator marketplace now has over 1.5 million discoverable creators. Meta is also testing a reserve buying option that lets advertisers lock in high-visibility Reels placement during a window of up to 24 hours around major cultural events like F1, NFL games, and Black Friday.

The through-line from all of this: the cost of creating enough video creative to feed Meta's algorithm is about to drop significantly. That removes one of the main reasons smaller advertisers have struggled on Reels. If the AI-generated video tools perform anywhere close to the 10% CTR lift figure from beta testing, expect spend to migrate toward video formats faster than the broader industry has anticipated.

Meta's automated video generation from product catalogs is still in testing, but there are concrete steps you can take now to be ready when it opens more broadly, and to run better video campaigns on Meta in the meantime.

First, get your product catalog current and clean. Catalog-based video generation is only as good as the underlying data. Log into Meta Commerce Manager and audit your catalog for completeness: every product needs a high-resolution primary image, an accurate title, current pricing, and a clear description. Products missing images or with generic placeholder titles will generate weak video and may be excluded from the feature when it expands.

Second, add lifestyle and contextual images to your catalog products. The AI video tools pull from your existing visual assets to generate video. Single product-on-white images produce generic outputs. Products with lifestyle imagery, multiple angles, and human context give the system more to work with and tend to produce outputs that look closer to genuine creator content.

Third, if you sell products with strong style or outfit pairing potential, connect your catalog to Meta's Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns and enable dynamic creative. This puts you in position to benefit from the full automation push Meta is building toward, and gives you real performance data now on how catalog-based creative performs for your specific audience before the video generation features mature.

2026 is the year AI moves from "cool demos" to real and measurable business use cases. Expect more agentic tools, voice-powered targeting, and a focus on privacy-first data.

Stay ahead of the game by treating your AI reputation like your website. It would behoove you to make your brand easy for agents to understand and cite.

What AI experiment are you running this week? Reply and let me know. I'll feature top stories in future editions! (Everybody loves a good story)

Stay sharp,
Jon
@mistersterling
Chief AI Marketing Geek