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Here is a marketing riddle: Take one of the best B2B brand builders alive, give him a big title, a near-trillion-dollar company to market, and the most famous product on earth to sell. Why would that be a disaster waiting to happen? Welcome to Colin Fleming’s new job at OpenAI.Fleming is the real deal. Thirteen years at Salesforce, culminating as evp of global marketing. Two years as CMO of ServiceNow, working wonders. He knows how to take a complex B2B product, build a brand around it, and drive pipeline. He isn’t the kind of marketer you hire when you are serious about…
AI is getting expensive, and some companies are cutting back on usage in an attempt to moderate costs. That cohort includes Uber, which recently instituted internal usage caps as a way to cut down on its exorbitant AI spend. Bloomberg reports that the company has instituted a new rule that places a monthly $1,500 cap per employee and per agentic coding tool, including Anthropic’s Claude Code or Cursor. The usage is trackable via an internal dashboard that each employee has access to, although — in certain cases — the caps can be exceeded with permission, the company says. The news…
I’ve been covering spam calling for years, so when Google offered me details about a new Android feature built to detect and flag spoofed calls, I was ready to hear more. What I didn’t expect from the demo was to hear my own voice.“I’m so excited to be interviewing you today about this new fake-call detection feature!” I heard myself saying, while a headshot I’ve used publicly for years popped up on the demo device. The caller ID name said “Lily.” “Unfortunately, I lost my wallet and I’m stuck. Any chance you can Venmo me so I can take an…
Century-old brands don’t stay relevant by accident. They require constant reinvention—in how they show up culturally, who they partner with, and how they meet consumers wherever attention lives. For Kraft Heinz, that means showing up at NFL tailgates and TikTok feeds simultaneously, reading generational shifts in real time, and building an internal culture that thinks more like a startup than a legacy giant. In this episode of The Speed of Culture podcast, Todd Kaplan, chief marketing officer at Kraft Heinz North America, joins Matt Britton to talk about keeping 70 iconic brands at the center of culture, from the game-day experience to…
In the first weeks of 2026, OpenClaw spread through the AI world like a sonic boom, introducing many of the industry’s most ambitious technologists to the joy and chaos of an unrestrained AI agent. The project’s momentum tailed off after OpenAI scooped up its founder, but the influence is still being felt — particularly at Microsoft Today, Microsoft is launching Scout, a new AI assistant meant to bring the power and flexibility of OpenClaw into the Microsoft 365 system. Built on the OpenClaw framework, Scout is an always-on agentic assistant, designed to work alongside the user with a persistent identity…
Soon, your coworkers in Microsoft Teams might not all be human. Scout, an always-on AI agent announced at Microsoft’s Build developer conference on Tuesday, can go through your work messages, calendar, and email inbox to automate tasks, reschedule meeting conflicts, and draft professional-sounding responses.Microsoft more or less built an enterprise agent on top of OpenClaw, the AI tool that riveted San Francisco’s early adopters at the start of 2026. Scout is designed specifically to be an assistant for office folks, who can send commands directly in Teams as if the agent was a carbon-based coworker.Scout is part of Microsoft’s larger,…
Scott Pelley, a renowned 60 Minutes correspondent, and Nick Bilton, the show’s new executive producer, reportedly got into a heated exchange on Monday during Bilton’s introductory meeting with his new staff. Now, Bill Owens, Pelley’s former executive producer, is defending his actions.According to The New York Times, during Bilton’s introductory meeting, Pelley accused Bari Weiss, CBS News’ editor in chief, of “murdering” 60 Minutes after several staffers and journalists were cut last week. Pelley also questioned Bilton’s TV journalism credentials, saying the tech journalist and filmmaker had “slender” qualifications.Now, Owens, who left the show in 2025, citing a loss of journalistic…
Focused Energy recently raised an oversubscribed $240 million Series A round, one of the largest early-stage rounds for a fusion power startup. The new round, announced last week, brings the company’s total private capital raised to $300 million, the company told TechCrunch. The startup has also received $200 million in grants, collectively making it one of the most heavily funded fusion startups. Germany-based Focused Energy is developing a reactor that will use lasers to compress fusion fuel, an approach known as inertial confinement. The lasers fire on a fuel target, which compresses under the onslaught to create conditions ripe for…
“Partiful will not make money. There is no pitch at scale,” Partiful once posted via tweet in 2023, adding, “Investors gave us money to help u party, and that is what we are here to do. Enjoy it babes.”In a call with WIRED, Murthy said the tweet was always meant to be a joke.“It’s kind of funny how many people took it literally, and now it’s followed us around everywhere, and it’s become a meme,” Murthy said. “But it is nice to say that Partiful is monetizing now.”Last CallCourtesy of PartifulPartiful has done well partly due to its ability to…
Brands’ march into entertainment continues.This year, marketers like Gap and Dick’s Sporting Goods have stepped up their efforts to create original content on par with professional TV shows and movies. This move to brand-backed filmmaking will be on display at Tribeca X, the two-day marketing-focused event within the Tribeca Festival this year. This year’s event, from June 8 to 9, marks the 10th year of Tribeca X programming.The number of brands sponsoring the Tribeca X programming track has increased 13% year over year, while revenue from sponsorships increased 23%, according to festival organizers. New brand sponsors this year include McDonald’s, Lavazza,…
OpenAI is getting serious about courting enterprise users. On Tuesday, the AI lab released a new set of capabilities for Codex, meant to expand the agentic tool’s uses in the workplace. Together with the new tools, the company released an internal report on how Codex is being used for knowledge work, finding its uses go far beyond software engineering. “Codex now has more than 5 million weekly active users, up more than 6x since the launch of the desktop app in February,” reads a blog post introducing the report. “While developers remain the largest user group, knowledge workers now represent…
A small San Francisco startup known for making well-appointed, beautifully designed webcams is now vying to become the AI hardware company of the moment.Opal Camera is rebranding to Opal Electronics and will expand its product portfolio beyond webcams to a broad range of consumer devices, some of which will be AI-focused. It aims to emulate Sony Electronics as a wide-ranging consumer gadget brand by focusing on design and culture, not just tech.The transition was possible thanks to a $40 million Series B funding round from OpenAI. Some details about the investment were first reported in 2024, but the deal was…
In this episode of Brave Commerce, Rachel Tipograph and Sarah Hofstetter sit down with Bob Liodice, CEO of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), to discuss the forces reshaping modern marketing. From media transparency and measurement to AI adoption and talent development, Bob shares his perspective on the challenges marketers must navigate today and the opportunities that will define the industry’s future.Bob reflects on the industry’s progress toward greater transparency, the role collaboration plays in solving complex challenges, and why he believes AI can help marketers make smarter, more informed decisions. He also shares his thoughts on navigating uncertainty, developing future…
On Tuesday, Elon Musk-owned social network X launched a new feature, “React with Video,” that aims to expand the types of commentary on the platform. The feature is being pitched as an alternative to the Repost button, encouraging users not just to reshare or type their reaction via a Quote Post, but actually record a video response to posts. The feature is clearly targeting creators, who often build their personal brands by commenting on others’ content and sharing their own thoughts. X, in particular, could lend itself to news influencers looking to garner fame for their hot takes and reactions…
I’ve tested nearly 45 fans for WIRED over the past two years, so I can say this with some authority: Your fan doesn’t need an app. If the app helps connect the device with your smart-home ecosystem to enable voice control, that’s fine, but a fan is supposed to blend unobtrusively into the background of your life, not take up any remaining scraps of real estate on your phone or in your brain.Coway, maker of some of our favorite air purifiers (which I will note are also app-free), agrees with this, which is why its first stand-alone fan, the P50…
Havas is entering the music business with the launch of VOLYUM, a record label created to connect emerging artists and brands, with Virgin Music Group on board as a distribution partner. The label was created by Havas’ sonic branding agency, Art of Sound, and led by its CEO and Havas global chief music officer Damien Escobar, a former professional violinist. Rather than treating music as a component of a campaign, Havas is betting that in the TikTok era, brands can play a role earlier in the creative process by helping develop and amplify artists and original recordings. “These aren’t jingles.