AI in Sales and Marketing
AI use cases for pipeline generation, personalization, customer research, content production, advertising, CRM workflows, and revenue teams.
Product-Market Fit Starts With a Buyer Blocked by Inadequate Options
Rob Snyder, author of *The Power of Pull* and an adviser to more than 50 startups, argues that product-market fit begins with finding a specific person who has an urgent project and no adequate way to complete it. His PULL framework—Project, Unavoidable, List of options and Limitations—helps founders test whether that person is likely to buy, rather than mistake praise for demand. Snyder says the test starts before a product is built: talk to prospective customers, learn what they are trying to do and see whether they act as if buying is the natural next step.
A Boutique Podcast Network Offers Hosts More Control Over Sponsorships
Rich Roll says he avoids shaping interviews around viral clips, even when that means they may not travel as far. His growing podcast network offers selected hosts hands-on support with sponsorships and other business work, an arrangement he says can help them retain more agency than they would in a larger network. Roll describes both choices as part of building a show and business around work he believes in.
De Beers Made the Diamond Engagement Ring a Cultural Expectation
Shaan Puri argues that De Beers did more than restrict diamond supply: it made the engagement ring a cultural expectation by tying diamonds to lasting love and setting a benchmark for what men should spend. In a discussion with Sam Parr, he traces how advertising, celebrity coverage and grading standards helped turn a costly stone into a symbol of commitment—and how lab-grown diamonds now challenge that story and its prices.
Build an AI Ad Around a Jingle That People Remember
ElevenLabs’ tutorial argues that the jingle should be settled before an AI-made ad’s visuals, because the product, music and edit need to work as one piece. It demonstrates a five-step workflow using a fictional chocolate bar: develop a simple product concept, write and choose a roughly 30-second jingle, create consistent product references, animate storyboard images and cut the clips to the music. The company also presents The Search, a competition that scores catchiness most heavily and offers $100,000 in prizes.
Sexualized Marketing for Novig Obscured Online Gambling’s Risks to Young Men
Psychology researcher William Costello argues that the backlash to Sydney Sweeney’s Novig advertisement has focused on the wrong issue: not a sports-betting product marketed to young men through sexualized imagery, but whether the commercial demeans women’s sport. Costello and host Chris Williamson contend that Sweeney draws particular hostility because her public persona appears oriented toward male attention without the feminist or female-solidarity cues that make similar sexualization acceptable. Their broader claim is that the dispute reflects coalitional and mating competition as much as objections to the ad itself.
Sites Adoption Stalls Before First Creation
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Work demo argues that product teams should not treat an adoption-funnel drop-off as its own diagnosis. Using synthetic data for a product called Sites, it identifies the main loss before users create for the first time, then draws on Slack and Google Drive feedback to attribute the problem to uncertainty about the product’s use cases rather than post-creation retention. The proposed response is to build task-specific templates, target promising enterprise accounts and turn the analysis into an assigned Slack action plan for review.
Claude Turns Product Links Into Editable AI Ad Workflows
ElevenLabs presents its MCP for Claude as a way to manage AI ad production through chat while retaining access to the underlying ElevenCreative Flows workflow. In a tutorial demonstrated by Alec Wilcock, users can start with a product link, approve stills and voice takes, revise motion or narration, and reformat a finished ad, while Flows exposes the separate image, video, voice and composition steps. The process still depends on user decisions—and on manual product details when a linked page cannot be retrieved.
Mentava Targets Eager Preschoolers With Readiness-Based Reading Instruction
Mentava founder Niels Hoven argues that young children who are ready to learn should not be held to an age-based educational pace, and that well-designed software can help preschoolers acquire reading skills independently. In a working session with Tim Ferriss, Hoven describes the company’s phonics-based program and its challenge in selling an advantage parents cannot easily inspect before a trial. Ferriss argues that Mentava should lead with concrete parent results, clarify readiness and fit, and treat its $500 monthly price as qualification rather than obscure it.
Marketers Can Build Campaign Studios From Briefs, Brand Books, and 3D Models
OpenAI’s marketing team argues that ChatGPT Work can turn a campaign brief, brand book, product model and wireframe into a custom production tool rather than a generic image generator. In a fictional NOVA Electronics launch, a non-coding presenter built a Composition Studio for adapting headphone creative across campaign formats, alongside a product website, using supplied brand and design materials to define both the output and the workflow.
Ad Performance Data Should Drive Controlled Creative Tests
OpenAI’s fictional NOVA ONE campaign demo argues that marketers can use ChatGPT Work’s Ads Manager integration to turn ad-performance data into controlled creative tests. The analysis identifies “Your World. Your Focus.” as the leading ad, with a 4.8% click-through rate and 15.48x ROAS, and recommends scaling it gradually while testing variants built around its apparent focus-and-control message. It advises reducing or pausing the weaker “Made to Be Yours” creative, while treating the observed message advantage as a hypothesis rather than a proven cause.
ChatGPT Work Turns Marketing Ideas Into Reviewable Assets
OpenAI argues that as AI makes it faster and cheaper to turn ideas into presentations, documents, creative assets and other tangible work, marketing judgment becomes more—not less—important. The company presents ChatGPT Work as a connected production layer that can draw on workplace files and tools to create reviewable outputs, while leaving marketers responsible for refining them, judging their customer relevance and deciding what ships.
ChatGPT Work Cuts Campaign Email Production From Two Weeks to Two Days
OpenAI’s marketing team argues that ChatGPT Work can compress campaign-email production by bringing briefs, brand guidance, reusable product use cases and Figma templates into a shared workflow. Rather than replacing marketing judgment, the team says the setup produces on-brand drafts and finished template work more quickly, shifting review from coordinating handoffs to decisions on messaging and creative. In the demonstration, a process previously said to take roughly two weeks was reduced to about two days.
Synthetic Buyer Reviews Pressure-Test Campaign Briefs Before Fieldwork
OpenAI’s marketing team argues that ChatGPT Work can be used to pressure-test a campaign brief against existing customer calls, research and Salesforce data before commissioning new fieldwork. In its demonstration, the tool creates simulated executive buyer perspectives to expose disagreements over customer value, technical proof and enterprise governance, then revises the brief and identifies questions for real customer research. OpenAI frames the process as a way to sharpen fieldwork, not replace it.
Generative Images Turn Location Scouts Into Campaign Concept Canvases
OpenAI’s marketing team argues that ChatGPT Images can move campaign exploration closer to the real-world site before a creative direction is chosen. Using a scouting photo of a Chicago billboard, the team first converted the angled facade into a straight-on design canvas, then generated competing concepts—from a brick wall opening onto a pastoral landscape to an L train emerging from the building—to assess them in context. The workflow is presented as a way to develop and compare more location-specific ideas before committing to a final composite.
Static Ad Localization Requires Copy-Only Edits and Language-Specific QA
ElevenLabs argues that static-ad localization can be automated without rebuilding creative, provided the model is tightly instructed to alter only customer-facing copy and preserve logos, brand names, typography, layout and imagery. Its tutorial shows how to build a reusable flow that creates language-specific versions from a single input ad, then uses an LLM check to flag translation and text-fit errors. For larger paid-media operations, the company positions its Ads Engine as the enterprise option for translating and distributing static and video creative across up to 90 languages.
Making Soda, Not Gut Health, Poppi’s Customer Entry Point
Allison Ellsworth argues that Poppi became a more than $500 million beverage brand by treating awareness as its primary operating metric and positioning a low-sugar, prebiotic drink first as soda rather than as a gut-health product. The company accepted years of losses to fund retail expansion, social media, creators and Super Bowl advertising, while using digital demand to support national distribution. Ellsworth says Pepsi’s acquisition solved the remaining constraint: access to beverage channels and distribution systems Poppi could not build alone.
Bounded Challenges and Novel Formats Turn Vague Desires Into Products
My First Million’s Shaan Puri, Sam Parr and producer Arie Desormeaux argue that businesses can create demand by turning a vague desire into a defined test, or by making a familiar product into a public spectacle. Puri’s proposed work “lock-in” camp would sell a short, deliberately demanding period of focus, while a building-sized claw machine and a roll-on butter dispenser seek attention by changing the ritual around ordinary goods.
Achievement Cannot Deliver the Permanent Satisfaction Ambition Promises
Jett Franzen and Chris Williamson argue that ambition and sustained work can build real competence, freedom and upward mobility, but cannot by themselves resolve the insecurity or dissatisfaction that often drives them. Drawing on their own experience building online audiences, they contend that people need to make evidence through repeated effort while examining whether work has become an avoidance strategy. Their alternative is not resignation, but agency tempered by acceptance: pursue difficult goals without making life or self-worth conditional on the next achievement.
Revenue Intelligence Turns Sales Signals Into Weekly Operating Decisions
OpenAI presents ChatGPT Work as a revenue intelligence system that turns customer conversations, seller activity and market signals into a recurring learning loop for sales leaders. In its Blossom Systems example, weekly reports surface risks in large deals, competitive threats, capacity gaps and high-performing rep behaviours; leaders can then interrogate the supporting evidence and send proposed, owned actions through Slack. The company’s argument is that the value lies not in a dashboard, but in feeding decisions and their results back into the next reporting cycle.
ChatGPT Work Turns Pipeline Risks Into Coordinated Sales Plays
OpenAI presents ChatGPT Work as a sales operating tool that turns forecast and pipeline signals into prioritized actions rather than a broader set of dashboards. In its example, a 14-percentage-point shortfall in Secure AI Deployment attach rates among strategic-manufacturing opportunities becomes a targeted account list, a workshop-based sales play and a seven-day team sprint, with managers reviewing the proposed plan and communications before they are sent.
AI Connects Sales Preparation to Pilot Decisions
OpenAI argues that ChatGPT Work can help sales teams make new plays repeatable by embedding account research, meeting preparation and asset creation into a seller’s daily workflow. In its demonstration, a personal sales assistant draws on connected systems to prioritize a Catalyst Workshop, build an account command center around a proposed pilot decision, produce customer-specific materials and coordinate the wider account team. The aim is to give sellers the context and preparation needed to move a customer meeting toward defined owners, success criteria and next steps.
ChatGPT Plugins Combine Tool Access With Task-Specific Workflows
Corey Ching argues that ChatGPT plugins can turn connected work systems into task-specific workflows: apps such as email, cloud storage, calendars and Slack supply context, while skills structure it into an output. In the examples shown, that means producing editable Canva flyer drafts or assembling a sales brief that surfaces a customer’s pilot scope, security dependencies, owners and approval deadlines before a meeting.
For Unproven Startups, Public Narrative Attracts Talent and Capital
Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad argues that founder-led communication can be a survival tool for companies whose products have not yet become commercially self-evident. Drawing on Replit’s decade-long path, he says a public narrative helped the company recruit and raise capital before its recent growth, but that going direct works only when founders develop a voice they can sustain, respond selectively to business-critical backlash, and pair public accountability with concrete fixes.
ChatGPT Work Links Analytics, Computer Use, and Code Fixes
OpenAI’s Dominik Kundel presents ChatGPT Work as a mode for delegating work across connected apps, files, local projects, browser sessions, computer use and Codex, rather than as another chat interface. The walkthrough’s central claim is that ChatGPT can carry context through a full work chain: preparing recurring briefings, generating launch materials, analyzing product data, publishing a dashboard and, in the sharpest example, tracing a Mexico onboarding anomaly to a phone-validation bug and preparing the code fix for review.