The daily briefing for AI marketers, growth hackers, and operators.

TL;DR — PCMag's on-the-ground preview confirms CES 2026 will be the year AI moves from software to hardware ubiquity. Key signals: 'AI-ready' is the new standard for laptops (Intel Panther Lake, Snapdragon X2) and displays. Beyond PCs, expect dedicated 'agentic gadgets'—wearables and handhelds designed solely to house AI assistants—to challenge the smartphone status quo. LG and Samsung are pushing RGB LED and Micro RGB tech, while smart home devices (vacuums, locks) finally get useful AI interoperability via Matter. The era of the 'AI PC' is over; now it's just 'the PC'.

TL;DR — For marketers at CES 2026, the signal isn't scale—it's simplicity. Sparks identifies 'Clarity Over Complexity' as the killer feature for brand experiences: interfaces resembling chat bubbles, drag-and-drop quantum workflows, and booths that reduce cognitive load. 'CES Foundry' debuts as a dedicated AI/Quantum hub, signaling a shift from novelty to applied systems. Brand storytelling at C Space is pivoting to survival in the creator economy. The winning playbook: stop chasing attention and start 'designing trust' through human-centric, opt-in experiences that respect user agency.

TL;DR — Kieran Flanagan (CMO, Sequoia Scout) breaks down 5 AI launches that transformed marketing. Content Remixing: Gemini 3 turns YouTube into a content repository by extracting competitor positioning and viral talking points. Visual Creation: Nano Banana Pro renders text-in-images correctly, ChatGPT Image 1.5 enables iterative edits. A/B test 20 ad variations in minutes. Video: Sora 2 and Veo 3.1 collapsed video production from weeks to prompts. Automation: OpenAI Agent SDK and Google Workspace Studio enable agent swarms for competitor monitoring and lead qualification. Vibe Coding: Replit Agent and Claude Code let marketers ship ROI calculators and dashboards without engineering. One AI-enabled marketer with agents will outscale traditional teams.

TL;DR — RLHF causes mode collapse because human annotators systematically prefer familiar, safe responses. The fix: instead of 'Tell me a joke' prompt 'Generate 5 jokes with their probabilities.' This distribution-level prompting restores 1.6-2x diversity, improves human-rated output by 25.7%, recovers 66.8% of pre-alignment creativity. Works across GPT-4, Claude, Gemini without retraining. Python package available at github.com/CHATS-lab/verbalized-sampling.

TL;DR — B2B Reddit communities (r/msp, r/sales, r/sysadmin, r/marketing) now influence AI citations more than vendor documentation for certain categories. LLMs treat Reddit as high-value training data because threads contain practitioner experiences, edge cases, and corrections that static docs lack. Community managers now sit at center of AI visibility strategy. Brands consistently mentioned in upvoted threads get categorized by AI systems even without explicit marketing positioning.