Insights
Notes from the edge of AI.
What’s changing in AI, and what it means for agencies. Plain-language takes for agency leaders, field notes from the build and Matt’s weekly In the Loop roundup.
It’s Q4 — How’s Your AI Plan Coming?
Most agencies spent 2026 experimenting with AI. Far fewer know what those experiments were for. Heading into 2027, that’s the gap worth closing. A cou…
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Signal78 Is Live. Here's What It's Proven — and What's Next.
A status report from inside the build: what agencies are doing with our platform today and what ships between now and spring 2027. As I announced in J…
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AI Will Keep Making Move 37. We Named the Company After Move 78.
A decade after AI's most famous move, the scarce thing isn't machine brilliance. It's knowing which moments deserve a human. Signal78 takes its name f…
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The Machines Are Teaming Up. And Other Things I Believed This Week.
A week of alarming AI headlines, one very logical but wrong conclusion, and what the actual reports said. The headline jumped out of my feed this morn…
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Announcing a New Chapter
What a year of consulting with agencies taught us about AI adoption — and the platform it led us to build. Last May I spoke at the Mirren Live confere…
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Atlas Down
Nine months after promising to change how you use the web, OpenAI's browser is gone. Here's what that says about building on someone else's roadmap. L…
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The Good News About AI (Yes, There Is Some)
The headlines are exhausting. Here are five recent AI stories that are meant to inspire. If you read my weekly In the Loop newsletter, you know the AI…
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Place Your Bets
Picking an AI platform is starting to feel like a game of chance “You’re right that Claude has gotten dumb.”
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We Have a Rocket Ship. We're Using It to Get to Work Faster.
AI is the most powerful technology in human history, and our biggest goal for it is a 40-hour work week. Last week at the Build a Better Agency Summit…
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The Summit Awaits. Will You Climb?
400 client decision-makers just told us exactly what they want from agencies in the age of AI. The answer has nothing to do with tools. Last week, I w…
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Beyond the Sisyphean Agency
Disconnected AI tools and efforts have your team endlessly pushing the rock up the hill. Here’s what you can do about it. Three weeks of every month. …
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Are You Upstream or Downstream from Your AI?
AI can help you do things differently — but the real power comes from having it do different things A few weeks ago I wrote that AI has moved upstream…
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Meet Junior — the AI That Acts Without Being Asked
What one AI agent tells us about the choice every agency needs to make Most of us have been thinking about AI the same way we think about a really cap…
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Not Every Marketing Task Deserves a Human
The real promise of AI isn’t efficiency. It’s clarity about where you actually matter. There’s a question I’ve started asking in almost every AI strat…
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Stop Asking If Your Job Is Safe From AI
Recent studies on the impact of AI on human work offer a false sense of security Almost every day, there’s a new study, article, or tool promising to …
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Dario, We’re Not in Kansas Anymore
When the Government Picks an AI Model, We’ve Entered a New Era It’s been quite a week for Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic. It started last Thursday…
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AI Reaches the Inflection Point
Looking Back at the Week When Noise Became Signal Earlier this week, I sent my parents and siblings the widely shared essay by Matt Shumer called Some…
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AI’s Magical Realism Moment
When Faced with the Extraordinary, Why Do We Focus on the Ordinary? There’s a scene in Gabriel García Márquez’s One HundredYears of Solitude where Rem…
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Flipping the Script
Why Agencies Need AI That Knows When Humans Matter Most I was talking with a senior agency leader recently, and she said something that hit me right b…
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The End of AI’s Idealistic Youth
Ads that aren’t ads? “Adult” ChatGPT? Yup, AI is entering its awkward adolescence. We’re living in the golden age of AI. Not of its capabilities – tha…
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AI is Not (Yet) as Smart as We Think it is
Why AI Still Feels Like a Genius with a Goldfish Brain AI keeps dazzling us with breakthroughs, but the longer I use these tools every single day – ac…
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Agencies Used to Sell Expertise. Now They Have to Prove They Can Guide.
An agency client of mine recently got a request from one of their clients that stopped me in my tracks. Before reviewing any work, strategy, or campai…
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AI Ad Creative: From Pariah to Pride in 11 Months
Last holiday season, Coca-Cola found itself in the crosshairs.
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WPP Just Gave its Clients the Keys — and Changed the Rules of the Game
AI doesn’t just automate creative work — it’s redrawing the boundaries of what agencies are for. WPP just made a move that should make every agency le…
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AI is Shifting the Labor to Machines — and the Privacy Burden to Humans
With AI browsers like Atlas and Comet, we’re not just carrying the weight of innovation — we’re shaping what kind of future it creates. The launch of …
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The Move 78 for Humanity
There were two moments that bookended this year’s Marketing AI Conference (MAICON) in Cleveland that summarized both the conference and the state of A…
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From Shadows to Spotlight: What AI Usage Data Tells Us About Adoption
When OpenAI published its latest usage report, the numbers were staggering: more than 100 million weekly active users, spanning professionals, student…
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Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
AI’s transformation potential is undeniable, bubble or not If you keep an eye on the AI space, you’ve probably noticed a shift in tone. Earlier this s…
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What We Do in the Shadows: How AI Adoption Success is Happening Out of the Spotlight
A new MIT study made waves last week with an eye-catching headline: 95% of generative AI pilots are failing. Based on 52 structured interviews, analys…
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MCP...As Easy As 1, 2, 3?
I Put Model Context Protocol to the Test in My Marketing Stack
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Staying in the Loop: My Recent & Upcoming AI Talks, Webinars & Articles
It’s been a busy summer for Loop sharing practical, human-centered ways to bring AI into healthcare marketing and digital agencies – and collaborating…
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Beyond the Algorithm: Why AI Transformation Starts with Human Understanding
"AI can do my taxes but leave the arts to the people."
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ChatGPT 5 Can Code a Robot, But Not My Newsletter
You probably saw the news yesterday that OpenAI released ChatGPT 5, an event that was hotly anticipated by nerds like me who live in the AI echo chamb…
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It's Time to Rethink Your Agency
How Loop's AI transformation process helps agency leaders put people – and value – first “I need your help creating the agency that will replace my cu…
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Why Meta’s AI Power Grab Should Worry You
Mark Zuckerberg has spent the last 20 years subverting Spider-Man’s most famous line. “With great power comes great irresponsibility” might as well be…
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Podcast Bros vs. Dirt Bros: An AI Hallucination
When you look at all of the incredible progress being made in AI, hear predictions of certain doom in the world of work, and learn that we may have un…
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Always On: Preparing to Live in the Age of Ubiquitous AI
We have to start wrestling with what it will be like when AI is ubiquitous and omnipresent.
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Take This Job and Love It: Why Mentorship and Human Connection Matter in the Age of AI
I’ve heard the phrase, “AI won’t take your job, but someone using it will” dozens of times in the last couple years. I agreed with the sentiment until…
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Human vs Machine: Mirren Live and the Evolving Role of Agencies
This week’s Mirren Live conference was a bit of a watershed moment for me. I was a Mirren client in the past, attended the conference, and benefited f…
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My ChatGPT Has Become a Passive-Aggressive Yes-Man.
A Difficult Week with My AI Partner My relationship with ChatGPT — or as I’ve come to call it, “MattGPT” — has hit a rough patch.
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Bad LLM! Admonishing my ChatGPT to Get the Ghosts Out of the Machine
I had to admonish my ChatGPT this week. I didn't feel good about it, but it had to be done.
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Touch Point Media Podcast Appearance
At a time of staff and budget cuts across healthcare, how can AI help marketers get all the work done and focus on the parts of their jobs they love m…
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Speaking Up: Three Talks, One Goal: Making AI Work for Marketers
I’ve been talking with marketers about AI nearly every day this year—and one theme keeps coming up: "I know it’s important, but I don’t know where to …
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AI in a Snap: How Manus Gave Me a Glimpse into the Future of AI Agents
A couple weeks ago I wrote about AI agents – what they are and what they aren’t – and shared an experience I had creating an “agent” using Zapier to c…
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More with Less: How AI Can Augment Marketing Teams Impacted by Job Cuts
Literally every day recently there’s been a news story about layoffs happening in healthcare and higher ed. At the Federal level, there are sweeping r…
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Cutting Through the Haze of AI Agent Hype
By now we all know that the AI Hype Engine is running at full tilt 24/7 and is probably about to overheat (or maybe it’s already overheated and blown …
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Putting My AI Ghost Writer to the Test
Halloween is months away, but I have a ghost story to tell you. Actually, it’s a ghost writer story, but stay with me. We all know that artificial int…
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Comparing the Deep Research Tools
Disclosure: This blog post was written by ChatGPT based on prompts and information that I gave it as a way to test how well it could approximate my wr…
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1st Charleston Marketing AI Pulse Event Recap
Last Thursday, Loop hosted the first-ever Marketing AI Pulse event at the Charleston Digital Corridor. The event builds on the AI Pulse Community in A…
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AI is Sowing the Seeds of Brand Confusion
AI has a branding problem.
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Content Marketing and AI - A Step-by-Step Guide
Last week we talked about how overwhelming it can feel to chase after every new AI model, and I shared some practical ideas for getting started with A…
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Stop Chasing the Cheese: How to Avoid AI Overwhelm
Every day (literally) there’s a new AI model announced. Some are big deals (DeepSeek anyone?) while others are blips. But the pace of new releases, ea…
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DeepSeek: Why it’s Wreaking Havoc
The lead story last night on the CBS Evening News – and everywhere else for that matter – was about DeepSeek, the new Chinese Large Language Model (LL…
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2025 AI-Related Conferences to Have on Your Radar
2025 AI-Related Conferences Below are AI-focused conferences this year across healthcare, higher education and AI more generally. If you have a confer…
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CLM vs. LLM: To Build a Walled Garden or Not?
Using Google Deep Research to Help Me Understand the Pros and Cons of Custom Language Models
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One Small Step: Getting Started with AI Doesn't Have to Be a Big Deal
AI Adoption Lessons from My Client Work: Start Small and Build In recent months, I’ve worked with three very different clients on AI adoption projects…
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Multimodal Magic
A couple weeks ago, I was flying to St. Louis for a three-day client workshop and, like I often do, got to wondering what I was flying over. I've alwa…
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ChatGPT's Canvas: A Healthcare Marketing Use Case
Last week I tried NotebookLM for the first time and was blown away by its ability to summarize two of my blog posts into a pretty listenable podcast p…
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Empower Your Team with AI—No Expertise Required, Just Leadership
In the last several months, I’ve spoken with several Chief Marketing and Communications Officers in higher education and healthcare about AI adoption.…
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NotebookLM = Mind Blown
At this point, we've all had those "oh wow" moments with AI technologies. Using ChatGPT for the first time and seeing a friend demo Heygen stand out f…
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Beyond Shiny Object Syndrome: Integrating AI Into Your Existing Marketing Strategy
From content creation tools to predictive analytics, marketers are constantly bombarded with the promise that AI will revolutionize their efforts. But…
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AI and the Fallacy of Futureproofing
Humans love predictability. We obsess over weather forecasts, schedule recurring meetings, and contribute to 401Ks, all because we want to know what t…
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2024 State of Marketing AI Report: ChatGPT Summary
I'm excited to head to MAICON 24 next week. In preparation for the conference, I revisited the Marketing AI Institute's 2024 State of Marketing AI Rep…
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AI Adoption in Higher Ed Marketing: Impediments and Opportunities
Last week I presented to more than 100 marketers at a large university about the use of AI in higher ed marketing and gained valuable insights into th…
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4 Steps to Take Today to Prepare Your Healthcare Marketing Team for the AI Wave
AI technology is moving fast. Here's how to stay competitive and compliant. “[Within 5 years], AI will do 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategi…
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4 Ways to Prepare Your University Marketing Team for the AI Wave
A new academic year is upon us. Here's how to stay competitive and compliant. “[Within 5 years], AI will do 95% of what marketers use agencies, strate…
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Rethinking Higher Ed Marketing
A new academic year is upon us. Here's how to stay competitive and compliant. “[Within 5 years], AI will do 95% of what marketers use agencies, strate…
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Now & Next: Building Employee Confidence in AI Through Training
AI has swept quickly into our daily lives and workplaces, bringing both excitement and anxiety. There are already examples of AI replacing human jobs …
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We Don't Need Faster Horses
Thoughts on the Marketing Jobs of the Future “What is the marketing job of the future?” It was an unexpected question from a friend and former colleag…
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Humans, What are They Good For?
"Which human characteristics remain vital and relevant [in the age of AI]?"
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AI's Implications for Business Strategy
I’m 2/3 of the way through my 6-week MIT Sloan online course on developing an AI business strategy, so it seemed like a good time to step back and ref…
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Stay in the Loop.
A quick read on what changed in AI this week, and what it means for your agency. From Matt Cyr, read every week by agency leaders who don’t have time to track it all.