End of the road for the ‘Mad Men’ as AI moves into advertising

FT Tech — Apr 27, 06:00 ★★★★★

Traditional advertising holding companies are losing share to AI-native agencies; the skill set gap between old and new is structural, not cyclical.

FT reports that large marketing groups struggle to adapt to automation tools that compress creative cycles and shift labour toward prompt engineering. AI workflows require different hiring profiles, measurement frameworks, and client relationships than legacy agency models built on retainers and creative teams.

Ibrahima's take: The Mad Men didn't die. They're redundant. A prompt engineer in Lagos now competes with a creative director in London for the same client budget.

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#Entertainment #Labor #Media #Agents

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Woolworths gives agentic-powered Olive chatbot to its 200,000 staff

Woolworths deployed an agentic AI chatbot called Olive to 200,000 employees with safeguards built into the response generation layer.

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— Apr 27, 22:51 ★★★★★

Oliver's take: Eight judges to keep a chatbot honest at Woolworths scale. That's not safety theater. That's the cost of deploying something that actually makes decisions to hundreds of thousands of people who have no idea they're part of the experiment.

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Applications & Sectors ·

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— Apr 27, 18:20 ★★★★★

Oliver's take: Citi, Home Depot, Capcom all live in production now. None of them has solved the governance problem. They're discovering it in real time. Auditing an agent's decision is harder than building the agent.

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Applications & Sectors ·

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— Apr 27, 11:15 ★★★★★

Sofia's take: HMRC gives Microsoft Copilot access to 28,000 tax files marked Official Sensitive. 26 minutes saved per user. No mention of what Microsoft does with the data or where it trains next. This is risk pricing as productivity.

#Microsoft #Enterprise #UK #Privacy

Applications & Sectors ·

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— Apr 27, 06:26 ★★★★★

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Applications & Sectors ·

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#Education #Labor #Southeast Asia #Indonesia

Applications & Sectors ·

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#Agents #Enterprise #Hospitality