AI, Digital, Tech, & Marketing Developments So Far In 2026: 15th February

As of February 15, 2026, three major AI developments are reshaping the industry: (1) DeepSeek’s R1 open-source reasoning model released January 2026 proved Chinese firms can match frontier capabilities, (2) OpenAI’s operator agents now autonomously browse and interact with websites, and (3) context engineering has emerged as the critical skill for AI workflow optimization. These… Read More

Week 6 Intelligence Briefing: When Infrastructure Becomes the Product

by Pål Erik Waagbø | Week 6, 2026 THE 30-SECOND TAKE This week, three things converged that haven’t overlapped before. Models are now building models (OpenAI’s Codex debugging its own training runs). Agents are managing agents (Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 with agent teams, McKinsey running 25,000 AI agents among 60,000 total “workforce”). Infrastructure became the actual… Read More

AI Intelligence Briefing: Week 5, 2026

THE 30-SECOND TAKE ChatGPT launched advertising this week at $60 CPM with no conversion data. Read that again. Advertisers are paying 3x Meta rates for reach they can’t measure. This isn’t a temporary gap, it’s the new reality. The measurement system that built modern marketing assumed humans visited websites we could instrument. AI agents don’t.… Read More

Weekly Newsletter Analysis: Week 4 2026

THE 30-SECOND TAKE AI is entering the physical world, and the race isn’t for the smartest model anymore. It’s for who owns your context. Apple just signed a multi-year deal to power Siri with Google’s Gemini while simultaneously racing to put AI in a wearable pin. The shift is clear: competitive advantage has moved from… Read More

The 22% Problem

Only 22% of marketers actually use their CDP. Not “use it a little.” Use it at all. The other 78% have a very expensive database they occasionally log into. Technology doesn’t solve utilisation problems. Strategy does. The data quality crisis has only intensified since this post. Recent industry benchmarks from Forrester’s 2025 Customer Data Platform… Read More

The Role of Emotions and Influencing in Marketing

Marketing that makes people buy is almost always emotionally driven. There is research out there that concludes that people are more likely to make an emotional judgment over a rational judgment when making buying decisions. Cialdini’s six principles of persuasion are a masterpiece of research, and most of the important tricks we marketers use, or… Read More