🤖 Growing or slowing?

Meta admits AI agents are lagging, but claims its new model is catching up

The future is… Not quite now? At least according to Mark Zuckerberg.

Reality bites: Zuckerberg told staff that Meta’s AI agents haven’t accelerated as hoped, and the restructuring bets “haven’t come to fruition yet.”

The lesson for you: agentic automation is still maturing. Don’t rebuild your workflows around capabilities that still aren’t there.

On the other hand: Meta’s superintelligence chief says its next model, codenamed Watermelon, has caught up to OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, with a coding-focused update imminent.

More frontier competition means better tools and pricing pressure. Good news if you’re paying for AI.

And it’s not only Meta that’s struggling with its AI…

Prove it or lose it: Microsoft is merging consumer and business Copilot in August, cutting underused features, and pushing an always-on “Autopilot” agent.

The message is blunt. Copilot must focus on “real work” and earn its right to exist.

Notice the pattern? The hype cycle is cooling into a demand for results, and the tools that survive will be the ones that do the job.

It’s time to stop relying on pompous announcements and focus on what ships.

Instagram Stories turns into marketing sandbox as Meta’s algorithm punishes the platform-dependent

Two lessons in one breath: build where you can play, but own where you land.

Your new low-stakes testing lab: Instagram Stories has become the cheapest place to experiment.

Link stickers, polls, questions, scheduling, and AI restyle are all behind a 24-hour reset button.

That means you can test creative, drive off-platform traffic, and spark interaction without committing to a polished post. At least that’s according to Instagram itself…

Don’t sleep on the interactive stuff: Polls, quizzes, and question stickers are the easiest engagement lever most marketers ignore. Near-zero effort, real-time signal. Use them.

Now the sobering part: Meta’s shift toward creator content is gutting publisher referral traffic. LadBible saw indirect revenue fall 41% as clickable content lost priority to creators.

The lesson for you? Stop renting your audience. Platform-dependent reach can vanish overnight.

And it’s a two-front war: Google’s AI Overviews are squeezing the other side, with the Daily Mail reporting click-throughs down as much as 89% on some content.

Publishers are racing to build owned channels and direct relationships before the referrals dry up completely.

The takeaway: Play on the platforms, but never bet your business on them.

What if doing nothing beat 90% of professional fund managers?

The investment industry sells complexity. Research. Timing. Alpha.

The data tells a different story. Over any 20-year period, a simple world index fund has outperformed more than 90% of professionals. Most investors who try to beat the market end up paying more in fees to underperform it.

The edge isn’t intelligence. It’s patience.

But patience is hard when your portfolio feels abstract. A passive fund is just a ticker on a screen. The thousands of companies inside it, the businesses you actually co-own, stay invisible.

90 Percent fixes that. Every week, it pulls one company at random from the world equity index and tells you what it actually does.

• The Brazilian company that makes the electric motors inside almost everything that spins.
• The Florida company that sells your airline its spare parts at half the price.
• The Japanese hardware company hiding inside every factory.

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How many ad sets should you really run in a Meta ads campaign?

Jon Loomer has a refreshingly blunt answer to the ad set question: you’ve probably got too many.

His core message is to limit complexity and consolidate budgets wherever you can.

1) More ad sets, thinner budget: Every extra ad set waters down your spend.

In a vacuum, $100 in one ad set beats $100 split across five, and splitting invites auction overlap and audience fragmentation.

Our take: Complexity feels productive. It rarely is.

2) Do the math before you multiply: Budget only means something next to your performance goal and expected cost per action.

Aim for 50 optimized events per week, per ad set. Splitting up makes that threshold harder to hit, especially on pricey conversions like professional services.

3) Location, age, gender are mostly exceptions: Separate ad sets by geography can work if your product or messaging genuinely changes by location.

Same with age and gender, but only if you’ve got the budget and truly distinct strategies. Otherwise, let creative diversification do the sorting for you.

4) Targeting splits that fool you: Detailed targeting and lookalikes are just suggestions now. Split ad sets by them, and you’re reaching the same people anyway.

Different results? That’s random distribution, not clever segmentation.

5) When splitting actually earns its keep: Two real reasons hold up.

• Remarketing versus prospecting: when Meta over-invests in easy remarketing wins that look great but aren’t incremental.
• High ad volume, since Meta caps you at 50 ads per ad set.

Our take: Split to solve a proven problem, not to feel organized.

The CBO caveat: With Advantage+ Campaign Budget on, multiple ad sets matter far less. The budget optimizes at the campaign level and shifts dynamically.

Turn it off, and you’re forcing fixed budgets into each ad set, killing efficiency and inviting overlap.

The standardized play: start with one ad set, consolidate hard, monitor, and only split when there’s a real problem to fix. When you do split, keep CBO on.

Don’t look for reasons to fragment your budget. Look for reasons not to.

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What’s the general opinion on AI tools?

It might’ve been a science fiction curiosity a few years ago.

But by now most people have started viewing AI as the Robin to their Batman.

AI is in its side-kick era, where 39% of users see it as such. This also suggests that it’s used to augment daily tasks rather than replace them.

Then we have 26% who already see AI as a new kind of search engine, which is a significant jump for a technology that only went mainstream a few years ago.

Interestingly, only 11% use it as a source of advice or a creative partner, showing that while we trust AI to find things, we’re still a bit picky about its “opinions”.

We’re definitely in the middle of a massive rebranding of Search. If your marketing doesn’t provide “answers” that a sidekick can easily pass along, they’re missing the caped crusader entirely.

Shift your SEO focus from keywords to conversational answers. Structure your data so that an AI “assistant” can easily summarize your value proposition in a single sentence.

AI MARKETING: This daily newsletter condenses the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. They read the noise, pull out the signal, and explain what actually matters for work, strategy, and the tools your team is already using. Trusted by 700k+ readers. Subscribe right here.*

GOOGLE: “Dude, where’s my review?” That’s what business owners submitting reports to Google probably asked in recent days. After several days of complaints, Google confirmed it’s looking into this and if you had the issue too, know that it should be fixed soon-ish.

AI MARKETING: Seedance is trying to step into Hollywood. After an AI-generated video made with Seedance portraying Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt went viral, the Chinese AI tool is full steam ahead. Although officially it gets negative reactions too, it seems it’s an unspoken secret that generative AI is used more and more in the industry already. So it’s not just marketers…

GOOGLE: Fake US DMCA complaints can wipe your live pages from search results before any dispute resolves, and the burden of filing a counter-notice falls squarely on you. Press Gazette got hit twice this year. Watch Search Console for sudden single-URL drops, that’s your early warning.

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