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Your weekly guide on everything AI marketing. Covering everything from AI marketing news, tips, deep dives, events, podcasts, jobs and much more. Never miss a beat with our 5-minute newsletter.
In today’s email:
Canva launches its biggest product overhaul ever with AI 2.0
Google kills Dynamic Search Ads in favour of AI Max
HubSpot launches AEO to help brands show up in AI search
Plus: a Marketing Week podcast on digital ad accountability, a step-by-step workflow using Fathom to turn call recordings into campaign briefs, and a deep dive into whether AI marketing is becoming the dark art of our time.
The Top 3 Stories
1. Canva goes agentic with AI 2.0, its biggest product launch ever
Canva launched AI 2.0 on April 16, introducing conversational design, agentic orchestration, and persistent memory that learns how your team works and keeps every project on-brand automatically. The rollout began as a research preview for the first million users.
Why it matters: Agentic design means marketers can brief an AI with a campaign goal and get fully editable, on-brand assets, compressing what used to be a multi-step creative workflow into a single prompt. 📰 Fortune
2. Google retires Dynamic Search Ads and goes all-in on AI Max
Google announced it will stop allowing new Dynamic Search Ads campaigns once automatic upgrades begin in September, migrating all eligible DSA, automatically created assets, and campaign-level broad match settings to AI Max for Search. The company says AI Max campaigns generated 7% more conversions at a similar cost per action.
Why it matters: If you're running DSA campaigns, the clock is ticking… Voluntary migration tools are available now and you should audit your campaigns before the automatic switch forces your hand.📰 Marketing Dive
3. HubSpot launches AEO to help brands show up in AI search
HubSpot's Answer Engine Optimisation tool, launched at its Spring 2026 Spotlight on April 14, lets marketers track brand visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, analyse competitor share of voice, and act on content recommendations directly inside HubSpot. It's available as a standalone product for $50 per month.
Why it matters: With HubSpot reporting a 27% year-on-year drop in organic search traffic for its customers, AEO is no longer optional — it's the next channel to get right.📰 TechTarget
Winning, on-brand ads—without endless prompting
Most AI creative tools fall short for one simple reason. You can generate tons of ads, but they aren’t up to par.
Refining copy, adjusting layouts, or nudging a CTA into place shouldn’t require rewriting prompts over and over. It slows teams down and breaks the creative process.
With Hightouch Ad Studio, AI gets you 90% of the way there. For the final 10%, use a built-in editor to quickly refine copy and design, or export directly to Figma for seamless collaboration with your design team.
Move faster without losing control. Every ad, exactly how you want it.
More trending AI marketing news from last week
Adobe launched Firefly AI Assistant on April 15, letting marketers orchestrate multi-step creative workflows across Photoshop, Premiere, and Illustrator using plain-language prompts.
Meta's new Muse Spark model now powers a dedicated shopping mode in the Meta AI app, pulling from creator content and brand catalogues to surface products conversationally.
Anthropic launched Claude Design on April 17, a new product that turns text prompts and briefs into prototypes, slides, and marketing assets using Claude Opus 4.7.
Dentsu unveiled Dentsu.Connect 4.0, an agentic AI operating system for marketing built on Google Gemini and Meta Llama, with autonomous agents handling cross-workflow orchestration.
Salesforce pushed back on Silicon Valley's AI measurement obsession, introducing Agentic Work Units as a new metric that tracks agent output and impact rather than token consumption.
Quote of the week
Marketers feel the pressure, but the real challenge is knowing where adopting AI creates actual value versus where it's just noise."
Trending AI tools for marketers
Here are 4 trending tools to explore this week. Quick, practical upgrades to your AI marketing arsenal:
Fathom: Records, transcribes, and summarises meetings without a bot joining the call.
Offsite: Automates out-of-home ad buying, targeting, and performance reporting with AI.
ClayHog: Shows exactly what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews say about your brand.
Carousels Generator: Creates full LinkedIn carousels from a prompt, complete with design and direct publishing.
TV, podcasts & streaming
The Marketing Week Podcast - Rethinking transparency and accountability in digital advertising
Marketing Week's latest episode examines the growing pressure on the digital advertising industry to become more accountable, exploring what transparency really means for brands and media buyers as AI reshapes the ad environment - listen to it here.
AI training
How to turn client call recordings into campaign briefs using Fathom
The overview:
Fathom is a bot-free meeting recorder that transcribes calls and lets you search and summarise your entire meeting history using AI.
Step-by-step:
Enable bot-free capture
In Fathom settings, switch to bot-free mode so it records audio without appearing as a visible participant in the call.Run your discovery call as normal
Fathom captures and transcribes everything in the background without disrupting the session.Query the transcript with Ask Fathom
After the call, open Ask Fathom and ask for the client's core objective, stated pain points, and success metrics.Generate a structured campaign brief
Ask Fathom to format its output covering: campaign goal, target audience, key messages, and tone. Then paste it directly into your brief template.Cross-reference past calls for patterns
Use Ask Fathom's cross-call search to surface recurring themes across previous client sessions and sharpen the strategic context.
Pro tip: Paste the brief into your preferred LLM and ask for three campaign angles — you will have a draft creative strategy ready before your next client touchpoint.
The weekly deep dive
Agentic design is the new battlefront — and the lines are being drawn fast
In the space of 48 hours last week, Anthropic launched Claude Design, Canva unveiled AI 2.0, and a quiet but telling move happened: Anthropic's CPO resigned from Figma's board. The agentic design race is now official.
Partnership or power play?
Canva and Anthropic framed their collaboration warmly — two years in the making, with Canva serving as the default design backend for Claude Design. Users generate assets inside Claude, then push them into Canva's Visual Suite for editing. For Canva, this is distribution at scale through Claude's user base. For Anthropic, it's a visual output layer without needing to build one from scratch. It reads like partnership; the underlying logic is closer to mutual dependency.
Where Figma stands
Figma built its recent AI features on Claude. That bet now looks complicated. Anthropic's CPO left Figma's board the day before Claude Design launched, and Figma's stock dropped when the product went live. Figma has a counter — Code to Canvas, launched in February, converts Claude Code output into editable Figma files, but it is a defensive play, not a strategic one. The deeper problem is structural: any design tool that depends on Anthropic's models is now competing with Anthropic itself.
Our takeaway: The agentic design wave is not coming for designers, it is coming for the software layer between the designer and the output. Marketers who understand which tools are allies in this stack and which are at risk of being bypassed will be better placed to build workflows that hold up as the platforms shift beneath them.
📖 Read the full article at The New Stack
