Good morning,

This week we’re looking at AI’s influence on search, spending, and the future of work.

First up: visibility rules are being rewritten. As AI models standardize how they generate answers, sites like Reddit are becoming the new backbone of search—while your dot-com risks becoming invisible. In Strategy of the Week, we unpack how answer engines build trust, what they cite, and how “helpfulness” is now the real SEO.

We also cover:

How AI helped drive $11.8B in Black Friday sales

Why Oracle’s $300B OpenAI cloud deal may already be underwater
Meta’s rogue ad tools and the automation trust problem
The rise of Amazon’s Rufus assistant—and what it means for conversion
And why Accenture is going all-in on AI agents for enterprise clients

In Big Picture, we explore why AI fluency is the next must-have skill, and how the best orgs are reinventing workflows around hybrid human–agent collaboration.

A strong issue for strategy teams thinking beyond the toolstack.

- The Marketing Embeddings Team

NEWS

AI helps drive $11.8 billion in Black Friday sales

Adobe found that AI-driven traffic to US retail websites jumped 805% compared to last year, helping push Black Friday sales to a record $11.8 billion. Looking at October, AI traffic rose 1,200% year over year and converted 16% better than traditional browsing. Open in GPT

Oracle is already underwater on its ‘astonishing’ $300bn OpenAI deal

Oracle’s US $300 billion cloud-computing deal with OpenAI is reportedly “underwater,” as investors erode billions in market value over doubts about the risk and returns. Open in GPT

Meta's AI tools are going rogue and churning out some very strange ads

Meta’s AI ad automation tools (like Advantage+) are facing growing skepticism from advertisers, driven by concerns about transparency, inconsistent performance, and loss of control. Recent reporting and research show real-world failures and reduced consumer trust in AI-generated ads, suggesting automation isn’t yet reliably delivering on its promises. Open in GPT

Amazon’s AI assistant, Rufus, saw a surge in usage during Black Friday:

Amazon's AI assistant, Rufus, is proving to be a powerful sales driver: Rufus-assisted shopping sessions resulted in a 75% daily increase in purchases, more than doubling the 35% growth seen in non-Rufus sessions. This confirms a significant trend: consumers are increasingly relying on AI to guide their shopping decisions. Open in GPT

Accenture and OpenAI accelerate enterprise AI success

Accenture and OpenAI are partnering to provide ChatGPT Enterprise to tens of thousands of consultants. As part of this collaboration, they are also launching a program specifically designed to help clients deploy AI agents. Open in GPT

STRATEGY OF THE WEEK

The new rules of visibility and how AI search is being rearchitected

Across over 4 billion AI citations and 300 million answer-engine responses, one pattern is clear: models are standardizing how they build answers. That has four consequences, some of which were well publicized, while others not so much.

Reddit Is Now the Human OS for AI
Across models, Reddit consistently sits at the top of the citation table. From August 2024 to late October 2025, Reddit accounts for 3.11% of all citations across major answer engines, ahead of YouTube (2.13%) and Wikipedia (1.35%), and ranks #1 in Perplexity, #2 in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. This isn’t about memes. It’s about scale: real humans, unfiltered experiences, and category depth that models cannot replicate anywhere else.
Websites Are Becoming Back-End, Not Front-Door
As answer engines ingest and synthesize your content, more of the journey happens outside your dot-com. People can browse options, compare trade-offs, and in some cases even complete a purchase flow without ever landing on your site. Google’s AI Overviews already surface AI answers in over 50% of healthcare results, while Perplexity has jumped to 100M weekly queries (up from 500M in all of 2023). Your .com becomes training data, decision support, and transaction infrastructure for AI — not necessarily the primary customer interface.

Each LLM Builds its own Source Stacks
Answer engines don’t trust one site; they build a stack:
• ChatGPT: Reddit + Wikipedia + reviews + news.
• Google AI Overviews: Reddit + YouTube + Quora.
• Copilot: Reddit + business media + official forums.
Underneath, the model is looking for consensus. When superfans in r/TravelHacks and a respected review site converge on the same advice, that combination effectively becomes the truth a user sees.

Helpfulness, Not Hype, Drives Inclusion
Models aren’t just lifting the most upvoted comment. They’re optimizing for semiotic cues of “this will actually help”: clear question → response threads, concrete how-to detail, natural language, and balanced pros/cons. Profound’s analysis shows the average cited Reddit post is about one year old, with 4% of cited posts from 2019 or earlier, and that AI pulls from content with positive brand sentiment 5% of the time vs 6.1% for negative — a nearly identical range. Profound A small DTC brand that consistently shows up in those patterns can beat a Fortune 500 that only shows up with polished campaigns.

BIG PICTURE

The Emerging Workforce Advantage: AI Fluency as a Competitive Imperative

The rapid acceleration of AI adoption is reshaping talent needs faster than any previous technological wave. Across industries, employers are urgently seeking workers who can not only execute tasks with AI tools but also govern and develop them.

According to a study conducted by McKinsey, Between 2023 and 2025, the number of U.S. employees in occupations requiring AI-related skills is projected to more than triple, with the most dramatic growth in roles demanding practical AI fluency—rising nearly sevenfold. Non-STEM roles account for a substantial portion of this increase, signaling that AI is transitioning from a specialized capability to a foundational workplace competency.

At the same time, the structure of work itself is evolving. in 2024, an estimated 57% of total work hours were automatable—yet not purely through robotics or full automation. Instead, a hybrid model is emerging in which people, AI agents, and robots each play differentiated roles. People remain dominant in non-automatable tasks requiring judgment, creativity, and interpersonal skills.

AI agents are positioned to assume nearly half of automatable tasks, particularly those involving information processing and prediction, while physical automation continues to expand within operational environments.

For marketers building with AI, the implication is clear: value creation will come from integrating human creativity with AI-driven scale. Competitive advantage will favor organizations that reskill quickly, redesign workflows around AI agents, and leverage automation not to replace talent but to allow workers to unlock higher-value work. The opportunity is not efficiency alone—it is reinvention.

ONE MORE THING

Developers have uncovered ad modules buried in ChatGPT’s Android beta including “search ad,” “carousel,” and “bazaar content."