Miron Lulic

Love this important new piece by OpenAI’s incoming CEO of Applications (and former Instacart CEO), Fidji Simo, about the ways in which AI will empower people. And I couldn’t agree more with her about the exciting breakthroughs for AI in healthcare. As Fidji writes, healthcare is also about what happens between doctor visits, and AI can empower people to improve their health by improving their key daily habits: “AI can also make sure that health decisions don’t just happen in the doctor’s office. The biggest levers for preventing disease and optimizing health outcomes—sleep, food, movement, stress management, connection—all depend on everyday habits. AI can help us build those habits through small, achievable, daily steps with personalized, real-time nudges. Beyond diagnostics and accelerated drug development, this is one of the most profound uses of AI in healthcare: an always-on companion that bridges knowledge gaps, reinforces good habits, and empowers people to take charge of their own health with confidence and clarity.” But as Fidji notes, realizing the ultimate possibilities of AI won’t happen on its own: “That’s why we have to be intentional about how we build and share these technologies so they lead to greater opportunity and prosperity for more people.” It’s great to have someone as visionary as Fidji helping to build the AI that can truly empower people to take charge of their health.  You can read the piece here: https://lnkd.in/dCNmw8Ex #Health #AI #Technology #ArtificialIntelligence #Healthcare

379

65 Comments

The Gemini product is quickly catching up to ChatGPT, but usage just continues to fall behind. This is what it looks like when someone else innovates first and becomes the preferred consumer destination, and it's playing out faster than it ever has. What does Google do? They could make it the default experience every time you go to google[dot]com, but that would put all of their search revenue (half the business) at risk. We're watching a speed-run of competitive strategy.

177

88 Comments

The hottest role in AI startups right now isn’t Forward Deployed Engineers. It isn't GTM Engineers. It’s Deployment Strategists. Decagon calls it an “Agent Product Manager.” Harvey calls it a “Solutions Architect.” Palantir Technologies has had versions of this role for years. And the salaries are climbing fast: - Decagon: $200k–$285k - Palantir Technologies: $120k–$200k - Figma: $150k–$260k - Ramp: $100k–$180k - Harvey: $190k–$260k So who are these people? They are usually pseudo-technical -- CS or engineering majors, or folks with technical work experience. Many come from 2 years in consulting, IB, or PE, then jump into startups to get their hands dirty. They are young, hungry, polished, and comfortable being in front of customers. What do they actually do? They make sure enterprise AI deployments succeed. A $100k+ deal does not survive on a nice pitch or a self-serve onboarding flow. It survives if the customer sees value in the pilot. That means: - Embedding directly with the customer - Designing prompt logic for specific workflows - Working with engineering to align integrations and data flow - Helping exec teams define their AI roadmap - Running feedback loops into product and GTM Why does this role matter so much? Because enterprise AI is messy. Integrations, data transfer, and adoption make or break a deal. Most buyers are using AI for the first time, and each has unique workflows. Deployment Strategists bridge that gap. They own the outcome. They are accountable for making pilots successful, which often means millions in revenue down the line. At Conversion, Sam Bochner has been leading this work for us. We are now thinking about scaling it into a full team. Because a few successful pilots can fund an entire department, and the cost of failed deployments is too high to ignore. Is this just a rebrand of customer success? Not really. Success is about answering tickets and renewals. Deployment Strategy is about going deep with a few enterprise accounts, extracting maximum value, and ensuring the pilot closes into a multi-year contract. Call it Agent PM, Solutions Architect, or Deployment Strategist. Whatever the title, this is becoming one of the most important roles in AI SaaS.

654

91 Comments

Performance agencies sometimes think they need to differentiate by building proprietary tech. I’ve seen that story many times — and I disagree. I recently had a check-in with two C-level execs at a performance agency. We’d been delivering exceptional results for their clients, including a $33 CPA using our machine learning optimization engine, compared to $120 manually. But performance wasn’t their focus. They'd decided to build new tech in-house. “If other agencies can use tvScientific,” they said, “we’re not unique.” It brought to mind the New York Times’ decision to build its own ad server — a costly, years-long detour that ended with a move back to DFP. The problem was a lack of clarity about what business they were really in and what they were positioned to excel at. The same applies to performance agencies. They’re not in the business of building ad tech (which is a constantly evolving, capital intensive business and is an entire business in its own right). They’re in the business of delivering outcomes. That means using the best tools available on the market and winning on superior client service. Not rebuilding tools from scratch. The edge comes from execution — knowing how to evaluate, adopt, and apply best-in-class technology to drive better results. Trying to be both a tech company and a service business is a recipe for subpar results on both fronts. Instead, invest in identifying cutting-edge technology, use it better than your competitors, and deliver both superior results and superior client service. That’s the path to agency differentiation. Just my .02. More detailed thoughts on this topic in my weekly newsletter (see comments).

193

17 Comments

In my article this week, I proposed the idea of an efficient frontier in an advertiser’s portfolio of channels: that all channels are maximized in terms of ad spend to achieve some target blended ROAS, where no other budget allocation could produce better ROAS-adjusted revenue. In this configuration, an advertiser would fully exploit one channel before deploying budget to another, with a waterfall approach. The efficient frontier probably holds for small advertisers, which aren’t practically constrained by budget but are extremely sensitive to ROAS performance, to a greater degree than large advertisers. This raises some important operational considerations for managing a portfolio of advertising channels, given some scale of ad spend: - Advertisers should prioritize channels by potential reach - Advertisers can justify expansion and new channel specialization (eg., non-standard creative production) as diversified spend reaches some minimum absolute threshold - Advertisers may abandon their efficient frontier as spend creates a systemic risk for their firm

57

13 Comments

Yesterday Clay hit $100M ARR and I shared a post on the GTM bets that got us here. Today, I'm sitting down with our Head of Finance to dive deep on the business - metrics, our view on the AI market, and the path to $1B. Karan often gets this question from candidates: "Look, I have to dedicate my livelihood to Clay. All the upside of my equity is baked into one asset. How should I frame the real risk/reward?" It's a great question! So I wanted to use this video to go beyond the tactics and share how we think about the business holistically. The fundamentals, market dynamics and where we're really going. Some of what we cover: - The AI market and why GTM is actually the least crowded - Cohort data that shocked even us (enterprises never churn!) - How we've built an entire economy around Clay - The three things that create our customer flywheel - Why we're not burning cash while growing at an insane rate - The vectors to $1B: new geos, personas, use cases, channels, and verticals At the end, we get candid about the real risks and why World of Warcraft helps explain them. Watch here 👇

462

44 Comments

Agentic AI is exploding but most companies today can't see what it actually costs to deploy their agents, making it nearly impossible to manage margins or price confidently. Enter Payloop, one of the latest spinouts from Struck Studio. Payloop provides real-time visibility into the true costs of deploying agents — per action, agent, and customer with a single line of code. Check it out here: https://trypayloop.com/yc Launching with exclusive access for Y Combinator companies. Seamless integration + differentiated insights.

127

10 Comments

Deep *startup* research 🧐 Austin Johnsen from Zapier shared in a post a few weeks ago the prompt he uses to do diligence on M&A targets (https://lnkd.in/gNTgBNde). It's a great prompt, and now Scout in Harmonic lets you save prompts like this and fire them off to do deep research on any startup, with much richer startup data than would be available from any general LLM or deep web research tool. Please share any thoughts/feedback that we can incorporate to make this even more powerful 😁 .

97

10 Comments

"Being 3 years ahead makes you look smart. Being 6 months ahead gets you paid." - Derek Gibbs in a meeting, speaking on our positioning in the AI market At Casper Studios, we nerd out on memory layers, MCPs, agent-to-agent workflows, multi-modal APIs from Google, all of it. It’s fun, and we’re building with it internally or working on small POCs with several founders. But that’s not what most clients are asking for. They’re asking us to take a workflow someone used to do manually—6 steps, 3 tabs, 2 email messages, and automate it with AI. Not fancy agents reasoning across knowledge graphs, speaking with each other in different languages, then making your breakfast. It's more like: 1.) Internal Workflows: Can we take a process that used to require multiple people… and make it faster and smarter with AI? 2.) External Products: Can we rethink the core product experience using new AI capabilities, without losing the familiar features users already rely on? And I think that's where most of the value is right now. We’re still pushing into the future, but we test everything on ourselves first. Take MCP. We haven’t shipped it in any client builds. We're not sure it's stable enough yet. But we use it internally to link Figma, Linear, and GitHub. We'll keep testing here, then roll out when we think it's ready. That’s the balance we try to strike: Experiment like a lab. Ship like a product team.

40

9 Comments

Gemini can now use your computer for you. The new Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model doesn’t just chat, it acts. It can open apps, edit files, analyze data, fill forms, send emails, and even automate workflows on your computer. Think of it as giving your AI the ability to do your job, not just talk about it. This is a massive leap toward autonomous AI agents capable of handling full digital tasks end-to-end. If ChatGPT was your assistant, Gemini might soon be your coworker. Is Google quietly building the world’s first true AI operator?

80

110 Comments

15 years in, and Conductor is betting everything on one truth: traditional search is over. AI is the new arena. Getting buy-in for SEO has always been hard (despite driving 30-50% of your digital business). Yes, some visionary leaders made this a priority…many became our customers. But, the formula for digital success has changed forever. Chasing Google’s ‘10 blue links’ will soon be a thing of the past. And, unfortunately, so will many of those website visitors. What remains is the largest opportunity in the history of digital marketing (IMHO). AI-driven search will become your customers’ most trusted advisor. How your brand shows up in AI results will define your digital future. AI will own more of the customer journey than your website—leaving your marketing tech obsolete and making AEO, GEO, AIO (whatever you call it) mission-critical. Fortunately for our customers, we’ve spent the last 5+ years investing 100% of their $ into one thing: building the most powerful technology for the future of digital. Over 3 years, we rebuilt our data infrastructure from the ground up leveraging our deep enterprise experience. And today, we launch Conductor AI…the next generation of our platform. Serious value includes: • AI Topic Maps: See your content the way AI does, identifying gaps and opportunities for an impactful content strategy–powered by our real-time web crawl, vector databases, and AI (this is over a year in the making leveraging our new data engine). • AI Search Performance: Understand your presence across critical AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity. This isn't rank tracking 2.0—it's an entirely new approach providing insights into your market share, sentiment, and critical perceptions about your brand. • Best-in-Class Content Generation: Exceptional content creation made easy through a powerful combination of LLMs, expert prompt engineering, topic performance data, competitive insights, and your brand guidelines. No training required. • Automated Internal Linking: Leveraging semantic analysis across your content and powered by a vector database, these agents automatically create optimal internal linking strategies. It's incredible. 100% unique. • AI Bot Detection & Alerts: Measure & monitor how AI bots interact with your website. These engagements will become critical signals that influence digital strategy. All of this comes with a completely new interface/navigation, end-to-end universal search, a vibrant customer community, 24/5 expert support, and the most experienced/dedicated/hungry team in the space. We’re watching brand new startups make the same mistakes we made a decade ago—but this moment is too important to gamble on newcomers. Enterprise brands need the best. That’s why you choose Conductor. And that’s exactly what we commit to delivering. Lets go!

373

51 Comments

GPT-5 dropped yesterday and it has a focus on healthcare. In a recent interview, Sam Altman mentioned healthcare is a major part of usage on ChatGPT by consumers. I'm sure many of us have asked GPT health related questions. In fact, 17% of U.S. adults do that at least once a month and 58% of the population does at least once a year according to a 2024 report from KFF. This trend isn’t slowing down. It’s becoming inevitable. People want to be competent and empowered when it comes to their health. They don’t just want to ask better questions, they want to make better decisions. And that builds trust, improves outcomes, and fosters a stronger and more collaborative provider-patient relationship. We launched KELLS Dental Advisor earlier this year, the first of its kind AI chatbot for personalized oral health guidance. We believe tools like this will be a standard component for any healthcare experience from now on. As foundational models advance, there are more we can do: 1. Go beyond generic answers by fine-tuning AI with dental expertise and patient context 2. Make oral health education accessible, personalized, and engaging 3. Not just answer questions, but complete tasks to remove frictions like finding a provider, scheduling appointments 4. Support real-time, two-way communication between patients and providers The future is promising but only if we build it with empathy, responsibility, and real human needs in mind. We’re excited to be part of that journey and transform how people care for their mouth and overall health. https://lnkd.in/eiY7SG2e

16

1 Comment

💥 Metropolis Technologies Raises $𝟭.𝟲𝗕 💥 Funding comes in 2 rounds: $500M equity round led by LionTree and $1.1B from J.P. Morgan. Metropolis is now 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 $𝟱𝗕. With the fresh funding, the plan is to take their "recognition and payment-automation" tech beyond parking assets. This would include retail stores, drive-throughs, gas stations, hotels and partnerships with real estate/asset owner. Congrats to Alex Israel, Peter Fisher, Courtney Fukuda, Travis Kell, Ryan Hunt,Chris Sherman, Robert Bland, Paul Rooney, Lookman Olusanya and the rest of the Metropolis family. #fundraise #parkinginvestment #parking #parkingindustry #metropolois Parking Today Media Parking Network B.V. National Parking Association International Parking & Mobility Institute (IPMI) Tim Maloney Advisory Tim Maloney Reservations Lab

128

7 Comments

🚨 BREAKING: Adobe just dropped $1.9B to acquire Semrush. But this isn't just another tech acquisition. It's a wake-up call for every marketer. 🎯 Here's what you need to know: The New Reality: Traffic from AI sources (ChatGPT, Gemini) to retail sites jumped 1,200% YoY 🚀 GEO is the New SEO: Generative Engine Optimization isn't optional anymore - it's survival Enterprise Validation: Semrush's enterprise revenue grew 33% YoY (clients include Amazon, JPMorgan, TikTok) The Vision: Adobe + Semrush = Complete brand visibility across traditional search, LLMs, and owned channels Timeline: Deal closes H1 2026, pending approvals TL;DR: Your customers are asking ChatGPT for recommendations before they Google. If your brand isn't optimized for AI discovery, you're already behind. The game has changed. CMOs who ignore GEO alongside SEO risk losing relevance and revenue. Are you ready for the agentic AI era of marketing? Will this be another acquisition Adobe mess up? :)

64

26 Comments

Concerned about protecting your proprietary AI work? OpenAI just experienced a wake-up call: a start-up reportedly replicated its core model, forcing a complete security overhaul. Here’s what stands out from their response, and why it matters for anyone implementing AI in marketing or product workflows: • Information tenting: Critical projects and sensitive data are only discussed by verified, select teams. • Biometric verification: Access to valuable data now requires fingerprint authentication, raising the bar on internal controls. • Internet lockdown: All external connections need explicit, pre-approved approval, stopping accidental leaks or unauthorized access before they start. As the AI race accelerates, so do the risks. Your models, strategies, and creative assets need more than technical innovation, they need operational security, too. Step into the world of AI through our newsletters. Insights and new developments in concise, engaging updates.

104

92 Comments

Most launches flop, not from bad products, but from ‘ta-da!’ rollouts with zero warm-up. Headed to a fall conference to break some big news? My latest MediaPost column provides a 6-week blueprint to turn the booth into a momentum machine. Details and article link in comments ↓ #gtm #marketing

9

1 Comment