Need to Know News - November 1st, 2025
In this week's Need to Know News edition:
🤖 The Goldman Sachs survey revealing 94% of small business owners using AI say it's having a "positive impact"... and it's NOT because they're replacing workers.
🤖 Pinterest's new AI features are turning boring "inspiration boards" into a shopping assistant... and what this means for anyone selling physical products online.
🤖 How TikTok's new "Smart Split" tool automatically clips, reframes, and captions your long-form content into multiple short videos.
And a whole lot more!
Oreo Maker Slashes Marketing Costs 30-50% With New AI
Mondelez dropped $40 million on an AI tool built with Publicis and Accenture. The payoff? Marketing production costs fell 30-50%. They're already running it for Chips Ahoy social ads in the U.S. and Milka chocolate in Germany (think waves of chocolate rippling over wafers with different backgrounds for different shoppers).
Traditional animation runs "hundreds of thousands" of dollars. AI costs a fraction of that. By next holiday season, they want TV commercials ready to air. Maybe even a 2027 Super Bowl spot.
Google's Pomelli Will Generate On-Brand Campaigns for Small Businesses
Google Labs just released Pomelli, an AI experiment for small businesses drowning in marketing tasks. You upload your website. Pomelli scans it and builds what they call a "Business DNA" profile—your fonts, colors, images, tone of voice, all of it. Then it spits out campaign ideas and creates actual posts, ads, and website assets that match your brand. You can tweak everything before publishing.
🚀 Missing One of These 5 Essential 'Copy Blocks' Could Cost You A Fortune!
Two $100+ million copywriters discovered what REALLY drives conversions—5 simple building blocks arranged in a specific order. This framework is so powerful that beginners are generating 5-figure profits with it. And you can learn the full system in just 33 minutes.
Discover All 5 'Copy Blocks' Now
Microsoft's Researcher Gained Computer Use to Browse and Click For You
Microsoft's Researcher in Copilot gained "Computer Use" capabilities. When you activate it, Researcher spins up a Windows 365 virtual machine in the cloud. That machine can navigate websites, log into premium content (with your permission), click buttons, fill forms, run terminal commands, and generate code.
Ask it to prep for a customer meeting and it'll scrape social media for company insights. Need industry trends? It'll log into subscription sites and gather data. Want a presentation? It'll build one from the research.
Small Businesses Using AI Report 94% Positive Impact on Operations
Goldman Sachs asked 1,400 small business owners about AI. Of those using it, 94% said it helps their business. Khari Parker runs Connie's Chicken and Waffles, a Baltimore restaurant chain with three locations. His team uses ChatGPT and Claude for designing menus, creating recruiting materials, training staff, and forecasting supply orders.
The AI even settles disagreements between partners. Parker said it saves "many, many hours a day" but won't replace anyone on his team. Separately, 78% of all small business owners surveyed feel optimistic about the next year despite rising costs and economic uncertainty. AI seems to be one reason why.
TikTok Rolls Out Smart Split to Auto-Clip Long Videos Into Posts
TikTok rolled out Smart Split and AI Outline at its U.S. Creator Summit. Smart Split lives in TikTok Studio Web and automatically clips, reframes, captions, and transcribes long videos into short clips ready to post. Upload a vlog or podcast, pick the sections you want, choose your video length and caption style. The tool handles the rest. AI Outline generates video titles, hashtags, hooks, and six-part outlines based on prompts or trending topics from Creator Search Insights.
You can customize everything before recording. Both tools go through safety checks to align with Community Guidelines. Oh, and TikTok boosted Subscription revenue share to 90% for creators who hit 10K followers, 100K views last month, and post three subscriber-only videos monthly.
Booking Holdings Credits AI With Better Conversions and Lower Cancellations
Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak, and OpenTable are tracking four AI metrics: faster search, better conversion, lower cancellation rates, higher customer satisfaction. CFO Ewout Steenbergen said early signals look good. AI helps people find what they need and finish bookings quicker, which drops cancellations (because they're not booking something, regretting it, then rebooking later).
New features include Agoda's hotel-specific chatbot for answering traveler questions, Kayak's natural-language search from the home page, and Booking.com's Smart Messenger that helps property owners communicate with guests.
Pinterest Tests AI Boards That Style Outfits From Your Saved Pins
Pinterest is experimenting with AI-powered boards in the U.S. and Canada. "Styled for you" collages let users mix saved fashion pins to create outfits, then swipe through AI-recommended items for matching. "Boards made for you" are curated collections (trending styles, weekly outfit inspo, shoppable content) that show up in home feeds and inboxes.
They're also adding tabs to organize pins: "Make It Yours" recommends fashion and home decor products based on saved pins, "More Ideas" suggests related content across beauty, recipes, and art, and "All Saves" shows everything you've saved. The overall vision here is to turn boards from organizational tools into personalized shopping and inspiration engines.
Perplexity Opens Patent Research to Anyone With Plain English Search
Searching patents used to mean learning obscure keyword syntax and paying for expensive pro tools. Perplexity Patents killed that. Just ask in plain English: "Are there any patents on AI for language learning?" The AI doesn't need exact matches. Search "fitness trackers" and you'll also find "activity bands," "step-counting watches," and "health monitoring wearables."
Behind the scenes, an AI research agent breaks your query into tasks, searches a patent knowledge index on exabyte-scale infrastructure, then delivers answers with supporting docs. It also crawls academic papers, GitHub repos, and blogs where breakthroughs appear first.
Adobe Demos AI That Edits Videos by Changing Just One Frame
Adobe's annual Max conference showcased a stack of AI tools that change how creators edit video, audio, and images. Project Frame Forward was the standout. Change anything in frame one (remove a person, add an object) and the edit ripples across your entire video automatically.
Generate Soundtrack creates backing tracks that sync to your footage based on mood prompts like "aggressive" or "sentimental." Adobe Express got an AI assistant where you describe changes instead of clicking through menus. And Photoshop's Generative Fill now runs on three AI engines: Adobe's Firefly, Google's Gemini, or Black Forest's Flux.
Gemini Now Generates Full Presentations From a Prompt
Google added presentation generation to Gemini's Canvas workspace (the interactive space they launched in March for editing writing and code). Now you can write a prompt or upload research papers and spreadsheets, and Gemini builds a full deck with themes and images already attached.
Export straight to Google Slides for editing or team collaboration. Works for personal and Workspace accounts. Canvas already handled code and showed visual designs for apps and web pages. Presentations were the obvious next step.
Thanks for reading.
Until next time!
The AI Marketers
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