Brian Sykora

Attention is the new currency. Get the playbook behind how top agencies are cashing in on conversions: https://lnkd.in/e98CiTyw High-performing teams are breaking down silos, integrating stacks, and aligning brand with performance to drive consistency across the funnel. Download our latest research report to see how top marketers are shaping their conversion strategies: https://lnkd.in/e98CiTyw

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One of the biggest breakthroughs building our agents was an insight hiding in plain sight... Agents perform better when given more agency. We're featured in Anthropic's customer stories on how Emergent applied this with Claude, giving our agents full autonomy to build and debug. The result? Production-grade full-stack apps shipped without human intervention. Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/gqPHRpSv #anthropic #claude #vibecoding

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🚀 Agencies using AI for outreach are closing 3x more deals. But here’s the thing most agencies still rely on manual research and cold outreach that doesn’t scale. It’s time to change that. 💡 OptaReach takes the guesswork out of outreach automating lead research, personalization, and follow-ups so you can scale your pipeline without the spam. If your team wants to close more deals with less effort, it might be time to put AI to work for you. 👉 Learn more at optareach.com #salesoutreach #optareach #reach #agencygrowth

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It's been interesting to watch the journey of Dstillery. An AI native company (in the last wave of predictive AI) well positioned to capitalize and accelerate growth with the current wave of generative AI. It's clear that companies that have strong AI talent can adapt much much faster.

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At the Brooklyn Tech Expo yesterday, Ramm.ai founder Alan Avidan emphasized the theme of 'AI Agents are everywhere.' A key point of discussion was the distinction between an agent and an Agentic system. The presence of agents is indeed notable, with WPP reporting 50,000 working on their behalf, raising questions about the cost and influence of such a workforce. A defining characteristic of an agent is its ability to act with agency and operate autonomously, unlike a bot that relies solely on prescribed LLMs or RAGs. However, a pressing question remains: how much autonomy does agentic AI truly possess without any human oversight? For instance, can it make purchases independently or comment on blog posts without human approval? What is its capacity to interact with other agents outside its ecosystem? Indeed in the case of fashion who decides what to put in your wardrobe for the new season? It appears there may be a spectrum of autonomy influenced by future governance and regulation. A critical question for businesses and society is how much independence should agentic structures be granted. While blockchain can serve as a verification mechanism to ensure data authenticity within an independent system, is this sufficient? Moreover, is it risky to embed such authority in a system that is challenging to modify? As AI agents become increasingly prevalent, the discussions surrounding their deployment are equally significant everywhere.

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Dashboards tell you what buyers did. Behavior tells you why they did it. Tone shifts. Repeated questions. Hesitation. Momentum cues. AI now quantifies these moments — giving PMMs clarity we’ve never had before. Not intuition. Not anecdotal notes. Actual evidence. PMMs who turn conversations into insight will build GTM strategy with a level of accuracy competitors simply can’t match. Full breakdown in our latest blog ↓ https://lnkd.in/g579Pwif #ProductMarketing #GTM #AIForGTM

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🤩 Standout Boston startups continue to emerge and Q1 2025 was no exception. Here are the fast growing teams we highlighted in Q1.. 🤩 Cimulate, Inc. is building a generative AI platform for commerce, peering into the future and redefining the customer experience for a gen-AI and LLM-driven era. This team is leveraging AI to reimagine the commerce customer experience starting with search Connective Health is building a healthtech service for doctors so they are better equipped with the right data at the right time to deliver high quality care to patients. This Seed stage startup is leveraging interoperability for automated medical record retrieval and customized summaries to deliver a better experience for providers WHOOP is on a mission to unlock human performance, revolutionizing how people better understand their bodies. This late stage consumer tech company, located just over the Green Monster in Kenmore Square, is a global leader ushering in a new generation of AI driven technology for the human body OnRamp is building a customer onboarding platform for customer success teams and businesses who want to succeed from the first handshake of B2B relationships. Customers and onboarding teams alike need structured guidance to onboard effectively and OnRamp is becoming the go to choice for a growing number of businesses Matterbeam is an infrastructure software startup ending data pipeline tyranny, freeing data to make enterprises more effective. This Seed stage startup envisions a deconstruction of ETL pipelines - extract, transform, load no more - so enterprise data is more portable, immutable, and most importantly...flexible Lynx is building modern fintech infrastructure for healthcare, making it easier for healthcare institutions to build great financial products. This growth stage team is using APIs to become a “Stripe for healthcare” Proton.ai is redefining the way distributors use CRM, bringing an industry stuck in spreadsheets into the future. The distribution industry is massive, touching nearly every vertical (HVAC, electrical, industrial, automotive, construction, janitorial, and more) Tulip Interfaces is building a frontline operations platform to help deskless workforces create and manage applications without writing code. They are helping discrete manufacturers and other physical businesses improve productivity and streamline operations 7AI has built an agentic powered cybersecurity platform to arm organizations with the tools they need to defend themselves from the next generation of AI enabled attackers. Cybersecurity is evolving rapidly and 7AI is stepping into the void to help them meet this moment Copley is building an enterprise grade, AI-powered content optimization and experimentation platform for commerce. They are leveling the playing field to help growing brands compete with the largest storefronts in the world in a scalable way Much more to come in Q2 at MGMT Boston!

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Love this - AI is the Oppenheimer moment for marketing. It fundamentally collapses the time and cost of production. A $2.5 million campaign that used to take four months can now be delivered for $500,000 in four weeks. Legacy firms that charge based on hours with the 'time-driven' model are existentially threatened by this.

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Today's tipsheet interview for Monday, February 2... IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur spoke to tipsheet yesterday about AI and its impact on governance in digital advertising. Topics included: * AI in ads and "rushing" into experimentation. * Creating the agentic definition at Tech Lab. * "Agentifying" six standards. * The most important agentic standard right now. * V2 of the Agentic Real-Time Framework (ARTF). * Goals and deadlines for current agentic efforts. * Development of an "Agent to Agent" registry launching March 1. * Was "User Context Protocol" (UCP), now "Agentic Audiences". * Agentic mobile, formerly "MobileCP". * Concerns about other protocol initiatives such as AdCP. * Top milestones ahead for Mr. Katsur. Read: https://lnkd.in/eDh8MQt7

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Most business growth problems aren’t really product problems or pricing problems. They’re communication problems. If people don’t clearly understand who you are, what you do, and why it matters, decisions slow down and opportunities slip away. This article explores why communication and presentation skills quietly shape trust, confidence, and growth — and why improving them is worth your attention. #businesscommunication #presentationskills #businessgrowth #leadershipcommunication #entrepreneurship https://lnkd.in/e8QH-Ych

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Excited to share that Aperiam has invested in Newton Research’s oversubscribed $9M Series A, alongside Greycroft, Bessemer Venture Partners, S4S Ventures, and LiveRamp Ventures. Newton is redefining what agentic AI can do for marketing analytics, enabling brands and agencies to: - Run customer 360 journey analysis across touchpoints - Segment audiences and build predictive models - Automate attribution, incrementality, and media mix modeling - Generate dynamic, natural language-driven reporting - Save up to 126 hours/month and achieve 10x analytics output Their pre-built “blueprints” let non-technical teams securely run advanced analytics on their own data with just a few clicks. John Hoctor, Matthew Emans, and Steven Bennett have successfully built and exited multiple companies. We love to back repeat founders on their most ambitious ideas, like Newton Research. Link to more in comments.

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One thing that really excites me is seeing what other people are building with AI. There are so many use cases that I haven't even considered, yet people/companies are finding ways to margin them. It was really cool to see what my former colleague Ram Y. has been up to at TenorShift. Ram's use case for AI was around monitoring, and surfacing how to respond to scope creek (clients that want you to build, change, modify, update things that are out of your contracts scope). The technology not only checks to see if their request is in scope, but also allows users to update the cost of the contract and send an updated SOW to the client to sign off on. Really cool stuff. Congratulations Ram Y., keep building!

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TrueTrends from Sila's consumer insights unit is a semantic consumer intelligence platform that allows market researchers and marketers to detect trends before they happen. Keyword search is a thing of the past - with multi-category AI, computer vision (image+video - audio coming soon) and semantic understanding powered by LARA, you get an unparalleled vision of what consumers actually want, desire, who they are and their motivations. More importantly, it actively solves challenges and directs R&D. It understands your intent as much as theirs. I think we've all been burned by social listening tools driven by keywords and having to construct boolean operators, and as a result just making outcomes full of biases and frankly untrustworthy with the amount of junk. That's why we've re-written the script on what different data sources, including social, can bring to market research in any language (not just 22 dialects of Arabic). The difference? 118% better content discovery because we understand meaning, not just mentions. More than a marketing tool, this is a way to replace costly trend agencies, test concepts with real behavioral data (not panels of 20 people), and predict outcomes that researchers and marketers can actually trust. Real-time intelligence instead of quarterly reports. A groundbreaking piece of kit the Sila | صلة market research and tech team has worked on tirelessly to cut through the noise, and I've got to say as a completely biased observer, an amazing tool that's already replacing traditional research methods at enterprise level across MENA. More details: https://lnkd.in/d8RFGdfp Reach out if you'd like a demo - I'll show you true trend semantic intelligence vs keyword bingo.

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S4 Capital is betting big on an “agents over agencies” future - framing its downturn while positioning Agentic as a loss leader. The goal: shift from human-led services to AI-led platforms, compress production cycles and repackage creative delivery as managed services. It’s a bold strategy, but also a tough execution challenge: quality, governance and enterprise integration remain critical. The future may not be “agents instead of agencies” but “agents and agencies” working together - using AI to enhance creativity, not hollow it out. Scale, trust and deep client partnerships will ultimately decide who wins. https://lnkd.in/e3zffAyy

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