🖼️🤔 Your life is one big reCAPTCHA now.

AI slop is getting its share of backlash these days, but it’s bigger than that. Even if you’re not a YouTuber or influencer like Joss Fong, you may still be asked to prove you’re a human. Maybe that means choosing words and punctuation that AI doesn’t often use. Maybe that means being explicit when you are using AI, like our email signatures that say “Sent from my iPhone, please forgive any typos”. In any case, it’s not necessarily a backlash against AI — it’s a defense mechanism for how we’re all using it. It’s a wall against being duped. Are you already going out of your way to prove your own humanness in your projects?

👩‍🚀🚀 Got project delays? So does the Artemis II mission.

Don’t get me wrong, getting 4 people safely around the dark side of the moon and back is literally the definition of mission-critical. And while I’m as excited as any space nerd, I am happy to see that a liquid hydrogen leak that could endanger lives has been deemed a good reason to push back the launch by a month. It’s important to remember what the purpose of your project is. Is it to launch on time at any cost, or is it to improve lives?

🤖🔎 SERP church and state may be getting separated.

Specifically, sites may soon be able to opt-out of Google’s AI Overviews without opting out of search entirely. The UK’s competition authority, the CMA, has proposed a new set of rules for this, and Google is allegedly considering applying this globally. Still unclear, though, about whether that’s even wise given that zero-click searches continue to become the norm, but it might at least release pressure from SEO specialists resorting to guerrilla SEO tactics on Facebook groups, reddit, and LinkedIn posts.

👩‍🚀 🚀 AI-ready entrepreneurs may have an unfair advantage. Heck, the folks in their 20s building AI-native businesses could become your employer’s biggest competition. But beyond the younger generation’s exposure to AI, perhaps the biggest advantage they have is that the older generations will underestimate them. (Or has that always been true?)

📱💼 TikTok has been “saved”… sort of. The deal to transfer control of TikTok’s US user data and US operations to a new joint venture has finally closed. That’s made throngs of creators happy who rely on TikTok for their livelihood, but it has its critics as well. Either way, make no mistake: this is neither the first nor the last time that user data will find itself at the center of geopolitics — and that’s worth remembering when your stakeholders are being lackadaisical about privacy, security, and data homing.

💾 💽 Maybe our civilizational OS is upgrading? This is a bit of a deeper cut, but my friend Cassie shared this article called “The End Of Fictions” by Azeem Azhar. It puts into context rapid advances in technology over the past 2 decades and how it’s gotten us to the new world we find ourselves in today. It may or may not be your cup of tea, but it’ll make you think.

🛍️👾 Ad agencies now need to sell to AI agents. On the heels of CES, some are claiming that the nature of advertising is changing. You could argue that “selling to agents” is just an evolution of the AEO/GEO game. But with ads coming to ChatGPT and Shopify and Google unveiling their universal commerce protocol (think MCP for agentic shopping), and Reddit launching its AI ad platform, it’s hard not to wonder if agencies should be pivoting hard to service early adopters or wait and see where the dust settles.

🛡️🗣️ X “fixes” Grok. And while it might not be the perfect solution to a wider problem of the culture around non-consensual sexualized AI deepfakes, it’s still a win worth celebrating. In a world where big tech and pushy governments seem to be able to do whatever they want, it’s nice that our collective voices can still influence change starting with individuals, then regional governments, then countries, and beyond.

👓☃️ The metaverse enters its ice age. Last week, Meta indicated plans to cut 10% of its Reality Labs Division and announced it would shut down some of its studios working on VR titles. This comes as little surprise given Meta’s decision to focus on AI-powered wearables late last year. My take? VR will be back. Right now we’re living WALL-E (2008), but Ready Player One (2018) is just around the corner.

🍎👾 Apple is planning to use a version of Gemini for Apple Intelligence. This announcement triggered heaps of discourse on LinkedIn and reddit. But ultimately these tech giants have a lot of layers of partnerships — this just happens to be a notable one. In fact, I’m starting to think that the eventual impact of AI will be less about technology and more about building a megacorp like WALL-E’s ‘Buy n Large Corporation’.

🤖💬 Slackbot is an agent now. A few months ago, I joked that our LLMs were just fancy DOS prompts. But now Slack could become the orchestration interface and AI team mate for the next phase of digital, multi-tool ways of working. Tie that in with some of the AI-enabled hardware tech featured at CES, and we’re properly moving into Jetsons territory. Also, suddenly I’m glad I’ve always been nice to Slackbot…

🎮🛠️ AI might be turning us all into gamers. A friend pointed me to this Reid Hoffman article about the fact that we can build any tool we need to make the things in our brain a reality. He equates the current state of AI to Minecraft. But if you’ve ever played Minecraft with my son and I, you know that also comes along with a debt of abandoned worlds. Liza Adams faces this down head-on with some interesting stats on how many AI teammates and GPTs made the cut after everyone of experimentation. So, basically this is also a PSA to say: experiment hard, but be prepared to tidy up as we exit the AI honeymoon phase in 2026.

😑 Having humans in the loop isn’t always better. Between the Disney-themed AI slop coming out of Sora since OpenAI licensed Disney character IP, and the conspiracy theories spun by humans from deeper access to (sometimes inaccurate information), it’s clear that the trick is having a “good” human in the loop. Perhaps there should be a certification for THAT? 😜

🐷 Merriam-Webster has selected “slop” as their 2025 word of the year. “Touch grass” also made the cut. Farm animals everywhere are rejoicing. It’s just been that kind of year, I suppose.

😎 Reality (albeit augmented) is still preferable to Ready Player One dystopia. With Meta shifting funds from metaverse to AI glasses and wearables, Google poised to try smart glasses again in 2026, and rumours circulating about Apple Glasses, it may be time to have a few HUD contractors on call.

📵👩‍🎤 Australia’s under-16 social media ban is in effect. That might not sound like DPM news — and we’re only a day in — but if other countries start to follow suit, there may need to be an entirely different approach to some of your social media campaigns or creator-focused strategies.

💣📺 Using AI for holiday ad campaigns is dicey. Actually, it’s like testing your new camera gear on a Superbowl spot. From Coca-Cola to McDonald’s, there’s more than a few examples. The agencies behind them defend the effort involved from their teams. Or are they just protecting their billable hours? Have any of you worked on a campaign with AI-generated video? Does this backlash undervalue the effort involved?

🔌💁 MCP is the API of the AI world, and it might get messy. Google announced they will be launching managed MCP servers to help AI agents connect to their tools, saving potentially weeks of a developer’s time. But it’s also more important than ever for us project leaders to know how to navigate the conversations. (Oh, and coincidentally we’re doing an event in a few hours focusing specifically on MCP for PMs!)

🌜☄️The next generation of boutique splinter agencies is coming. As expected, Omnicom finalized its acquisition of Interpublic Group, putting an estimated 4,000 agencies jobs on the line across retired brands including FCB, DDB, and MullenLowe. That means great talent hitting the market who might opt to create their own agencies instead of joining back up with another global agency conglomerate… which might mean more jobs?

🤖💙 Agile values and AI tools can co-exist. This conversation with Anu Smalley reminded me that AI and Agile aren’t in conflict — they’re complementary. Agile teams experiment, learn, and adapt, and AI simply gives them faster feedback loops to work with. But what’s important is that the “why” around decision-making stays human while AI supports the “how”. Also, it reminded me that most Agile teams don’t see their methods as “project management”…

💼😶 AI is technically capable of doing the jobs of 11.7% of the US workforce. As part of a study by MIT and Oak Ridge, researchers built a digital twin of every American worker, ran it on the world’s fastest supercomputer, and mapped 32,000 skills against 13,000 production-ready AI tools. So the tech is there, but our economies aren’t yet rushing towards replacing people (and that’s reassuring).