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Yesterday, I attended the Meltwater Summit in New York City and, unsurprisingly, heard a lot about AI. (And that’s not just because I moderated a panel about how AI is impacting the news business.) Meltwater CEO John Box opened the summit by sharing some information about how marketers are using the technology. While martech budgets rise and the pressure is increasing for corporate America to start using generative AI, 43% of marketers don’t know how to get value out of it.

Meltwater unveiled Mira, its new marketing-focused AI agent platform, as part of the keynote address. And while Mira is a new tool—which many attendees were excited about—its existence doesn’t change the fundamental issue that many marketers are having with AI: They need to learn how to use it, experiment with different functions, learn what it can do and discover its value. Rob Harles, CEO and founder of experiential digital marketing agency dig.human, said on a panel that the No. 1 question he gets from clients is how they can use AI to derive a measurable business impact.

“The harder question to answer is: What does it all mean? That’s the question I’ve had from pretty much every client, which is: I don’t know how my bit fits into the overall business plan,” Harles said. “I don’t know if it’s driving revenue, I don’t know if it’s driving acquisition, I don’t know if it’s driving conversion. I’m not sure if any of this stuff is going to help me keep my customers.”

This question is especially difficult to answer, he said, because there is not a single solution for every client. Brittany Paxman, managing partner of communication strategy firm Point 600, said that while AI can collect and synthesize data, it’s really up to humans to bring meaning to it. Point 600 is using AI to put the data together using metrics including history, sentiment analysis and penetration—based on client needs—to help people make better informed decisions. And, Harles added, humans are needed to make AI useful: It’s only as good as the questions it’s asked.

Humans are also needed to actually do the creative work of marketing and PR. AI is often used as a tool to help enhance and build on creativity, but that can be controversial. Freelance marketplace Fiverr has been leaning into permissive use of AI through marketing campaigns, loudly saying that its freelancers sometimes use AI as a tool to further improve their work. Fiverr recently launched its own AI tool, Fiverr Go, which “learns” from the style of creators so they can do what they do better. I talked to Fiverr CMO Matti Yahav about this campaign and the use of AI in marketing. An excerpt from our conversation appears later in this newsletter.

Tariffs are having a major impact on consumers' plans and spending.

Tariffs are dominating consumers’ plans and spending—even if they aren’t seeing the added costs just yet. The Conference Board’s most recent Consumer Confidence Index, released last week, fell nearly 8 points in April alone. The Expectations Index, based on short-term outlooks for business, income and the labor market, dropped 12.5 points last month to 54.4—the lowest since 2011. A recent Gallup online survey found 90% of consumers expect prices on most items to go up.

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