Ep 28. Apple Finally Showed Up to AI — And the Ad Industry Should Be Paying Attention, with Chris Kelly, Upwave

Apple announced its long-awaited Siri overhaul — and the reviews are basically "welcome to 2023." It's built on Gemini under the hood, while Apple simultaneously runs a privacy campaign aimed squarely at Google. Meanwhile, SpaceX went public at a two-trillion-dollar valuation, Anthropic and OpenAI both filed for IPOs with wildly different burn rates, and Anthropic dropped a new model called Mythos that's apparently too dangerous for the public to touch. This week, Shiv flies solo with Chris Kelly — founder and CEO of Upwave, his neighbor and friend — for a conversation that ranges from Apple's AI catch-up to the economics of the AI arms race to what real, concrete AI transformation looks like inside a measurement company. Chris breaks down why nobody should hold a year-old AI opinion against a current AI model — a year is "light years" in this space — and why Apple's massive iPhone distribution and head start on voice could let it make up ground faster than its brand reputation suggests. He also makes the case that AI conversations reveal far richer upper-funnel context than search ever could, opening up entirely new categories of ad units that don't exist today. And he pushes back on one of the most common AI marketing claims out there: that AI collapses the consumer journey. Some purchases still take three years, AI or not. They also get into why Anthropic going public might eventually mean an ads business — Super Bowl irony and all — why Google's AI strategy is really about embedding AI into every surface it owns rather than building a destination app, and why predictive brand lift could triple how much of the industry's advertising actually gets measured. Learn more about the AI Literacy Alliance at uof.digital/alliance New episodes every two weeks. Get your AI Edge here.