5 AI Tools The Smartest Marketers Are Using In 2026

If you are a marketeer, a founder, someone trying to grow your business in 2026, how should you even do that? What changed in 2025 that should influence how you succeed in 2026. Kip and I have spent more time trying to figure out how AI can help us grow our business, and we're gonna give you the five AI launches that you should know about and master the skills that they've created in 2025 to make sure you show up in 2026 as a winner. We're gonna go through the five launches, exactly what you should be doing with them, and why they were so impactful. All of that and more on this episode of Marketing Against the Grain. Before we get into today's show, here's a quick word from HubSpot. Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty incredible, but that's exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot. They used Breeze, Hub Spot's AI tools, to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch. And the results were pretty incredible. Click through rates jumped 25%. Qualified leads quadrupled, and people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to hubspot.com to see how Breeze can help your business grow. Okay. We are back, Kip. Back, baby. We've had a break. I think the kinda AI Christmas present to myself, being spent a lot of time in Gemini three, thanks for Logan Kilpatrick coming on just before the break and blew all of our minds with incredible Gemini three workflows. You should go check that out. But Opus 4.5 has been my model of choice over the Christmas break. But we are here to talk to you about that very thing. There are so many AI launches. AI launch after AI launch after AI launch. In 2025, it really felt like there was a launch every single day and probably a big launch every couple of weeks. So if you are a marketeer, a founder trying to grow your business, how do you even know what launches matter to you? Well, in this episode, we are gonna give you a breakdown of the top five AI launches that should have transformed the way you work. If you follow this episode, you will get the launches and skills you need to be successful and win in 2026. There's that old quote, you know, that there's some decades nothing happens, and in some weeks, decades happen. Felt like in 2025, decades of progress happened. And what we've done is sorted through the real important things that if you're doing marketing in 2026, these are, like, the five things that you have no excuse that you should be doing. Right. Right? Exactly. So the first kinda category of work that has really transformed because of this launch is content remixing, content repurposing. And this is all because of Gemini three, which launched in November. Gemini three has an incredible native YouTube integration, which means it really deeply understands the videos …