This Issue's TLDR...

• How to clone the brain of your favorite thought leader
• Hourly ranking on Amazon
• The dangers of AWD

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My favorite bit of content from the past week-ish was my buddy Adam Runquist's YouTube video, Cloning the Godfather of Amazon PPC, in which he cloned the brain of Chris Rawlings.

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Adam has been in the AI Lab a lot lately, building all sorts of cool tools and automations using AI...specifically, with Anthropic/Claude.

I love what he's been doing, and with every new release, I follow along and tinker, and use it as an opportunity to think through new AI use cases.

But, here's my problem...

I'm not a Claude guy.

My company isn't a Claude company.

I'm, increasingly, a Google guy.

And, my company is a Google company.

So, where I struggle with a lot of the AI content and tools that some of the best and brightest in the Amazon space are putting out is...

...It requires me to fragment my tech stack and skillset.

It requires me to climb a learning curve each time.

In an effort to become *more* productive, paradoxically, I've become...less productive.

This realization hit me HARD about a month ago.

I was leading an internal training for my team, part of which involved a Claude Code walk-through and application set-up.

But, we're not a Claude company.

So none of us could really do the thing I wanted us to do, because we didn't have an enterprise plan with Claude.

That led to some reflection, and a pronouncement the next day that:

"We're a Google company, and all of the AI tools and automations that we build will be in the Google AI suite, from here forward."

It also prompted this LinkedIn post:

So what, Jon?

Well, to bring this full circle, back to Adam's original video walk-though of his cloning of Chris Rawlings' brain...

I did the same thing. But with Google.

Here's how:

STEP 1 (The Extraction):

• Download the YouTube to NotebookLM Chrome extension. Then, head over to the Youtube channel of your choosing and either add to a current NotebookLM or create a new one.
• In Gemini, add the relevant NotebookLM as a source, and ask it to extract all the key strategies, tactics, procedures, and approaches to optimizing an Amazon PPC campaign.
• Once the step above is done, ask Gemini to draft Instructions for a Gem, where the purpose of the Gem is to audit a brands PPC performance, based on the PPC strategy document.

STEP 2 (The Collision):

• With the Gem that you've just built, upload your [Amazon Business Reports, SQP reports, Bulk PPC files...you choose] and ask it to analyze the data using the strategy framework.

STEP 3 (The Output):

• This isn't a necessary step, but if you wanted to then present the PPC analysis to an external audience or a leadership team, you could either (a) have the Gem summarize the analytical findings and recommendations in a Canvas or (b) use a Gem that you've previously created, with your brand guidelines, to build a slide deck.

Super simple, right?

Like I said on LinkedIn, I'm betting that the ultimate winners of the "AI wars" will converge on feature parity and similar functionality.

I'm betting on Google to be one of the winners, and to continuously match or exceed the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI.

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BEST from the Group Chats

This question recently popped up in one of my group chats:

Two of the solutions offered were Datarova and Data Dive.

And one of the comments in response to this question was:

"It's [hourly tracking] a silly thing to pursue"

...Which I agree with.

But, nevertheless, if you're looking for a tool that does this, check out ASINsight.

Here's what it looks like:

BEST from LinkedIn

For every AWD success story that I hear about, I probably hear 11-12 horror stories. Which...isn't a great hit rate.

I've had off-the-record chats with different Amazonians within the AWD business unit and my main takeaways have been:

1. The AWD team is well-intentioned and knows what is needed to improve the product/program, but is running into the common problem at Amazon of having resource requests "fall below the line"
2. The Amazon S-team is committed to investing CapEx elsewhere (notably, AI infrastructure)

Thanks, Burak, for your perspective here.

BEST from X

I'm generally ambivalent about AI generated content, but...This is super cool.

ChatCut @chatcutapp IT FUCKING HAPPENED. Seedance 2.0 now works with the @openclaw agent inside @chatcutapp. This UGC video was generated entirely with Seedance 2.0 after I sent an Amazon link. The agent crawled the page, extracted product info and photos, then fed the right assets into Seedance 3:20 PM • Feb 12, 2026 509 Retweets 6365 Likes Read 272 replies

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