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The Weekly Edge: AI Agents, The "Cookie" Apocalypse, and a Fast Food Comeback

December 9, 2025

The Weekly Edge: AI Agents, The "Cookie" Apocalypse, and a Fast Food Comeback

Good Morning

We're deep into December, and while many are winding down, the smartest operators are looking for the edge that will define their Q1. This week, we're talking about the "Agentic AI" revolution that's finally useful, why your SEO strategy might be invisible to half your customers, and how a fast-food icon bet on herself to engineer a massive turnaround.

Let's dive in.

📈 Trending This Week

1. The Rise of "Agentic AI" We've moved past simple chatbots. The buzzword for late 2025 is Agentic AI autonomous digital workers that don't just "chat" but do.

  • The Shift: Instead of asking ChatGPT to "write an email," businesses are deploying AI agents to "monitor this inbox, draft replies to leads, and update the CRM."
  • Why it matters: It shifts AI from a productivity tool to a productivity workforce. Companies deploying these agents are seeing operational costs drop while output scales linearly.

2. The First-Party Data "Gold Rush" With third-party cookies effectively dead in major browsers, the reliance on "rented" audiences is over.

  • The Trend: Brands are aggressively pivoting to First-Party Data strategies. This means prioritising email capture, community building, and direct-to-consumer relationships over reliance on Meta or Google targeting.
  • The Reality: If you don't own your audience data in 2026, you don't own your business.

3. Sustainability is No Longer Optional It's not just for "eco-brands" anymore. Consumer data shows a massive shift: buyers are actively punishing brands with opaque supply chains.

  • The Insight: "Greenwashing" is being called out faster than ever. The growth is coming to companies that treat sustainability as an operational efficiency metric (less waste = higher margins) rather than just a marketing slogan.

🛠️ Tool of the Week

Zapier's "AI Agents" & Copilot

You probably know Zapier as the "glue" of the internet. But their late 2025 update has turned them into an AI powerhouse.

The Update: Zapier has launched Zapier Agents and a natural language Copilot.

Why it's a game-changer:

  • No Code Required: You can now describe a complex workflow in plain English (e.g., "When a new lead comes in, research them on LinkedIn, summarize their recent posts, and draft a personalized outreach email in Gmail"), and the Copilot builds the entire automation for you.
  • Central Intelligence: Instead of paying for a separate "AI Writer" and "AI Researcher," you can use Zapier's built-in AI actions to perform these tasks inside your existing workflows.

The Takeaway: It’s the easiest way to deploy an "AI Workforce" without hiring a single developer.

🚀 Quick Tip / Growth Hack

Optimise for "Voice Search" (VSO)

With the explosion of smart home devices and improved voice assistants in late 2025, over 40% of search queries are now voice-based. If you're only optimising for keywords typed into a Google search bar, you're invisible to this traffic.

The Strategy: Shift your content from "Keywords" to "Conversational Questions."

How to do it:

  1. Audit: Look at your top FAQs.
  2. Rewrite: Rephrase headers to match natural speech patterns.
    • Old Way: "Best CRM Software Pricing"
    • New Way: "How much does a CRM system cost for a small business?"
  3. Structure: Use "Featured Snippet" formatting (bullet points, clear 1-2 sentence answers) immediately after the header.

Why it works: Voice assistants read the "Featured Snippet." If you win that spot, you win the voice search.

💡 Case Study Spotlight

Betting on Herself: The Slutty Vegan Comeback

The Business: Slutty Vegan, the viral plant based burger chain founded by Pinky Cole. The Context: After a meteoric rise, the brand faced financial headwinds and operational bloat in 2024. The "hype" had cooled, and the business fundamentals were being tested.

The Move: In a bold 2025 move, Pinky Cole didn't sell out or step down. She reacquired full ownership of the brand, buying out external partners to regain control.

The Strategy:

  • Consolidation: She closed underperforming locations to stop the bleeding.
  • Focus: She doubled down on the core product and the "experience" that made the brand famous, rather than rapid, unchecked expansion.
  • Franchising: With the ship steadied, she pivoted to a franchising model to scale globally without the heavy capex of corporate-owned stores.

The Result: Slutty Vegan is leaner, profitable again, and expanding into new international markets with a sustainable business model.

The Lesson: Growth at all costs can kill you. Sometimes the smartest "growth" move is to shrink, regain control, and fix the foundation before building the next floor.