OpenAI has appointed former Uber President Jill Hazelbaker as Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, according to Storyboard18. The article body focuses on influencer marketing, quoting Ajay Kulkarni, Business Head at Barcode Entertainment, who said brands will want in-house expertise for any medium that has grown fast and is operating at scale, while agencies will continue to play an important role in executing large-scale campaigns and delivering strategic insights. Kulkarni noted that some large-scale influencer programmes involve thousands, and in certain cases tens of thousands, of creators, making campaign execution complex. He said a significant part of transactional influencer marketing will increasingly get automated, with strategic value lying elsewhere, and argued that the next phase of agency differentiation will depend on combining management consulting capabilities with influencer marketing execution expertise. He acknowledged that agencies and production houses could compete for the same finite advertising budgets as connected television, creator-led intellectual property and digital entertainment compete for brand investment, with competition increasingly depending on strategic capabilities rather than execution alone. Kulkarni also described a convergence between traditional companies and independent creators, saying companies are trying to become influencers and influencers are trying to become companies, citing Bhuvan Bam and Kusha Kapila as examples of personalities expanding beyond conventional endorsement arrangements.