Author: Greg Kihlström

From Greg Kihlström’s Martech Futurist blog. For two years the marketing conversation treated the model as the prize. Buy access to the best one, wire it into a workflow, wait for the returns. The research surfacing now moves the argument somewhere less comfortable. The model has become the assumed…

More of the buying journey now runs inside AI systems that research products and buy on the customer’s behalf. Advantage is moving to whether those machines can read your brand accurately and trust it enough to recommend it.

Writing in Harvard Business Review, Gaarlandt and colleagues contend that agents shift the balance of power toward brands and away from retailers, because an agent will canvass options a person never would, and they urge brands to pursue what they call AI agent optimization (Gaarlandt et al., 2025). The…

Most of the AI work inside marketing organizations right now generates activity that never reaches the bottom line. Two releases dated July 1, plus two deeper pieces from the past two weeks, explain why, and where leaders are pulling ahead.

Recent research keeps circling the same shift, and it’s a big one. AI has stopped being another tool you bolt onto the martech stack. It’s becoming the layer that sits between your brand and your customer. It’s the intermediary that decides what a buyer sees before they ever reach…

The latest research converges on measurment of the distance between the AI transformation CMOs describe and the operating model they have actually rebuilt. BCG’s survey of 300 global CMOs captures it directly. 96 percent say AI is driving an end-to-end transformation of their function, while 8 percent run campaigns…

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. Unfashionable as it may be to say, direct mail will outlast most of the agentic commerce startups pitching you today. That’s a strange thing to say in a year when AI agents influenced 20% of all Cyber Week orders in…

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. The marketing technology industry names a shift after the part of it that has the best demos and makes the best headlines. We called the last decade “composable” after an architecture, and we are now calling this one “agentic” after…

The Brand Visibility for Agentic Commerce framework has, until now, treated trust as something a brand emits — the structured reviews, certifications, and authority links an agent can weight when it decides whether a product is credible. That’s one direction. The developments of late 2025 and 2026 have opened…

Recent research signals a pivotal inflection point for marketing organizations: AI is moving beyond merely a productivity tool to become the operating system of marketing itself. But the gap between AI’s promise and its practical deployment is widening, not narrowing. Three structural tensions are emerging that CMOs must confront…