Author: Greg Kihlström

A split runs through this week’s research, and it’s the uncomfortable kind for CMOs. Companies are pointing AI in two opposite directions. One group uses it to defend what they already do: trimming costs, automating the busywork. The other points it at growth: new revenue channels, a customer experience…

The dominant story in recent enterprise marketing research is a widening execution gap in agentic AI. Investment keeps climbing. Scaling doesn’t. Across the new reports, the same picture keeps surfacing — most organizations are spending on AI without operationalizing it.

Recent research keeps circling the same problem: companies want AI to do more than they’ve built the infrastructure to support, and the gap is starting to show up on the scoreboard. Three findings stand out.

Salesforce agreed to buy Contentful on June 1. Sitecore bought Scrunch on June 3. Inside 48 hours, two of the larger experience-platform vendors paid to move AI agents to the center of how content gets made and found. Salesforce is taking Contentful, the Berlin-founded headless content platform that serves…

Agent-mediated commerce is established and measured on the consumer side. Adobe Analytics recorded generative-AI-referred traffic to US retail sites growing roughly 690% year over year across the 2025 holiday season (Adobe Analytics, 2026); McKinsey estimates conversion from AI-generated product recommendations at about 4.4 times that of traditional search (McKinsey,…

This article was written for MarTech by Greg Kihlström. In agentic commerce, brand shifts from a perception advantage to a verifiable advantage. Customers may still choose brands based on emotion or identity, but their AI agents will evaluate those brands using measurable signals such as price transparency, fulfillment reliability,…

Trust Signal Density is one of six strategic dimensions in the Brand Visibility for Agentic Commerce (BVAC Framework), sitting above the two prerequisites the agent uses to resolve a brand and a product before anything strategic is weighed. It is the dimension that captures whether a brand’s trustworthiness is…

Recent research surfaces a single dominant pattern: the AI infrastructure layer and the data layer underneath it are consolidating faster than most marketing organizations are restructuring around them. Gartner’s latest forecast puts global AI spending at $2.59 trillion in 2026, a 47% jump year-over-year, with enterprises still trailing vendors…

Marketing and sales have been focused on the funnel for decades now, with roles and in some cases, entire teams taking actions to move customers through one stage to the next. Now, with agentic commerce in the rise, the traditional multi-step journey of browsing visual catalogs, reading reviews, comparing…

A growing share of product research, comparison, and purchasing now runs through an AI agent rather than a person. The agent interprets the request, narrows the field, and returns a small set of purchase-ready options, and the customer chooses from those. This is measurable. Adobe Analytics recorded generative-AI-referred traffic…