Author: Greg Kihlström

The AI conversation in marketing has officially moved past “should we use it?” to “who owns it, and is our data good enough to make it work?” Two HBR pieces this week hit on something CMOs need to take seriously: the C-suite battle over AI governance is happening right…

Recent intelligence points to a single strategic imperative for CMOs: the marketing function must be rebuilt for an AI-mediated world, not just augmented with AI tools. The shift from human-driven to agent-mediated discovery, purchase, and loyalty is not a future scenario — it is an active transition. McKinsey’s $3-5…

After decades of “spend-to-learn” advertising, are you still paying for consumer insights that AI can generate for free, before a single dollar of media spend?

In short, “creation sprawl” refers to the AI-driven proliferation of small tools and automations across marketing that outpaces oversight, leading to inconsistency, risk and rework. Let’s explore how we got here, and what can be done about it

The latest intelligence converges on a single, urgent message for marketing leaders: the AI transition is no longer a future planning exercise — it is a present-tense leadership test. Three interconnected themes dominate the landscape:

If you don’t own evaluation, you don’t own outcomes. You own activity, which looks great right up until it doesn’t. Vendor dashboards and “model quality” metrics are not the same thing as operational performance across real workflows.

Personalization is what you infer. Customization is what customers choose. If you want durable engagement, treat preferences as a first-class product surface, not a settings page nobody trusts.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. Salesforce data shows where AI agents drove growth, conversion and efficiency during the holidays — and what marketers should do next.

Agentic AI in marketing is not about “more content with fewer people,” but about how fast you can respond, how relevant you can be, and how safely you can operate across your most important domains. The meaningful frame for executives is simple: focus on a small, governed portfolio of…

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CustomerThink. If your customer stays with you in a downturn, is it because they love your brand? Or is it because they just don’t have the energy to try someone else again?