Author: Greg Kihlström

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…

The latest intelligence from Forrester, Gartner, HBR, and MarketingProfs converges on an uncomfortable truth for marketing leaders that I’ve discussed several times before in this series: AI adoption is accelerating faster than organizational readiness. The gap between what AI can do and what marketing teams are actually equipped to…

AI agents now sit on both sides of the transaction. They rank the information that shapes a purchase, they buy on a person’s behalf, and they sell inside answer engines and assistants. Forrester made the stakes plain for marketing leaders this week: brands market to machines as well as…

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. The talk track is familiar across just about any marketing or customer experience event lately. AI will write your content, route your tickets, predict your churn and book the room before the guest knows they want it.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. By now, we’ve all seen the demo where an agent takes a one-line brief and hands back a finished campaign in matter of minutes. It is impactful the first time you see it, but upon more reflection it leaves a…

This week’s research, insights, and news provide a consistent signal from the analyst desks: the limiting factor on AI value is organizational, and the vendor market is reorganizing to sell against that limit. Forrester argues that agentic AI inherits and amplifies the flaws of the operating model it runs…

For most of the past year, Protocol Readiness was the dimension a brand could defer. The standards that let an agent transact with a merchant were drafts, the integrations were pilots, and the reasonable position was to watch.