Author: Greg Kihlström

Are you building an organization of marketers using AI tools, or an organization of AI agents managed by marketers? This question usually earns me a few nervous laughs when I …

This article was written for MarTech by Greg Kihlström. We’re experiencing a conflict between the economic pressure to produce quick and cheap research results and the scientific demand for rigor. Hundreds, if not thousands, of lifelike personas can be generated within minutes by vendors promising strong results. But these…

The CMO’s job in 2026 is to be an AI realist, not an AI enthusiast. This means making hard decisions about where AI creates genuine competitive advantage and where it creates the illusion of progress.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. In economically uncertain times, it would seem safe to assume the best way to win over customers hinges on this uncertainty. Yet, relying on price as a primary market differentiator is growing increasingly unsustainable for CPG brands. This is no…

The CMOs who will win this race are building data infrastructure, rethinking how they earn (not buy) attention, and putting governance frameworks around agentic AI before they need them, not as they are in the midst of a critical project. The gap between AI ambition and AI execution is…

Have you ever shipped an AI capability that looked great on launch day, then quietly started making your customer experience worse, one “personalized” suggestion at a time? This is the part of the AI story that rarely shows up in vendor demos. A model can be well-designed, thoroughly tested,…

The AI transformation of marketing is no longer a future-state planning exercise, but rather a present-tense organizational redesign challenge.

The CMO role is being redefined in real time. This week, Oracle embedded AI agents into marketing command centers, Visa built infrastructure for AI agents to complete purchases autonomously, and OpenAI announced plans to become a $2.5B advertising platform by year’s end. These go beyond incremental updates to structural…

Recent from Gartner, Forrester, and Salesforce converges on a single uncomfortable truth: the AI investment cycle is entering a reckoning phase. The hype-to-reality gap is widening, and CMOs who haven’t built the operational infrastructure to support AI at scale are now facing compounding disadvantages — not just in efficiency,…

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. What failed as consumer hype is reemerging as infrastructure for AI agents, autonomous transactions, and machine-to-machine CX.