Author: Greg Kihlström

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.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. High-maturity brands spend nearly twice as much on GEO as their peers. Here’s what it takes to win visibility in AI search before competitors become the default answer.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CustomerThink. When purchases are made on behalf of customers without them ever seeing your carefully crafted display ad or landing page before the sale, what is the role of your brand in the transaction? This is an immediate question to consider…

AI investments are actively reshaping the infrastructure of how we engage customers, how buyers discover brands, and how martech platforms compete. Forrester’s Q1 2026 CDP Landscape confirms that agentic AI is poised to transform customer data platforms from data middleware into autonomous engagement engines. Their Experience Optimization Landscape shows…

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. As AI promises to automate 90% of your administrative tasks, are you ready to stake your brand’s future on the remaining 10% — the high-value human judgment machines can’t replicate?

CMOs need to build AI governance and readiness infrastructure now, before the agentic commerce wave fully arrives. The technology is outpacing organizational capability, consumer trust is more fragile than vendor narratives suggest, and budget authority is shifting toward finance. Those who will lead in the months and years ahead…

The promise is intoxicating: “instant users” available 24/7, capable of testing a prototype in minutes rather than weeks, all for a fraction of the cost of recruiting human participants.

What if your AI system is working exactly as designed… and still making your business worse? If you can’t clearly measure AI performance, you can’t confidently say it’s working. Many organizations deploy AI with strong pilots and impressive dashboards but lack a consistent evaluation framework once the system is…