Expert Advice for Marketing Leaders on MarTech, AI, & CX
Insights, ideas, and best practices for marketers that utilize artificial intelligence in their marketing.
Only 32% of U.S. employees are actively engaged at work right now. That number has been falling for five years straight. Companies are spending more than ever on engagement surveys, pulse checks, eNPS scores, and culture consultants. And the needle isn’t moving.
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
While ad executives increasingly leverage AI in creative processes, The AI Gap Widens, new research from IAB and Sonata Insights reveals that consumers hold significantly less positive views on AI-generated advertising than advertisers assume. For senior marketing and customer experience (CX) leaders, addressing this disconnect through strategic disclosure and robust governance is critical to maintaining brand trust and ensuring measurable campaign effectiveness.
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.
As we enter 2026, we find that, while traditional gifting remains important, how we shop for love has changed, and it says as much about our emotional intelligence as it does our need for convenience.
For many enterprise marketing leaders, the reality on the ground feels less like a revolution and more like a series of expensive science fairs. Ambitious projects, meant to redefine the customer experience, often stall out in the pilot phase, never to see the light of day. The graveyard of promising AI proofs-of-concept is getting crowded, and the return on investment remains stubbornly elusive.
The more profound, and frankly more interesting, shift is not in using AI to make ads, but in learning how to advertise within AI itself—specifically, within the conversational interfaces that are rapidly becoming the new front door to the internet for millions. This is uncharted territory, a frontier where the old rules of interruption and impression-based value simply do not apply.
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.
The difference between tools that assist and systems that actually execute work
The relevant question isn’t if AI will fundamentally change our function, but how we, as leaders, will architect that change within our organizations. The most forward-thinking are looking past the simple automation of tasks and toward the augmentation of talent, judgment, and creativity.
