Expert Advice for Marketing Leaders on MarTech, AI, & CX
Expert mode marketing technology, AI, and customer experience articles for marketers and other professionals from The Agile Brand Guide®.
In the relentless pursuit of customer loyalty, we marketing leaders are often caught in a familiar cycle. We build intricate points-based programs, optimize our funnels for retention, and pour resources into personalized communications, all in an effort to keep customers from straying. We treat loyalty as an outcome to be engineered, a line item on a P&L to be maximized.
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. Agentic AI is
intermediating the consumer-brand relationship, changing how products are discovered, evaluated and purchased.
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.
In the boardroom, the debate often plays out like a zero-sum game: “Should we put the budget into PR or Marketing?” The CFO wants measurable ROI immediately, pointing toward the granular tracking of digital advertising. The CMO argues for brand sentiment and long-term positioning. They are both asking the wrong question.
For decades, the contact center has occupied a specific, and often siloed, space in the enterprise org chart. It was the necessary, if not always beloved, cost center—a reactive function designed to triage problems and, hopefully, mitigate customer frustration. As marketing leaders, we’ve often viewed it as a parallel, but separate, track to our proactive brand-building and demand-generation efforts. We build the brand promise; they deal with the operational reality when things don’t go exactly as planned. This entire paradigm, however, is being dismantled and reassembled at a startling pace, and the catalyst is, unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence.
With generative AI accelerating production cycles to near-instantaneous speeds, the industry-wide obsession shifted toward how much we could produce and how fast we could ship it. Yet, as we look back at the creative that actually moved the needle, a different story emerges: speed without soul is merely noise.
For many organizations, the design system has become a gilded cage—a beautifully crafted set of constraints that now stifles innovation, slows down digital transformation, and creates more friction than it removes. It’s the digital equivalent of paving a cow path; it makes the existing route smoother but does little to help you get to a new destination faster.
AI doesn’t correct bad data. It does produce confident output built on
whatever you feed it. Because of this, most “AI failures” are actually
upstream data governance failures hiding behind polished outputs. Leaders
should treat data readiness as a product, with clear owners, thresholds,
and controls that prevent confident nonsense from scaling.
Bloomreach, the AI company for personalization, today announced its AI-powered marketing and search solutions are now available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. Bloomreach’s inclusion on AWS Marketplace will offer seamless integration of its tools with technology stacks built on Amazon Web Services, allowing more businesses around the world to recognize the impact of marketing and search powered by the company’s proprietary Loomi AI.
Let’s face it. The pressure to integrate AI into every facet of marketing is immense. Boards are asking about it, CEOs are mandating it, and our teams are navigating a veritable Cambrian explosion of tools, each promising to unlock unprecedented efficiency and personalization.
