Category: Articles

This article was written for CustomerThink by Greg Kihlström. The Medallia 2026 State of Customer Experience Report reveals a disconnect between how brands perceive the quality of experiences they provide and the consumer reality. While 66% of customer experience practitioners believe experience quality is on the rise, only 17%…

Agentic AI promises autonomous lead research, scoring, and outreach, but experts caution that human oversight and measurable KPIs are critical to avoid compliance risks and brand damage.

The AI conversation in marketing has officially moved past “should we use it?” to “who owns it, and is our data good enough to make it work?” Two HBR pieces this week hit on something CMOs need to take seriously: the C-suite battle over AI governance is happening right…

The practical decisions CMOs need to make are not about which AI tools to buy. They are about whether their organizations have the process discipline, data quality, and governance structures to make any AI investment pay off. The announcements below illustrate both the opportunity and the operational gap in…

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.

While the pursuit of natural language understanding was a necessary step, it often overshadowed a more critical goal: utility. The real measure of success isn’t whether an AI can eloquently apologize for its inability to help, but whether it can actually solve the customer’s problem.

After decades of “spend-to-learn” advertising, are you still paying for consumer insights that AI can generate for free, before a single dollar of media spend?

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

The return from any major industry conference, particularly one as sprawling as NRF, is always accompanied by a familiar sensation: a blend of inspiration, urgency, and a slight case of buzzword fatigue. Every year, a dominant theme emerges from the noise, and for the past few, that theme has…

The rise of generative AI, conversational interfaces, and AI-native browsers represents not just another channel to manage, but a fundamental reordering of the customer journey. We are moving from a world of search queries and results pages to one of conversational discovery and synthesized answers.