Articles Archives

CustomerThink: There Is A Customer Experience Proof Gap… Here’s What To Do About It

Greg Kihlström on March 19, 2026

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% of consumers agree. This perception gap suggests that many enterprise teams operate in an echo chamber.

Agentic AI in Sales: Where Automation Helps, and Where It Hurts

Agile Brand Guide on March 16, 2026

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.

AI readiness is no longer about having the right tools. CMO Futurist | March 15, 2026

Greg Kihlström on March 15, 2026

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 now, and marketing is at risk of losing decision rights over the very tools that will define customer experience for the next decade. If you don’t have a seat at the AI governance table, someone else is making those calls for you.

Yesterday’s MarTech News | March 14, 2026

Agile Brand Guide on March 14, 2026

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 concrete terms.

The Employee Experience Nobody’s Measuring: What Happens When You Remove the Worst Parts of Someone’s Job

Bassem Hamdy on March 11, 2026

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.

Expert Mode: Beyond Deflection – The Rise of Action-Oriented AI in Customer Engagement

Agile Brand Guide on March 10, 2026

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.

Synthesize to Optimize: Inverting the Marketing Funnel From Reactive Optimization to Proactive Simulation

Greg Kihlström on March 9, 2026

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?

CMSWire: How to Govern Creation Sprawl Without Blocking Marketing AI Innovation

Greg Kihlström on March 9, 2026

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

Expert Mode: Navigating the Chasm Between AI Hype and On-the-Ground Reality

Agile Brand Guide on March 3, 2026

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 been, unequivocally, AI. But this year feels different. The conversation has matured, evolving from a general, almost abstract discussion of “AI’s potential” into a far more specific, and frankly, more daunting, dialogue. The new term of art is “agentic AI,” and it represents a fundamental shift in how we must think about commerce, marketing, and the very nature of our customer relationships.

Expert Mode: Beyond the Blue Link: Navigating the New Era of AI-Driven Discovery

Agile Brand Guide on March 1, 2026

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.