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®.
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.
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 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.
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.
The Smarter Sorting study, Product Truth in the Age of Agentic Commerce: A Multi-Platform Evaluation of AI Shopping Systems’ Accuracy, Completeness, and Regulatory Reliability (2025), exposes persistent challenges in delivering “product truth”—a SKU-level representation that is accurate, complete, and regulatory-aligned.
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.
Retail Media Networks (RMNs) are no longer the new kid on the block; they are a multi-billion-dollar line item on nearly every CPG P&L. The promise was alluring: leverage rich, first-party shopper data to reach consumers at the point of purchase. Yet, for many seasoned marketing leaders, the reality has been more complicated.
