Expert Mode: From Personalization to Agentic Transformation
For the better part of two decades, we, as marketing leaders, have been on a relentless quest for the holy grail of personalization. We’ve invested millions in data platforms, segmentation models, and automation engines, all in the service of delivering the right message to the right person at the…
Expert Mode: The Human Glitch in the AI Loyalty Machine with Phaedon’s Jaclyn Wands
The current sprint to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into every facet of the customer experience feels less like a marathon and more like a land rush. Every vendor, every platform, and every internal roadmap is screaming “AI-powered personalization.” The promise, as we all know, is a seamless, predictive, and…
Identity Legibility Assumes the Agent Can Reach You
Writing in Harvard Business Review, Gaarlandt and colleagues contend that agents shift the balance of power toward brands and away from retailers, because an agent will canvass options a person never would, and they urge brands to pursue what they call AI agent optimization (Gaarlandt et al., 2025). The…
From AI Output to Business Outcome: Solving Marketing’s New Coordination Problem
The initial thrill of generating a sonnet about SaaS pricing models in three seconds has, for most marketing leaders, given way to a more pragmatic and pressing question: where is the ROI? We’ve all seen individual productivity spike. A content writer can now produce three blog post drafts in…
Zeta Global: AI-Driven Commerce: Reimagining Consumer Engagement and Brand Loyalty
According to From Discovery to Checkout: How AI Is Changing Consumer Behavior, new research from Zeta Global, senior marketing and CX leaders must understand this evolving landscape to build trust, foster loyalty, and drive measurable outcomes in an AI-powered commerce environment.
Expert Mode: Cutting Through the AI Noise to Build a Real-World Strategy with Daniella Harkins, LiveRamp
The pressure on marketing leaders to “have an AI strategy” is palpable. It’s a recurring line item on board meeting agendas and a constant hum in the background of every planning session. The vendor landscape, of course, has responded in kind, with every platform suddenly rebranded as a revolutionary,…
Optimizely: AI in Marketing: The Reality of More Work, Not More Time
While AI promises increased efficiency, faster content creation, and streamlined workflows, a recent study by Optimizely reveals a more complex reality. The findings, based on a survey of over 2,000 B2B marketing leaders across seven global markets, indicate that current AI adoption often leads to fragmented efforts, increased manual…
MarTech: 3 direct mail lessons for evaluating agentic commerce
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. Unfashionable as it may be to say, direct mail will outlast most of the agentic commerce startups pitching you today. That’s a strange thing to say in a year when AI agents influenced 20% of all Cyber Week orders in…
CMSWire: Why Databricks CustomerLake Just Rewired the CDP Space
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. The marketing technology industry names a shift after the part of it that has the best demos and makes the best headlines. We called the last decade “composable” after an architecture, and we are now calling this one “agentic” after…
The New Cadence of Strategy in a World of Constant Disruption with JD Carter from Vasion
The pace of change, driven by everything from geopolitical tremors to the relentless advance of artificial intelligence (AI), has rendered such static planning obsolete, if not outright dangerous. Today, strategy isn’t a destination you map out once a year; it’s a continuous process of navigation through a fog that…
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