Category: MarTech Futurist

This week’s research from Gartner and Forrester keeps circling the same (potentially uncomfortable) point for CMOs. AI is pulling apart tools marketers have leaned on for decades, and it’s quietly raising the bar on the work that’s left: brand, customer experience, and commerce all now demand more rigor and…

A split runs through this week’s research, and it’s the uncomfortable kind for CMOs. Companies are pointing AI in two opposite directions. One group uses it to defend what they already do: trimming costs, automating the busywork. The other points it at growth: new revenue channels, a customer experience…

The dominant story in recent enterprise marketing research is a widening execution gap in agentic AI. Investment keeps climbing. Scaling doesn’t. Across the new reports, the same picture keeps surfacing — most organizations are spending on AI without operationalizing it.

Recent research keeps circling the same problem: companies want AI to do more than they’ve built the infrastructure to support, and the gap is starting to show up on the scoreboard. Three findings stand out.

Salesforce agreed to buy Contentful on June 1. Sitecore bought Scrunch on June 3. Inside 48 hours, two of the larger experience-platform vendors paid to move AI agents to the center of how content gets made and found. Salesforce is taking Contentful, the Berlin-founded headless content platform that serves…

Recent research and press releases tell a story vendor marketing won’t. The gap between AI investment and AI readiness keeps widening. CMOs are caught between two pressures at once: deploy AI at scale, while their own customers turn to AI to screen out AI-generated marketing. Better messaging won’t close…

AI made marketing faster at producing almost everything, and the speed has surfaced a quieter problem underneath it. The output now arrives faster than teams can review it, the metrics that used to prove a campaign worked are losing their grip as buyers move to AI, and the customer…

Three years into the enterprise AI cycle, productivity gains are no longer enough to satisfy boards. The gap separating the firms building durable advantage from the firms still chasing tool adoption keeps widening, and the McKinsey, Forrester, and HBR research from this week makes the structural reasons for that…

Recent research surfaces a single dominant pattern: the AI infrastructure layer and the data layer underneath it are consolidating faster than most marketing organizations are restructuring around them. Gartner’s latest forecast puts global AI spending at $2.59 trillion in 2026, a 47% jump year-over-year, with enterprises still trailing vendors…

This week’s scan across Harvard Business Review, McKinsey, Gartner, Forrester, MarketingProfs, and the AMA Journal of Marketing converges on a structural problem: the tactics marketers use to persuade buyers and the metrics they use to prove value both assume a human on the other side. AI now occupies that…