This article was based on the interview with Mark Smith and Raymond Gerber, Co-Founders at Institute for Journey Management by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
Let’s be candid. The term “customer journey” has become one of the most ubiquitous phrases in the modern marketing lexicon. We map them, we analyze them, we talk about optimizing them in nearly every strategy meeting. It’s the conceptual North Star for how we think about customer-centricity. And yet, for many enterprise organizations, the practical application of managing these journeys in a cohesive, orchestrated, and value-driven way remains elusive. We have journey mapping tools, journey analytics platforms, and journey orchestration engines, often operating in their own orbits, creating a fragmented landscape that ironically mirrors the siloed customer experiences we claim to be fixing. It’s a familiar paradox: a universally accepted concept that has stubbornly resisted widespread, transformational success.
This gap between ambition and reality is precisely what has prompted two of the industry’s most respected—and formerly rival—pioneers to join forces. Mark Smith, formerly of Kitewheel, and Raymond Gerber, formerly of Thunderhead, spent years competing head-to-head in the journey orchestration space. Their decision to co-found the new Institute for Journey Management is more than just an interesting footnote in MarTech history; it’s a signal that the entire category may be due for a fundamental reboot. They argue that the technology has been ready for years, but the organizational mindset, the vendor ecosystem, and the strategic frameworks have lagged behind. This isn’t about a new piece of software; it’s about a new way of thinking, built on collaboration and a shared understanding of what “journey-led transformation” truly means.
The Frustration of Unfulfilled Potential
One of the driving forces behind the Institute’s creation was a shared sense of frustration. Both Smith and Gerber had front-row seats to the immense value that true journey management could deliver for brands. They saw the dramatic uplifts in conversion, retention, and customer lifetime value. Yet, despite these clear proof points, the broader market adoption never quite reached the escape velocity they knew was possible. There was a mysterious blocker preventing this powerful capability from becoming a standard pillar of the enterprise MarTech stack.
“The space really hasn’t taken off like both Ray and I know it could. We’ve seen the value that can be delivered from journeys, but not enough companies are getting that value. And so the Institute is essentially an association for this industry to try and help everybody in the industry get better results.” – Mark Smith
This sentiment gets to the heart of the problem. As Gerber pointed out, the vendors themselves, in their race to define and own a category, contributed to the confusion. The industry fractured into silos: journey mapping, journey analytics, journey orchestration, next-best-action, and so on. Each claimed a piece of the “journey,” but few offered a path to integrate them into a holistic system. For marketing leaders, this created a confusing and high-friction buying process. It also made it difficult to build a comprehensive business case when the proposed solutions only addressed a fraction of the overall challenge. The idea of competitors coming together to build a bigger pie for everyone is a refreshing, if overdue, development. It’s a tacit admission that a fragmented market ultimately helps no one—not the vendors, and certainly not the customers.
The Battle of Short-Term Wins vs. Long-Term Transformation
Perhaps the most significant hurdle to journey management adoption is not technological, but organizational and cultural. True journey-centricity is a transformational endeavor. It requires breaking down departmental silos, rethinking KPIs, and committing to a long-term vision. This stands in stark contrast to the quarterly-results-driven reality that most business leaders operate within. The immense, compounding value of a five-year journey transformation plan is often sacrificed for the certainty of a small win this quarter.
“The real benefits from a transformation to become truly journey centric are a long-term win…We’re talking about doubling your growth rate over a five year period… but it often gets left behind. Smaller wins this quarter… When everybody’s in a job for an average of three years, who wants to build a five year plan?” – Mark Smith
This is not news to anyone leading a large team. The pressure to deliver immediate results is immense. The brilliance of the approach Smith and Gerber are championing is its pragmatism. They’re not asking leaders to ignore short-term pressures. Instead, their methodology focuses on achieving the long-term vision through a carefully sequenced series of short-term, value-driven wins. Each step is an incremental move toward being more journey-led, and each step must deliver measurable value that justifies the next. This creates a self-funding, momentum-building flywheel. It reframes transformation not as a single, massive project, but as a continuous process of improvement, where the journey itself becomes the organizing principle for delivering incremental business value along the way.
Journeys Are an Enterprise Sport, Not a CX Solo Act
For journey management to succeed, it must escape the confines of a single department. While the CX or marketing team might be the natural stewards of the initiative, the customer journey is touched by sales, service, product, finance, and operations. Restricting the scope of journey management to a single team’s remit is a recipe for failure, as it ignores the vast majority of interactions that shape the customer’s actual experience.
“One of the key things that the companies have to take on to be successful with this is to realize it’s not just in the CX team… the whole concept of a journey… has to be across the businesses has to be everywhere in the business, not just in the CX team because everything touches the journey.” – Mark Smith
This points to a critical challenge. As Gerber notes, CX teams are often underfunded and lack the broad corporate remit to drive enterprise-wide change. To overcome this, the concept of the journey must be elevated to a strategic business principle, owned by a P&L leader and understood across the C-suite. It needs to become the shared language and framework for how different parts of the organization collaborate to deliver value. This is where the Institute aims to focus its initial efforts: educating business leaders on how to champion “journey-led transformation” and providing them with the methodologies to make it a reality. It’s a shift from seeing journey management as a tool to seeing it as an operating model.
AI: The Accelerant, Not the Silver Bullet
No conversation about the future of marketing technology is complete without discussing AI. However, the Institute’s perspective is refreshingly grounded. Rather than positioning AI as a magical solution, they see it as a powerful accelerant that, in fact, increases the need for robust journey management. The rise of agentic AI, for instance—where automated agents act on behalf of the business or the customer—will create an explosion of new, dynamic, and unscripted interactions. Managing this complexity requires a central “brain” that holds the context of the customer’s entire journey.
“We also see [agentic AI] being a huge driver for the need for journey management because all of a sudden you start inserting a lot more automation and a lot more intelligence into the interactions between customers and businesses. You need a lot more management and context for that, which is exactly what a journey management system provides.” – Mark Smith
This is a crucial insight for marketing leaders. The future isn’t about replacing human-designed journeys with AI-generated ones. It’s about using journey management platforms as the system of record and orchestration to provide the necessary context for AI models to act intelligently and coherently. An AI-powered chatbot, a personalized offer engine, and a proactive service agent are all more effective when they operate with a shared understanding of the customer’s history, intent, and current journey stage. AI provides the horsepower, but the journey management framework provides the rails and the navigation system. This symbiotic relationship will be key to unlocking the next generation of personalized and effective customer experiences.
The journey management space appears to be at an inflection point. The foundational technologies are mature, but the strategic frameworks and organizational alignment required to harness their full potential have been missing. The challenges of a fragmented vendor landscape, the tyranny of short-term thinking, and the persistence of organizational silos have prevented many companies from moving beyond superficial mapping exercises to true, real-time journey orchestration and optimization. The potential for a doubling of growth rates over five years is a compelling prize, but it requires a level of commitment and cross-functional collaboration that has been difficult to muster.
The emergence of the Institute for Journey Management, led by former rivals now united by a common purpose, is a clear sign that the industry recognizes the need for change. Their focus on creating a community for business leaders, establishing shared methodologies, and elevating the conversation to one of “journey-led transformation” is a promising step forward. For marketing leaders and aspiring leaders, this presents a unique opportunity. The path to true customer-centricity has always been through a deep and actionable understanding of the customer journey. Now, it seems the collective will of the industry is finally aligning to help us all get there, together.
