Agents now sit on both sides of the transaction. Martech Futurist | June 20, 2026
AI agents now sit on both sides of the transaction. They rank the information that shapes a purchase, they buy on a person’s behalf, and they sell inside answer engines and assistants. Forrester made the stakes plain for marketing leaders this week: brands market to machines as well as…
CMSWire: Forrester CX Forum East: Trust, Governance and Focus Emerge as CX’s New Priorities
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. The talk track is familiar across just about any marketing or customer experience event lately. AI will write your content, route your tickets, predict your churn and book the room before the guest knows they want it.
Are you ready for the B2B buying journey to get cut by 72%? Martech Futurist | June 14, 2026
This week’s signals point to a structural shift in go-to-market architecture, not incremental AI feature adoption. The convergence of AI-mediated B2B buying (HBR’s “dark funnel” research), agentic commerce payment infrastructure (Visa/Mastercard), and persistent gaps in AI ROI measurement creates a strategic inflection point for marketing leaders. CMOs who treat…
Your brand might be the last thing AI can’t copy. Martech Futurist | June 11, 2026
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…
The race that (almost) no one is winning. Martech Futurist | June 7, 2026
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.
Your AI Strategy Is Sitting on a Fault Line. Martech Futurist | June 5, 2026
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.
Most marketing orgs are letting AI replace human judgment without ever deciding to. Martech Futurist | June 2, 2026
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 investment keeps climbing. Performance lags. Martech Futurist | May 27, 2026
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…
Marketing’s persuasion and measurement systems were built for humans. Martech Futurist | May 17, 2026
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…
CMOs won’t be running campaigns, they’ll be orchestrating networks. Martech Futurist | May 9, 2026
The CMO role is being rewritten by the marketing technology (and related) architecture that is running the enterprise. Forrester’s new research makes it explicit: the next-generation CMO isn’t running campaigns, they’re orchestrating networks of AI agents, data pipelines, and human specialists. The question isn’t whether this is coming, or…
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