Tag: Greg Kihlström

From Greg Kihlström on the Martech Fururist blog. A survey of enterprise deployments finds that identity is the control organizations are least likely to have put in place. Perimeter research finds the same requirement outside the firewall, where an agent reaching your site may belong to a customer, a…

Marketing agents are moving from recommending a decision to executing it, on budgets, targeting, and messaging, often before any human reviews the choice. The ceiling on how much of that work an organization can hand over is no longer set by model capability. It is set by two things…

The Brand Visibility for Agentic Commerce framework scores a brand’s data surface — what an agent can resolve, compare, and trust — and the implicit assumption is that the agent is a fixed quantity the data is measured against. The evidence says the agent is a variable too. A…

Reposted from GregKihlstrom.com: Recent research across Forrester, Gartner, and adjacent CX coverage converges on the same seam. Adoption has stopped being the variable that separates leaders from the field. Roughly nine in ten organizations are piloting or running AI in some form, and the number keeps climbing across every…

From Greg Kihlström’s Martech Futurist blog. For two years the marketing conversation treated the model as the prize. Buy access to the best one, wire it into a workflow, wait for the returns. The research surfacing now moves the argument somewhere less comfortable. The model has become the assumed…

The AI-in-marketing story spent two years as a forecast. They have started producing tangible takeaways, and they point away from where most of the money has gone. Gartner found customers are three times more likely to resolve a service issue with a third-party tool like ChatGPT than with a…

More of the buying journey now runs inside AI systems that research products and buy on the customer’s behalf. Advantage is moving to whether those machines can read your brand accurately and trust it enough to recommend it.

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…

Most of the AI work inside marketing organizations right now generates activity that never reaches the bottom line. Two releases dated July 1, plus two deeper pieces from the past two weeks, explain why, and where leaders are pulling ahead.

Recent research keeps circling the same shift, and it’s a big one. AI has stopped being another tool you bolt onto the martech stack. It’s becoming the layer that sits between your brand and your customer. It’s the intermediary that decides what a buyer sees before they ever reach…