This Week in Marketing Technology, AI, and CX Podcasts | May 21, 2026
This week’s lineup of conversations on The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström centers on a single, urgent question: what does it actually take to operate a modern marketing and CX function when AI is reshaping discovery, execution, organizational structure, and the platform landscape all at once?
How Purchase Decisions Now Form Before the Customer Is Involved
A growing share of product research and buying now runs through an AI agent rather than a person. The agent reads the request, narrows the field, and hands back a few options ready to buy. The customer picks from a list someone else built.
Brand Visibility for Agentic Commerce: A Diagnostic Framework
Most brands are still optimizing for the wrong reader. The work that earns attention from a human shopper — narrative, design, persuasive merchandising — is largely invisible to the system that now determines whether the brand reaches that shopper at all. The Brand Visibility for Agentic Commerce (BVAC) Framework…
CMSWire: User Experience Design Tips … For the Agentic CX World
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. Since User Experience (UX) has been a discipline, the “user” has been synonymous with a human being for obvious reasons: humans were the consumers of software tools, websites, mobile apps and all the other experiences that fall under this umbrella.…
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…
Greg Kihlström Named #1 Global Thought Leader and Influencer on Customer Experience for Third Consecutive Year
Greg Kihlström has been named the #1 Global Thought Leader and Influencer on Customer Experience for 2026 by Thinkers360, marking the third consecutive year he has topped the ranking. The annual leaderboard, released on May 17, 2026, recognizes the 50 individuals Thinkers360 identifies as the most influential voices in…
New Book on Building and Scaling Modern Marketing Operations from Greg Kihlström and Publisher De Gruyter Brill
Marketing Operations: Strategy, Implementation, and Optimization of Marketing Teams, Processes, and Platforms by Greg Kihlström offers a practical framework for leaders seeking stronger alignment, governance, measurement, and operational maturity
Redefining Customer Service and Returns for the Agentic Era
AI is working its way through the buyer’s journey. The 2025 holiday season saw a 693% jump in AI-driven traffic from the previous year, as customers are increasingly relying on AI-based chat interfaces to help them in the initial search and discovery process for all manner of things, from…
Measuring AI adoption is one thing. Measuring impact will get real results. Martech Futurist | April 30, 2026
Recent research from Forrester, Gartner, and HBR converges on a hard truth: the AI transition in marketing has moved past experimentation — and most teams aren’t ready for what comes next. Forrester’s Brian Hopkins identifies the core failure: we’re tracking prompts run and content generated, not pipeline influenced and…
Micro-productivity can’t be all there is to gain from AI. Martech Futurist | May 2, 2026
This week’s research from HBR, Forrester, and MarketingProfs paints a clear picture: the CMOs winning with AI aren’t the ones with the most tools — they’re the ones who’ve redesigned how work actually gets done. Meanwhile, Forrester is projecting that 3 in 10 enterprises will actively damage customer experience…
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