Tag: Greg Kihlström

For consumer direct-to-consumer brands, the practical exposure is sharper than the general case. DTC catalogs carry the densest promotional treatment of any category, they are co-listed on marketplaces that compete for the same agent attention, and the consumer agent’s selection behavior has now been measured directly. The Brand Visibility…

Marketing and sales have been focused on the funnel for decades now, with roles and in some cases, entire teams taking actions to move customers through one stage to the next. Now, with agentic commerce in the rise, the traditional multi-step journey of browsing visual catalogs, reading reviews, comparing…

Consumer backlash to AI-generated marketing or customer service is not so much a reactionary rejection of technology itself as it is the culmination of a decades-long trend of consistent consumer resistance to inauthenticity, deception, and the degradation of the user experience in favor of corporate efficiency. The rush to…

A growing share of product research, comparison, and purchasing now runs through an AI agent rather than a person. The agent interprets the request, narrows the field, and returns a small set of purchase-ready options, and the customer chooses from those. This is measurable. Adobe Analytics recorded generative-AI-referred traffic…

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?

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.

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…

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.…

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 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…