Tag: Greg Kihlström

The throughline this week is the graduation of AI from a personal accelerant into the operating layer of the marketing function itself—and the stubborn, decisive role humans keep playing in making that shift actually work. Across them, the same refrain surfaces: keep a human in the loop, measure outcomes…

A split runs through this week’s research, and it’s the uncomfortable kind for CMOs. Companies are pointing AI in two opposite directions. One group uses it to defend what they already do: trimming costs, automating the busywork. The other points it at growth: new revenue channels, a customer experience…

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.

Agent-mediated commerce is established and measured on the consumer side. Adobe Analytics recorded generative-AI-referred traffic to US retail sites growing roughly 690% year over year across the 2025 holiday season (Adobe Analytics, 2026); McKinsey estimates conversion from AI-generated product recommendations at about 4.4 times that of traditional search (McKinsey,…

This article was written for MarTech by Greg Kihlström. In agentic commerce, brand shifts from a perception advantage to a verifiable advantage. Customers may still choose brands based on emotion or identity, but their AI agents will evaluate those brands using measurable signals such as price transparency, fulfillment reliability,…

Trust Signal Density is one of six strategic dimensions in the Brand Visibility for Agentic Commerce (BVAC Framework), sitting above the two prerequisites the agent uses to resolve a brand and a product before anything strategic is weighed. It is the dimension that captures whether a brand’s trustworthiness is…

AI made marketing faster at producing almost everything, and the speed has surfaced a quieter problem underneath it. The output now arrives faster than teams can review it, the metrics that used to prove a campaign worked are losing their grip as buyers move to AI, and the customer…

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…