Tag: Greg Kihlström

Recent from Gartner, Forrester, and Salesforce converges on a single uncomfortable truth: the AI investment cycle is entering a reckoning phase. The hype-to-reality gap is widening, and CMOs who haven’t built the operational infrastructure to support AI at scale are now facing compounding disadvantages — not just in efficiency,…

AI investments are actively reshaping the infrastructure of how we engage customers, how buyers discover brands, and how martech platforms compete. Forrester’s Q1 2026 CDP Landscape confirms that agentic AI is poised to transform customer data platforms from data middleware into autonomous engagement engines. Their Experience Optimization Landscape shows…

The promise is intoxicating: “instant users” available 24/7, capable of testing a prototype in minutes rather than weeks, all for a fraction of the cost of recruiting human participants.

This article was written for CustomerThink by Greg Kihlström. The Medallia 2026 State of Customer Experience Report reveals a disconnect between how brands perceive the quality of experiences they provide and the consumer reality. While 66% of customer experience practitioners believe experience quality is on the rise, only 17%…

Recent intelligence points to a single strategic imperative for CMOs: the marketing function must be rebuilt for an AI-mediated world, not just augmented with AI tools. The shift from human-driven to agent-mediated discovery, purchase, and loyalty is not a future scenario — it is an active transition. McKinsey’s $3-5…

After decades of “spend-to-learn” advertising, are you still paying for consumer insights that AI can generate for free, before a single dollar of media spend?

In short, “creation sprawl” refers to the AI-driven proliferation of small tools and automations across marketing that outpaces oversight, leading to inconsistency, risk and rework. Let’s explore how we got here, and what can be done about it

The latest intelligence converges on a single, urgent message for marketing leaders: the AI transition is no longer a future planning exercise — it is a present-tense leadership test. Three interconnected themes dominate the landscape:

Curated by Greg Kihlström of The Agile Brand, with contributions from leading voices across marketing, CX, and customer decisioning

If you don’t own evaluation, you don’t own outcomes. You own activity, which looks great right up until it doesn’t. Vendor dashboards and “model quality” metrics are not the same thing as operational performance across real workflows.