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? From a new “operating system” for marketing in the age of AI-driven discovery, to the shift from AI as a tool to AI as an autonomous agent, to the human experience that determines whether transformation actually sticks, to a state-of-the-market check-in on where CX and MarTech platforms are headed in 2026 — these four episodes connect the dots between strategy, technology, and the people doing the work. And in this week’s bonus pick, Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput zoom out to the macro forces shaping every AI decision leaders are making right now.
Moburst CEO Gilad Bechar on winning in the age of AI-driven discovery
Gilad Bechar, CEO and Founder of Moburst, joins Greg to unpack why the move from Search Engine Optimization to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) isn’t a tactical tweak — it’s a wholesale reset of how brands get discovered. Gilad makes the case that traditional channel silos break down when AI engines weigh trust signals across Reddit, Quora, YouTube, LinkedIn, third-party reviews, and beyond, and that winning means structuring content and operations around being the answer rather than the top result.
Klaviyo CMO Jamie Domenici on moving from AI as a tool to AI as an autonomous agent
Jamie Domenici, Chief Marketing Officer at Klaviyo, returns to the show to explore what changes for marketing leaders when “agentic” AI can independently execute complex campaigns from a single strategic prompt. Jamie shares how Klaviyo is building Composer to take the manual build work off marketers’ plates, reframes the “human in the loop” debate as the human being the conductor of an AI orchestra, and previews the emerging concept of Agent-Led Growth (ALG) as the next evolution beyond product-led growth.
RGP Chief Strategy & Experience Officer Jennifer Jones on the human experience of digital transformation
Jennifer Jones, Chief Strategy & Experience Officer at RGP, makes the case that the biggest obstacle to world-class CX isn’t technology or strategy — it’s how teams are structured and enabled to work. Drawing on 28 years of human-centered design and transformation experience, Jennifer explains why 70–80% of digital transformations still fail for people reasons, why employee experience and customer experience are two sides of the same coin, and why treating transformation as “done” is the surest path to it not lasting.
#860: Resident Expert: Bill Staikos on the CX landscape in 2026
Bill Staikos, Founder of Be Customer Led, returns as the show’s resident expert on the CX and MarTech platform landscape for a quarterly check-in. Bill shares what’s shifted since the start of 2026: buyers now demand hard business outcomes from AI features rather than just generative bells and whistles, category lines between CDPs, service automation, and orchestration are collapsing, the data conversation has turned sharply operational, and “creation sprawl” from vibe-coded internal tools is becoming a real governance challenge. He also makes a bold prediction that a major category player will disappear from the market this year.
![[The AI Show Episode 215]: Musk v. OpenAI Round 3, AI’s Hot New Job, The AI Jobs Apocalypse Debate & The 2026 State of AI for Business Report](https://podcast.smarterx.ai/hubfs/ep%20215%20cover%20-%20video.png){kind=link}
Bonus Pick: [The AI Show Episode 215]: Musk v. OpenAI Round 3, AI’s Hot New Job, The AI Jobs Apocalypse Debate & The 2026 State of AI for Business Report — The Artificial Intelligence Show
For a wider-lens companion to this week’s Agile Brand conversations, Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput of Marketing AI Institute / SmarterX break down the macro forces shaping every AI decision marketing and CX leaders are making right now. Episode 215 covers the Musk v. OpenAI trial verdict, the rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer as enterprise AI’s hottest new role, the coordinated pushback against “AI jobs apocalypse” narratives from voices like Scott Galloway, a16z, Andrew Ng, and Derek Thompson, and key findings from SmarterX’s just-released 2026 State of AI for Business Report — including that 71% of professionals now believe AI will eliminate more jobs than it creates.
Taken together, these five conversations sketch out the same picture from different angles: the playbook is being rewritten, the operating model matters more than the tool, and the brands that win will be the ones that connect strategy, data, technology, and human experience into one coherent system. See you next week!
