The CMO's job in 2026 is to be an AI realist, not an AI enthusiast. This means making hard decisions about where AI creates genuine competitive advantage and where it creates the illusion of progress.

The CMOs who will win this race are building data infrastructure, rethinking how they earn (not buy) attention, and putting governance frameworks around agentic AI before they need them, not as they are in the midst of a critical project. The gap between AI ambition and AI execution is a leadership problem, not a technology problem.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. In economically uncertain times, it would seem safe to assume the best way to win over customers hinges on this uncertainty. Yet, relying on price as a primary market differentiator is growing increasingly unsustainable for CPG brands. This is no longer a theoretical concern, but an operational reality.

The AI transformation of marketing is no longer a future-state planning exercise, but rather a present-tense organizational redesign challenge.

The CMO role is being redefined in real time. This week, Oracle embedded AI agents into marketing command centers, Visa built infrastructure for AI agents to complete purchases autonomously, and OpenAI announced plans to become a $2.5B advertising platform by year's end. These go beyond incremental updates to structural shifts in how marketing operates.

Recent research 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, but in competitive positioning and consumer trust.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CustomerThink. When purchases are made on behalf of customers without them ever seeing your carefully crafted display ad or landing page before the sale, what is the role of your brand in the transaction?

This is an immediate question to consider as we are witnessing the shift from a search-based economy to a machine-mediated one, where AI agents act as concierges that guide, or even entirely represent, shoppers.

Three interconnected themes dominate this week's enterprise marketing intelligence: (1) the accelerating transition from assistive to agentic AI and its structural implications for marketing technology; (2) the redefinition of CMO creative leadership in an AI-saturated content environment; and (3) the widening gap between AI adoption leaders and laggards, driven by customer-centricity and executive commitment rather than technology spend alone.

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 that always-on, real-time personalization is replacing periodic A/B testing as the operational standard. And Gartner is already predicting that by 2028, half of all LLM investments will go toward explainability and observability — because governance is becoming the new competitive moat.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. As AI promises to automate 90% of your administrative tasks, are you ready to stake your brand’s future on the remaining 10% — the high-value human judgment machines can’t replicate?

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. Experiences are not just a feature of the business. They are the business," said Qualtrics CEO Jason Maynard as he kicked off Qualtrics X4, which took place March 17 to 19 at the Seattle Convention Center.

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.

For product teams under pressure to ship, the allure of synthetic users—AI agents generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) to mimic human behavior—is undeniable. Vendors now claim these agents can “think like customers” and “respond like real humans,” offering a shortcut through the messy, expensive logistics of traditional qualitative research.

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% of consumers agree. This perception gap suggests that many enterprise teams operate in an echo chamber.

What if your AI system is working exactly as designed… and still making your business worse? If you can’t clearly measure AI performance, you can’t confidently say it’s working. Many organizations deploy AI with strong pilots and impressive dashboards but lack a consistent evaluation framework once the system is in production.

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

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?

What if your “high-performing” AI is quietly dragging down your business, and the only reason you don’t see it yet is because you’re measuring the wrong thing? The latest in the Confident Nonsense series by Greg Kihlström.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. High-maturity brands spend nearly twice as much on GEO as their peers. Here’s what it takes to win visibility in AI search before competitors become the default answer.

Customers care whether switching channels makes them start over. If someone has to repeat the issue, re-enter the same details, and re-authenticate twice to complete one task, your internal handoffs are not staying internal.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. The company’s innovation roadmap reflects a broader shift in CX from analysis to accountability.