In my latest article for CMSWire, I recap two days at Forrester’s Technology & Innovation Forum East in New York, an event built for CIOs and CTOs rather than marketers. Forrester framed the forum around the IT singularity, the point at which AI is everywhere and businesses can no longer differentiate on it alone. What I brought back for marketing leaders is that most enterprises deploying AI agents have never documented who can decide what, and marketing teams, with their constant automation, personalization and experimentation, usually run into that gap first.
The article covers why Forrester’s analysts see measurable AI returns limited to developer coding and support tickets for now, and why trust and governance concerns hold back broader deployment. I map Forrester’s five AI CIO investments (identity, capability, meaning, confidence and control) onto the marketing stack. I also explain why marketing leaders should keep their marketing clouds and CDPs while budgeting for the integration layer around them. Finally, I argue that marketing should take a seat in the AI governance function, since marketing teams deploy more customer-facing agents than the security and AI teams that own risk and capability.
Read the full article on CMSWire for a worked retail holiday example: the five accountability questions a marketing team should answer before launching an agent that adjusts individual offers up to 15% off in real time.