This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. Unfashionable as it may be to say, direct mail will outlast most of the agentic commerce startups pitching you today. That’s a strange thing to say in a year when AI agents influenced 20% of all Cyber Week orders in 2025 and drove an estimated $67 billion in global sales, according to Salesforce. The capability is real, and so is the money behind it. 

AI agents now sit on both sides of the transaction. They rank the information that shapes a purchase, they buy on a person's behalf, and they sell inside answer engines and assistants. Forrester made the stakes plain for marketing leaders this week: brands market to machines as well as to people. Advantage goes to whoever the agent picks, and the agent decides before any human reads a message.

Three reports landed this week from the big enterprise-intelligence shops, and read side by side they tell one story. AI is doing more than changing how marketing runs day to day. It's changing who you're even selling to. Brand matters more now than it has in years, and at the same time the knowledge inside your own organization is quietly eroding. Those threads are connected. CMOs who file them as separate tech projects will fall behind the ones who treat them as a single problem.

This week's research, insights, and news provide a consistent signal from the analyst desks: the limiting factor on AI value is organizational, and the vendor market is reorganizing to sell against that limit. Forrester argues that agentic AI inherits and amplifies the flaws of the operating model it runs inside.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. By now, we’ve all seen the demo where an agent takes a one-line brief and hands back a finished campaign in matter of minutes. It is impactful the first time you see it, but upon more reflection it leaves a few open questions.

This week's signals point to a structural shift in go-to-market architecture, not incremental AI feature adoption. The convergence of AI-mediated B2B buying (HBR's "dark funnel" research), agentic commerce payment infrastructure (Visa/Mastercard), and persistent gaps in AI ROI measurement creates a strategic inflection point for marketing leaders. CMOs who treat these as separate technology trends will miss the compounding effect: the entire buyer journey — from awareness to purchase — is being rebuilt around AI agents, not human browsers.

This week's research from Gartner and Forrester keeps circling the same (potentially uncomfortable) point for CMOs. AI is pulling apart tools marketers have leaned on for decades, and it's quietly raising the bar on the work that's left: brand, customer experience, and commerce all now demand more rigor and a more human touch.

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 built to win people the old funnel never reached.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. CRMC 2026 surfaced three recurring failures in retail loyalty strategy — brands that listen superficially, friction that persists because CX teams are excluded from policy decisions and disruptive ideas that die inside siloed organizations. AI tools are accelerating all three problems for brands that have not addressed the fundamentals first.

The dominant story in recent enterprise marketing research is a widening execution gap in agentic AI. Investment keeps climbing. Scaling doesn't. Across the new reports, the same picture keeps surfacing — most organizations are spending on AI without operationalizing it.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. Most brands treat travel data as somebody else's category. Unless you sell flights or hotel rooms, it lives on a different brand’s dashboards, or in a different agency's deck.

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.

Salesforce agreed to buy Contentful on June 1. Sitecore bought Scrunch on June 3. Inside 48 hours, two of the larger experience-platform vendors paid to move AI agents to the center of how content gets made and found. Salesforce is taking Contentful, the Berlin-founded headless content platform that serves more than 4,800 brands. Sitecore took Scrunch, an AI-search visibility platform, in a deal Bloomberg reported at about $225 million.

Recent research and press releases tell a story vendor marketing won't. The gap between AI investment and AI readiness keeps widening. CMOs are caught between two pressures at once: deploy AI at scale, while their own customers turn to AI to screen out AI-generated marketing. Better messaging won't close that gap. It's structural, and it changes how a marketing organization has to work.

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 on the other end has grown harder to convince. Four reports this week land on that problem from different angles. They point to where the real work sits over the next year: building the capacity to review what AI produces, prove that it performed, and make it credible enough that people act on it.

A growing share of product research, comparison, and purchasing now happens inside AI agents — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and the assistants embedded in retailer apps — that assemble a shortlist before a human reviews anything. 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). Most brands have no diagnostic for whether their products clear the bar to appear in that shortlist, and no measurement infrastructure that would catch it when they stop. A brand can be filtered out of consideration with no traffic decline, no campaign failure, nothing obvious to investigate.

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, reviews, loyalty value, privacy practices, and service history.

Three years into the enterprise AI cycle, productivity gains are no longer enough to satisfy boards. The gap separating the firms building durable advantage from the firms still chasing tool adoption keeps widening, and the McKinsey, Forrester, and HBR research from this week makes the structural reasons for that gap unusually clear.

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 prices, and manually checking out is being condensed in some instances into a single interaction. 

Recent research surfaces a single dominant pattern: the AI infrastructure layer and the data layer underneath it are consolidating faster than most marketing organizations are restructuring around them. Gartner's latest forecast puts global AI spending at $2.59 trillion in 2026, a 47% jump year-over-year, with enterprises still trailing vendors and hyperscalers on actual deployment. At the same time, two of the largest martech and CX acquisitions of the cycle closed or were announced inside a single week