This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. Marketers find themselves in a paradox: drowning in requests and feeling like they are doing the job of more than one person, yet also facing an existential crisis as AI could replace at least part of their work. Yet, there is a potential silver lining for marketers, brands, and even customers if the right AI adoption decisions get made.

Gartner, HBR, and the CMO Spend Survey converged inside five days on one change to martech economics: AI pricing moved from a seat to a meter. What that does to Q4 planning.

Gartner finds 11% of organizations cannot say what their function spent on AI in 2025, and 82% of marketers lack a clear view of campaign performance. Naming an owner was the easy part.

McKinsey, HBR, the CMO Survey, and Marketing Week converged in 72 hours on one constraint for AI value: diffuse accountability. How to name the owner.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. On February 3, 2013, during a 34-minute power outage at Super Bowl XLVII, Oreo posted an image of a single cookie with the line "You can still dunk in the dark."

Okta shipped agent identity into core SSO, Gartner put customer IAM among the top three value platforms and forecast a $4.8B securing-AI market, and MarTech named the correction test governance programs skip. Greg Kihlström on why the permission set is now the martech specification with the shortest fuse.

Correction labor, use case sprawl, and Gartner's shift from features to controls point to one constraint on martech buying in 2026: you can only buy what you can specify. Greg Kihlström on pricing verification work and writing acceptance standards.

ChatGPT ads go live across 31 European markets today with targeting stripped down to the current conversation. Agent identity moves under a Linux Foundation body. OpenAI and Anthropic split on data retention. Other parties now write the conditions that determine what your AI can do, and Q4 planning should treat them as contract terms.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. You wouldn’t purchase a forklift to carry a coffee cup. Yet that’s effectively what happens when enterprises apply complex AI systems to tasks that don’t need it. As AI adoption increases, it is essential to understand the costs of running these systems and their impact on existing people and processes.

Forrester's new AI Disruption Model, Experian's Identity and Fraud Report, and a B2B search overhaul at Akamai all point the same direction: durable martech budget is moving beneath the application, into data, identity, and trust. A practitioner's read for CMOs planning 2027.

Gartner forecasts AI inference costs per agentic workflow rising more than fivefold through 2028 while token prices fall. HBR's Stacia Garr says vendor subsidies are ending. IAB updates its AI disclosure framework. Greg Kihlström on why routing becomes the marketing operations discipline of 2027 planning.

Gartner finds 93% of audit teams use AI and 38% have a strategy. HBR names leadership drift. MarTech documents buyers paying for platforms that explain outcomes. Greg Kihlström on why explanation became the scarce good in marketing operations.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. Nobody says "electric light" anymore, and as far back as 2017, Andrew Ng wrote that AI is the new electricity. The electric qualifier wasn’t needed anymore once the capability was taken for granted, and "AI-powered" is on the same trajectory. Which raises a fair question about the first week of August 2026: what explains 12,000 people flying to Las Vegas to talk about something on its way to becoming invisible?

Gartner reports inference spending passed training spending in 2026. For CMOs, that makes verification a recurring operating cost on someone else's meter. Here is how to price it and which instruments to own.

Point-of-purchase evidence has a shelf life. PubMatic, Makeable, Google, and METR each pushed AI verification from a buying decision into a continuously running function. What CMOs should own, instrument, and write into contracts.

Gartner, IAB, Cloudflare, and a candid APAC agency panel all landed in the same week on one question: what evidence quality does a number need before a CMO can spend against it. A practitioner's read on grading AI measurement.

EU AI Act Article 50 transparency obligations took effect August 2. Greg Kihlström on what changes for marketing operations, agency contracts, and brand-configured agents.

New research puts a measurable ceiling on multi-agent coordination: collective accuracy peaks near 16 agents and declines after. Why verification cost, not compute, now governs how far marketing teams can scale agentic execution.

In the business world, the Red Queen Effect describes a dynamic where organizations must run at maximum speed and continuously innovate merely to maintain their current market position. This creates a perpetual arms race where competitors constantly co-evolve and match each other's moves. However, simply running faster to match competitors traps marketers in a "Red Ocean" of cut-throat rivalry. To truly survive and grow, companies must develop uniquely differentiated strategies—or "Blue Oceans"—to escape this zero-sum game.

Enterprise marketing reports 70% AI deployment and 85% missed launch dates. New research from Knak, StackAdapt, Algolia, and Progress Software shows AI capacity landed on drafting while approvals, assembly, and coordination still set the calendar.