Post by Greg Kihlstrom

9 in 10 agencies now use AI. Yet in the same Forrester study, CMOs ask those agencies for cost efficiency about 3x as often as they ask for revenue growth. Hype aside (and there is definitely hype), we finally have the most capable tool marketing has seen in a generation, and most teams are simply aiming it at the expense line. All the while, AI commoditizes the brand and the creative strategies they used to compete on. Four pieces in my Martech Futurist series this week kept circling the same point from different directions. Forrester on agency creative going flat. Databricks' CustomerLake folding the #CDP into the warehouse. An HBR study where the AI's tone moved work quality a full point while satisfaction surveys caught none of it. McKinsey & Company data putting only one in three organizations past the pilot stage, stalled by undocumented processes and messy data rather than by the technology. The agent layer doesn't repair a weak operating model. It inherits it and runs it at machine speed, out in front of customers, with your name attached. A seam that used to just slow someone down now produces the same wrong action over and over, in public. Adoption is the easy number to report, but what the operation can actually do when an agent runs it is the number that decides whether any of this pays back. Which seam in the foundation are your agents going to get stuck on first? Read the rest in the latest newsletter. #martech #marketingAI #CMO