Customer experience has become one of the most overused phrases in business. Every company claims to put the customer first. Very few actually know what that means.

Rodrigo Aviles, Senior Manager, rpc – The Retail Performance Company, has spent his career inside that gap — across automotive, retail, and consulting — watching organizations confuse CX with a department, a survey score, or a line in a strategy deck. At Hyundai Motor Europe, he saw firsthand what happens when an industry obsessed with the thrill of the product forgets the moment after the sale. At RPC, he is now helping companies rethink the foundations.

A self-described Human-First AI advocate, Aviles is not anti-technology. He is anti-thoughtlessness. In this conversation, he makes the case that the real crisis in customer experience today is not a lack of AI — it is a lack of honesty about what problem you are actually trying to solve.

Excerpts from the interview; 

You’ve worked across automotive, retail, and consulting — three industries with very different relationships to the customer. Where did you see the biggest gap between what a company thought its customer experience was and what it actually was?

Three gaps keep coming up across industries.

The first is understanding. The definition of customer experience varies widely from one organization to the next. In some companies, CX was considered a function within customer service. In others, it sat inside marketing. In others still, people used customer experience and customer journey interchangeably, as if they were the same thing. They are not.

What I have come to believe and what I actively push in my work now is that customer experience is not a department or a team. It is a mindset. From the person at the reception desk to the C-suite, everyone has an impact on the customer, whether they realize it or not. Every touchpoint, every decision, every internal process eventually reaches the customer in some form.

The second gap is ownership. Because CX spans functions, nobody wants to claim it fully. I have been in organizations where the CX team was treated like the black sheep — where other departments would close the door on us because they assumed we were trying to take over their responsibilities. We were not. We were trying to orchestrate. There is a significant difference.

The third gap is measurement. NPS and CSAT have been the default metrics for years, and I will be honest, I am not a fan of NPS. Both metrics measure a moment. They capture how a customer feels at the end of an interaction, whether they are satisfied or not. Everything in between all the friction, the waiting, the confusion, the small recoveries goes unrecorded. And that is precisely where the real opportunities are hiding.

Also Read: Your ERP Is Holding You Back. Here’s How to Fix It.

You led CX at Hyundai Motor Europe during a period when the entire car industry was being turned upside down by EVs, software, and changing ownership models. What broke first — the product experience or the service experience?

The service experience. Without question.

I have seen a pattern across the automotive industry, and I wrote a white paper about it because I think it deserves more attention than it gets. I call it the unsexy part of the journey. Most of the resources, the energy, the excitement — all of it goes into pre-sales. Bring the customer in, get them excited, close the deal. The assumption that follows is: they bought the car, they are happy, they will stay.

But in automotive, some of the most significant revenue sits in after-sales — spare parts, insurance, and additional services. And that is exactly where the experience tends to collapse.

Think about what happens the first time a customer brings their car in for a service. Nobody knows why they are there. There is no communication while the car is being worked on. Days go by with no update. These are not dramatic failures — they are quiet ones. But they accumulate, and they erode trust.

What makes this worse is the benchmark customers are carrying in their heads. When someone brings their car in for a service, they are not comparing the experience to another dealership. They are comparing it to Amazon. They know the exact moment they press send on an order where their package is, when it will arrive, and what they will pay. No hidden fees, no surprises, constant visibility until it arrives at their door.

We cannot change that reference point. We can only decide what to do about it. And in the automotive industry, far too many OEMs have not yet asked that question seriously enough.

You call yourself a “Human-First AI” advocate. Tell me about a moment when you saw AI deployed in a customer experience that made you genuinely angry.

I was with a health insurance provider in Germany for almost six years. Then they redesigned their app — completely overhauled the UX — and everything I knew about how to navigate it disappeared overnight. I am a quick learner and reasonably tech-savvy. It still took me a significant amount of time to find basic functions.

Once I did, I submitted an invoice for a medical expense and heard almost nothing back. The app had a chatbot — marketed as AI-powered, though I remain sceptical there was much intelligence behind it. What followed was an exhausting back-and-forth across multiple channels, where I was asked the same questions repeatedly and gave the same answers repeatedly. Eventually, I left the provider.

A friend told me recently that the same company now claims to have an improved AI agent. His experience has been identical to mine.

This is the pattern I see most often. Companies encounter a problem, and instead of diagnosing it clearly, they reach for AI as the solution. But if you have not truly understood what you are trying to fix, and for whom, the technology will not save you. It will just create a faster, more scalable version of the same failure.

I use this analogy: it is like having a Ferrari in the garage when you do not know how to drive. Technology is not the problem. The lack of clarity about the problem is.

I had a manager early in my career who gave me a piece of paper the size of a business card and told me to write my idea on it. If it did not fit, I had not understood it well enough. The same discipline applies here. If someone needs half an hour to explain the problem their AI deployment is meant to solve, they are not ready to deploy it.

Also Read: Your Marketing Dashboard Is Lying to Your CFO

Customer journey mapping sounds clinical on paper. Walk me through the most surprising thing you’ve ever discovered when you actually mapped one out for a real company.

The most consistent surprise is how little companies actually know about the full journey their customers go through — including the teams supposed to manage it.

Part of this is structural. When organizations work in silos, each function only sees its own piece. Marketing sees the awareness stage. Service sees the complaint. Nobody is watching the customer move from one to the next, experiencing the whole. What journey mapping forces you to confront is that the customer does not care about your org chart. They are moving through your brand as a single continuous experience.

What struck me most in several of these exercises was how much we were unconsciously mirroring our own internal complexity onto the customer. The difficulty, the confusion, the unclear ownership — we were essentially asking the customer to navigate our internal dysfunction alongside us.

But the most valuable realization came from pairing data with direct observation. I am a strong believer in data, but I also think we lean on it too heavily as a substitute for actually watching people. In one exercise, I challenged a team to spend three hours sitting in a dealership, not collecting data, not running surveys — just observing. Who comes in, what happens, where do things slow down, and what do people look confused by?

The gaps between what the data said and what the observation revealed were significant. There were friction points we never would have identified through surveys alone, and opportunities that no amount of voice-of-customer data had surfaced. That is what I mean when I say journey mapping should never just live on a wall or in a workshop deck. There are real people moving through that journey every day. You have to go and watch them.

You’re now based in Munich, having worked across Latin America and Europe. Does culture change what good customer experience looks like — or do people fundamentally want the same things everywhere?

Both things are true, and I think the tension between them is actually useful.

Culture absolutely shapes expectations. Coming from Mexico, warmth is embedded in how service works. You walk into a restaurant, and within seconds, someone greets you, makes you feel welcome, and treats you like you matter. That is not exceptional service in Mexico — it is the baseline. In Germany, that does not exist in the same way. My wife is German, and when we visited Mexico, she found it overwhelming. Too many people checking on her, too much attention. For her, that was not hospitality — it was intrusion.

Neither one is wrong. They are simply different cultural contracts around what a positive experience feels like.

But then there is the other layer, which is universal. Regardless of where someone is from, regardless of generation or background, when something goes wrong, people want it resolved quickly. The frustration of being ignored, passed between channels, asked to repeat yourself, or left waiting for a response that never comes — that is not cultural. That is human. And the tolerance for it is shrinking everywhere because the reference points keep improving. WhatsApp read receipts. Two-minute grocery delivery. Real-time tracking. Every one of these has raised the floor for what people consider acceptable.

The challenge for companies is navigating both. They need cultural sensitivity in how they design the emotional texture of an experience, and they need universal speed and clarity in how they resolve problems. Getting one right while neglecting the other is no longer enough.

Also Read: Why the CMO Now Owns the Privacy Problem

You speak publicly about CX. What’s the question nobody in the audience ever asks — but should?

Are we using AI to help our customers or to help ourselves avoid them?

I think about this a lot. When I look at many of the AI deployments happening in customer experience right now — the agents replacing call center teams, the chatbots standing between customers and resolution — the honest question is: who is this actually serving?

In some cases, the answer is genuinely the customer. Faster, available around the clock, consistent. In others, the technology is being used to reduce the cost and friction of human contact for the company, while the customer gets a worse experience dressed up in modern language.

Klarna is an interesting example. They made significant headlines for replacing a large number of customer service staff with AI. A year or so later, they were quietly hiring humans back because the experience had gaps that the technology could not cover.

I am not against AI in customer experience. I use it constantly in my own work, and it has changed how I operate. But there is a distinction that is not examined enough: are we deploying this because it genuinely helps the person on the other end, or because it helps us avoid dealing with them?

That question — asked honestly, before any deployment decision is made — would change a lot of what gets built.

The post Are We Using AI to Help Customers or Avoid Them? appeared first on MartechView.

Something remarkable has been happening in boardrooms and brand strategy sessions across North America and Europe. Companies that spent nearly three years racing to announce AI integrations, AI-powered experiences, and AI-driven personalization are now doing what would have seemed professionally suicidal in 2023: publicly walking some of it back.

The hot new trend in marketing, it turns out, is hating on AI — or at least being seen to.

This is not a fringe movement. It is a strategic recalibration happening at some of the most commercially sophisticated consumer brands in the world, driven by a simple and increasingly hard-to-ignore insight: in a market saturated with artificial intelligence, the most powerful differentiator available to a brand may be genuine humanity.

The Starbucks Signal

The most striking recent example is Starbucks. In May 2026, the company retired its AI-powered inventory-counting system built by NomadGo across all its North American stores, just nine months after deploying it as a centerpiece of CEO Brian Niccol’s “Back to Starbucks” turnaround strategy.

The problems were operational and embarrassing. Employees and managers across multiple locations described the system frequently miscounting and mislabeling items — confusing similar milk types, missing items entirely during scan sessions, and, in at least one case, failing to recognize a peppermint syrup bottle in a promotional video Starbucks itself had uploaded to showcase the tool. That promotional video, along with the original blog post announcing the rollout, was quietly deleted from the company’s website before the retirement was announced.

At launch, Starbucks had promoted the technology as a way to free workers to focus on what matters: crafting beverages and connecting with customers. The floor reality inverted that promise entirely — the AI system created more work, not less, and the friction showed up precisely at the human moments the brand could least afford to compromise.

For a chain that leans heavily on drink customization and frequent limited-time items, any friction in inventory accuracy can quickly affect sales, waste, and customer satisfaction. Starbucks is not retreating from technology entirely — Niccol is rolling out a generative AI chatbot for staff built on Microsoft’s Azure platform. But the NomadGo failure is a clear signal that AI deployed without operational rigor in a brand built on human warmth and reliability can do more harm than it solves.

Dove’s Decade-Long Head Start

Starbucks may be the most recent and most dramatic example, but Dove understood this dynamic earlier than almost anyone. The brand’s “Real Beauty” campaign, launched in 2004, was built on a single contrarian insight: in a category flooded with aspirational, heavily retouched imagery, showing real women — unaltered, diverse, ordinary in the best sense — would be more commercially effective than following category convention.

In 2024, marking the campaign’s 20th anniversary, Dove formalized what had been an implicit creative principle into an explicit public commitment. “At Dove, we seek a future where women decide and declare what real beauty looks like — not algorithms. Pledging to never use AI in our communications is just one step. We will not stop until beauty is a source of happiness, not anxiety, for every woman and girl,” said Alessandro Manfredi, Chief Marketing Officer at Dove.

The timing was not incidental. As generative AI began flooding advertising with synthetic models, algorithmically optimized faces, and artificial perfection, Dove’s commitment to real images became more valuable, not less. The contrast did the work — and audiences responded.

Also Read: Why the CMO Now Owns the Privacy Problem

The Broader Backlash

Dove and Starbucks are not isolated cases. Porsche released a hand-drawn holiday advertisement with an explicit statement that no AI was used, and it received significant praise in the comments from audiences who recognized and valued the human craft behind it. Polaroid launched a billboard campaign with the line “AI Can’t Generate Sand Between Your Toes,” connecting with consumers on a personal level amid screen fatigue and phone exhaustion.

Aerie made “No AI” a trust promise, extending its long-running no-retouching stance into a clear, modern pledge. Heineken’s “real friends” wearable campaign flipped the AI companionship conversation into an offline invitation.

The year 2025 marked a clear shift, as brands began highlighting human effort and labeling their products “100% human” and “no AI”,  labels that are becoming the digital equivalents of “organic” or “non-GMO” in food marketing. Bob Hutchins, CEO of Human Voice Media, described it plainly: “We are at a tipping point where the superabundance of algorithmically-generated content, ‘AI slop, ‘ is making human-generated work a luxury good.”

Merriam-Webster agreed with the diagnosis, designating “slop” its word of the year for 2025.

The Backlash Economy

What these brands are responding to is consumer skepticism that is not a niche concern — it is mainstream, measurable, and commercially consequential.

A Nielsen study found that 55 percent of consumers feel uncomfortable with websites that primarily use AI-generated content, and 4 out of 5 said brands and media organizations should be transparent about their AI use in content creation. A 2025 study from the Nuremberg Institute for Market Decisions found that simply labeling an ad as AI-generated makes people see it as less natural and less useful, lowering ad attitudes and willingness to research or purchase.

The market, in other words, is creating a premium for authenticity precisely because authenticity has become scarce. When something abundant becomes rare, its value rises. Human-made, genuinely considered communication was once the default. AI has made it exceptional almost overnight — and the brands that recognize this before their competitors do will capture a meaningful and durable advantage.

The Risk of Overcorrection

It would be a mistake, however, to read this as a simple rejection of AI. The brands navigating this moment most effectively are not the ones abandoning technology entirely. They are the ones being selective and transparent about where AI adds genuine value and where it subtracts human value.

Starbucks, notably, is not walking away from AI — it is walking away from AI that failed operationally and degraded the human experience on which its brand depends. Dove is not anti-technology; it has created Real Beauty Prompt Guidelines to help people use generative AI more responsibly and inclusively. The distinction is not AI versus no AI. It is a judgment about where each belongs.

Also Read: Hyper-Automation Is Over. Agentic AI Is What Comes Next.

What Comes Next

The irony at the center of this moment is rich. The technology that promised to make marketing more efficient, more personalized, and more effective has, at scale, made it less trusted, less differentiated, and less human. And the brands that spent the most aggressively to automate their way to relevance are discovering that the most relevant thing they can do right now is slow down, show up as people, and say something worth saying.

Starbucks is retooling its in-store operations to put human connection back at the center. Dove is running photographs of real faces. Porsche is hiring animators. Polaroid is putting up billboards about sand between your toes.

The slop, as Merriam-Webster put it, “oozes into everything.” And the brands pulling back from it are finding that the space they reclaim is worth considerably more than what they gave up.

The AI arms race is not over. But the counter-movement has started — and, in marketing, as in most things, it’s where the most interesting money gets made.

The post Brands Are Making ‘No AI’ Their Biggest Selling Point appeared first on MartechView.

There is no shortage of executives willing to talk about responsible AI. There is a considerably shorter list of those willing to be honest about what it actually costs — and what it demands of the people whose names are on the org chart when things go wrong.

Peter Yeung, Chief Information Officer at Optimizely, is in the second group. A former practicing attorney with 18 years at the bar before moving into technology leadership, he brings an unusual combination of legal precision and operational candor to questions that the industry too often answers with carefully worded reassurance.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Yeung addresses the governance paradox at the heart of enterprise AI — how to move quickly without moving recklessly — and argues that accountability, far from being a legal fiction, is a structure that leaders must be willing to sign their name to. He also takes on explainability under GDPR, the data minimization debate, and the accelerating fragmentation of the global data landscape.

His answers are not always comfortable. That is precisely what makes them worth reading.

Excerpts from the interview; 

Companies are rolling out AI faster than governance can keep up. Is ‘responsible AI’ just a story businesses tell to move quickly, or do you truly think governance can match the pace of deployment?

The companies actually getting value from AI aren’t treating governance as a brake; they’re building it into how they scale. Most of us started broadly: put the tools in people’s hands, see what sticks. That phase served its purpose, but what’s working now is the opposite — picking a handful of high-impact use cases and making sure the data, controls, and workflows behind them are genuinely solid, secure, and trustworthy. Done right, governance accelerates things by cutting rework, risk, inaccuracies, and fragmentation.

That said, I’d be lying if I said governance doesn’t have a cost. The fastest innovation I’ve seen on AI happens in the messy middle — small teams shipping fast, breaking things, learning in days rather than quarters. The moment you wrap that in review boards, data classifications, and approval workflows, you do slow it down. That’s just the reality. The trick isn’t pretending the trade-off doesn’t exist; it’s finding the right balance for where you are. Too little governance and you end up with a graveyard of pilots and a compliance problem. Too much and you kill the energy that made AI exciting in the first place.

Responsible AI isn’t a layer you bolt on top of performance; it’s what allows AI to graduate from experimentation into something the business can actually rely on. But you have to be honest that getting the balance right is the work.

When AI systems use flawed or unclear data and cause harm, responsibility is often spread among teams and vendors. Right now, isn’t the idea of clear accountability in AI mostly just a legal fiction? 

As CIO at Optimizely, with both the CISO and Trust organization reporting into me, I’d push back on the idea that accountability is a legal fiction — but I understand why people frame it that way. AI accountability is more complex than in traditional systems because it spans multiple teams: the people sourcing the data, the people building or selecting the models, and the people deciding how outputs are actually used in the business. Spread that across vendors, too, and yes, it can feel diffuse. If you then include my statement above, which calls for empowering individuals within the business to innovate at speed, the task becomes daunting. 

But the way I look at it, regardless of the actor — vendor, third-party model, internal team, or individual employee — we are ultimately accountable, both internally and to our customers, for the end result. That accountability can’t be outsourced. The vendor contract doesn’t absolve us. The model provider doesn’t absolve us. If something goes wrong, our customers don’t care about the seven hops in the supply chain; they care that we own it. 

What makes that real, rather than rhetorical, is structure. We treat AI like any other critical business process: explicit ownership of data inputs, clear responsibility for model deployment, and a named, accountable owner for outcomes in production. Without that, accountability genuinely does dilute across vendors and teams, and that’s where the “legal fiction” critique starts to land. With it, you create a clear line of responsibility even in a distributed system, and you give the CISO and Trust functions something concrete to govern against. 

So it’s not a fiction. It’s just harder, and it requires leaders to actually sign their names.

Rules like GDPR require that automated decisions be explainable. But big AI systems often cannot give real reasons for their choices. Are we trying to enforce laws that no longer fit the world we live in?

Having practiced as an attorney for 18 years, I’d say the question is sharper than the framing suggests — but the answer isn’t quite “the laws no longer fit.” It’s that the laws were never as clear as people assume.

GDPR’s intent is absolutely still relevant: to protect individuals and hold companies accountable for automated decisions that affect them. That hasn’t aged. But read Article 22 alongside Articles 13–15 and Recital 71, and what you find is a requirement to provide “meaningful information about the logic involved” — with genuine, ongoing debate among regulators and legal scholars about what that actually means in practice. GDPR doesn’t even explicitly grant a “right to explanation”; it’s inferred. The framework was contested before modern AI arrived. Large models didn’t break a clean framework; they stress-tested an ambiguous one.

That matters because, in the absence of clear guidelines, the standards organizations actually have to meet are believability and traceability. Can you credibly describe how the system reached its decision? Can you trace the data, the controls, and the human checkpoints? Have you documented it clearly enough to walk a regulator, a customer, or a court through it without flinching? That’s the real test today.

So no, I don’t think we’re enforcing laws that no longer fit. We’re operating in a gap that regulators and industry need to close together. Until they do, the burden is on companies to set their own bar: traceable data, auditable decisions, guardrails on outputs, and documentation you’d be comfortable defending.

AI works best with lots of data, but privacy rules call for using as little data as possible. If companies have to choose, will they prioritize performance over principle? Are we already seeing this happen?

There’s real tension here, but the framing as a binary choice between performance and principle is a bit limiting. The premise that AI works best with “lots of data” is itself worth challenging. More data isn’t automatically better — if it’s poor quality, incomplete, or stripped of the right context, you’re just feeding the model noise. And noise-in produces worse-outcomes-out: hallucinations, bias amplification, and decisions you can’t defend. I’d rather have a smaller, well-governed, well-contextualized data set than a sprawling lake of mixed-quality inputs, while certainly following the GDPR tenet of Privacy by Design.

I think it reframes the privacy question. Privacy rules pushing companies toward data minimization aren’t necessarily working against AI performance — in many cases, they’re forcing the discipline that actually improves it. The companies getting this right are being deliberate about their data strategy: prioritizing quality, relevance, and governance over volume. That’s not a compromise position; that’s just better engineering.

Are we seeing companies cut corners on privacy for short-term performance? Yes, and it tends to come back to bite them through regulatory exposure, customer trust erosion, or models that don’t generalize the way they thought. Trust is becoming a genuine differentiator, particularly in customer-facing and enterprise use cases, and you can’t retrofit it.

The right answer is to design systems where privacy and performance are engineered in from the start, rather than treated as a trade-off you settle later. When done well, they reinforce each other rather than compete.

With decisions like Schrems II and laws like the CCPA, are we heading toward a split internet where data cannot move freely across countries? If so, what will break first: innovation or trust?

What’s interesting about the question is that it frames the split as a US–Europe divergence, when the more consequential fault line is East versus West — between western frameworks debating how to balance rights and commerce, and an eastern framework where the state’s relationship to data is structurally different. That gap isn’t closing through a successor to the Privacy Shield/US-EU Data Privacy Agreement.

So yes, we’re already in a split internet. Between Schrems II, CCPA, the EU AI Act, India’s DPDP, China’s PIPL, and a patchwork of US state laws, any global business is operating across fifteen-plus regulatory environments. My background on both the technology and legal sides of things, coupled with my ability to adjust to both business and customer needs, makes this isn’t hypothetical anymore — it’s the operating environment. We architect for it: data residency, regional processing, model deployment choices that respect where data can and can’t go.

On what breaks first — innovation and trust fail together, even if one precedes the other. If regulation becomes so prescriptive that nothing can cross borders without months of legal review, innovation slows. If companies route around the rules, trust collapses, and regulators tighten further. It’s a doom loop either way.

The companies that come through this well won’t bet on innovation at all costs over trust, or really cumbersome trust over innovation. They’ll invest in both, and accept that regulatory complexity is now part of the engineering/product/support lifecycle, not separate from it.

The post The CIO Who Says Governance Can Actually Speed Up AI appeared first on MartechView.

For most of the past decade and a half, the annual marketing technology landscape had one reliable characteristic: it grew. Sometimes by a lot. Sometimes by a merely extraordinary amount. Even in the years when analysts confidently predicted consolidation was finally upon us, the landscape found another gear. This year, it did not.

The State of Martech 2026, which debuted at MartechDay on May 5 by Scott Brinker of chiefmartec and Frans Riemersma of MartechTribe, puts the total number of marketing technology products at 15,505 — up just 121 from the 15,384 counted last year. That is growth of 0.79%, rounding to effectively zero. After a run of more than 10,000% expansion since 2011, when the landscape counted just 150 products, the market appears to have hit a ceiling — or at least a plateau.

But flat, as the report and keynote make abundantly clear, is perhaps the most misleading word one could use.

A Market Metabolizing, Not Stagnating

Beneath that near-zero headline number, the market is moving with real intensity. In the past 12 months, 1,488 new products were added to the landscape while 1,367 were removed. The volume of new entrants dropped 40% year on year — down from 2,489 in 2025 — while the removal rate climbed 13%. For the first time in the post-pandemic era, additions and removals are nearly canceling each other out.

Riemersma’s framing at MartechDay was direct: “Peak Martech is a myth. Martech is entering its Darwin phase. The martech landscape is renewing. Value is growing.” The era of accumulating tools, both argued, is giving way to an era of replacing them. At the core of that transition is a structural change in where value actually lives: SaaS platforms are no longer the primary source of differentiation. They are becoming infrastructure — systems of record, workflow engines, and integration layers. The real value is moving on top of that foundation. AI is becoming the value layer.

The companies exiting the market tell their own story. More than half of this year’s removals — 51.7% — came from the 2010–2019 wave of software-as-a-service startups, the first great generation of martech builders. The exits are concentrated among smaller firms: 41.2% had between one and ten employees; 38.7% had between 11 and 50. By revenue, the $1 million to $10 million band accounts for 45.5% of removed products — companies that found enough early traction to survive past zero revenue, but not enough to build a truly defensible position, caught between incumbents bundling AI features from above and AI-native startups attacking from below.

The Content Marketing Bust

Perhaps the single most striking data point concerns content marketing tools. When generative AI went mainstream in 2023, content marketing was one of the first categories to feel the full force of the wave, nearly doubling in two years from 575 tools to 1,102. In 2026, it leads all subcategories in a less coveted ranking: the highest net product removal of any category, at minus-37, with 176 removed and only 139 added.

Three forces converged. The major AI laboratories absorbed the core functionality; incumbent platforms such as Adobe, HubSpot, and Salesforce rapidly embedded generative AI into existing workflows; and many first-wave tools solved the problem of generating content fast without solving the harder problem of generating content that actually works. The report describes this as a natural selection event: not the end of AI-powered content technology, but the clearing out of an undifferentiated first generation in favor of a more mature second.

The Stack Is Stratifying, Not Consolidating

One of the most significant conclusions from the MartechDay keynote — drawing on a survey of 208 marketing and marketing operations leaders across 70 specific AI use cases — is that the long-running debate between platform consolidation and best-of-breed diversification has a 2026 answer: neither. Instead, the stack is stratifying into layers with different competitive physics. 

AI-native tools are largely winning creation — copy ideation, pitch decks, visual production, competitive intelligence — tasks where the primary input is a prompt and model quality is the product. Incumbent SaaS platforms such as HubSpot and Salesforce are largely holding on to orchestration: lead scoring and routing, pipeline management, and channel delivery. These systems increasingly serve as infrastructure for other commercial and custom AI agents.

The survey also revealed a striking divergence between B2B and B2C adoption patterns. Conventional wisdom holds that B2C leads technology adoption. On AI, the data inverts that pattern: B2B shows broader adoption across more use cases, with consistently lower non-adoption rates — likely because B2B teams are chronically understaffed relative to their content and operational demands, and a decade of CRM, MAP, CDP, and revenue intelligence investment had already built natural docking stations for AI capabilities. When B2C does adopt, it builds deeper: the customer-facing AI output is the brand experience, and the differentiation lives in the final 20% — brand voice calibration, proprietary guardrails, custom data integration — that off-the-shelf tools cannot provide.

The AI Agent Paradox

A central tension running through the MartechDay findings is the gap between AI enthusiasm and AI deployment, as researchers described it. Some 90.3% of marketing organizations now use AI agents in some capacity, yet only 23.3% have deployed them in full production. The rest are piloting, experimenting, or running agents in narrow workflows with a human approving every output. The report identifies this as the “Trust Wall”: currently, 80.6% of marketing organizations refuse to let AI agents operate autonomously, requiring a human in the loop for every final decision.

Governance is moving in the right direction — 73% of respondents now report having a formal generative AI policy, up from 52% in 2024 — but the gap between having a policy and having the infrastructure to enforce it remains wide.

Where Growth Is Actually Happening

If content marketing is the cautionary tale, content management systems and e-commerce platforms are the 2026 growth story. CMS and web experience management grew 21.4%, jumping from 504 to 612 products. E-commerce platforms grew 19.9%, from 547 to 656. These are not new categories. They are being reshaped. CMS is evolving into a machine-readable infrastructure for AI agents. E-commerce is adapting to AI-driven discovery. iPaaS is becoming the orchestration layer that connects everything. Growth is happening where AI changes the job to be done.

The explanation lies in a fundamental shift in who—or what—digital properties are built for. For two decades, marketing teams designed experiences primarily for human visitors and search engine crawlers. That audience now includes AI search assistants, agentic browsers, shopping agents, and procurement systems that arrive not to browse but to extract, evaluate, and act. Other fast-growing subcategories follow the same logic: mobile and web analytics grew 11.3%, call analytics 8.9%, data integration 8.0%, and marketing automation 5.9% — the last a sign that AI is reinventing what campaign orchestration can look like, attracting builders who see agentic marketing automation as a meaningful step beyond rule-based systems.

SEO Becomes AEO — but Visibility Is Shrinking

Search engine optimization, widely eulogized as AI assistants swallowed the top of the funnel, is in fact metamorphosing rather than dying. The SEO and answer engine optimization subcategory posted a net positive result this year — 44 added, 38 removed — and has grown for three consecutive years. The market is reflecting a shift in the underlying discipline: from making brands findable by search crawlers to making them findable, credible, and actionable across AI search assistants, answer engines, and agentic browsers. The challenge, the report notes, is that the tools are improving while the marketer’s visibility is shrinking — when a customer consults an AI assistant about which product to buy, that conversation is entirely invisible to conventional tracking.

The Transformation Beneath the Numbers

What ties these shifts together is a structural transformation of marketing itself. As Brinker argued in the lead-up to MartechDay: “AI doesn’t eliminate constraints. It moves them. When content becomes abundant, the bottleneck shifts to relevance. When integrations get easier, the bottleneck shifts to orchestration.” The organizations pulling ahead are those that have recognized where the new bottleneck sits and invested in context engineering, governance, and strategic coherence — rather than continuing to optimize against constraints that AI has already dissolved.

The best stacks are not the most feature-rich. They are the most aligned — focused on a small number of high-impact use cases where SaaS enables, and AI amplifies. Integration is no longer just technical. It is a strategic asset.

Whether 2026 marks the peak of martech or simply a pause before the next expansion remains genuinely uncertain. Brinker and Riemersma’s own position is the latter. The cost to build keeps falling, AI keeps opening new niches, and the minimum viable scale for a sustainable martech business keeps shrinking. The landscape is metabolizing — not dying. But the shape of whatever emerges from the chrysalis will bear little resemblance to what went in.

The State of Martech 2026 was debuted by Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma at MartechDay on May 5, 2026, and is available free at chiefmartec.com.

The post Peak Martech? The Landscape Has Plateaued, but the Real Story Lies Beneath appeared first on MartechView.

Every industry has a word it reaches for when it does not know what else to say. In boardrooms today, that word is transformation. It gets invoked at strategy off-sites, written into annual reports, and handed to consultants as a mandate — often before anyone has agreed on what exactly needs to change, or why.

The results are predictable. Brands that once stood for something begin to feel like everything. Customer experiences that were once a competitive advantage become inconsistent and interchangeable. Revenue targets get hit in the short term. Brand equity quietly erodes over the long term.

The problem, more often than not, is not a lack of ambition. It is a lack of an anchor. Transformation without a clear sense of what must be preserved is not strategy — it is change for its own sake.

Giovanna B. Questioni has spent her career in that gap. A transformation expert with experience across luxury fashion, food, furniture, and the digital industries, she has led mergers and acquisitions, crisis interventions, and large-scale omnichannel overhauls across global markets. Her argument is not against change. It is for coherence.

The brands that survive disruption, Questioni argues, are the ones that understand the difference between what is negotiable and what is not. Design, quality, emotional resonance — these are not variables to be optimized in a transformation roadmap. They are the reason the brand exists. Everything else is in service of them.

That distinction shapes how she thinks about omnichannel strategy — an area where many brands have spent heavily and delivered inconsistently. The instinct is to treat every new channel as an opportunity. The discipline is to treat every channel as a responsibility to serve customers without breaking what they already trust.

“Every touchpoint — whether in retail, franchising, wholesale, e-commerce, or social commerce — must deliver a distinct yet cohesive experience. Physical stores thrive on human connection and sensory engagement, while digital platforms excel through simplicity, speed, and personalization.” 

A customer who buys online and returns in-store should not feel the friction of two separate systems. The seams should never show. And the sales assistant at that moment is not a workaround — they are an opportunity for the kind of personalization no digital platform has yet replicated.

What Questioni warns against is the version of transformation that becomes its own end. “Disruption is powerful, but it must always align with customer expectations and ROI,” she says. “Without this balance, transformation risks becoming an academic exercise — one that could dilute the brand’s reputation and desirability.” Bold innovation is not the enemy of brand integrity. Undisciplined innovation is.

The second argument she makes — and the one that challenges the most deeply held assumptions in corporate strategy — is about resilience. The dominant understanding is reactive: how fast can an organization absorb a shock and return to normal?

That framing, Questioni argues, is entirely the wrong one. By the time a company is managing recovery, it has already lost the most valuable thing: time. The organizations that emerge from disruption stronger are not the ones that responded fastest. They are the ones that had already built for it.

“Resilience isn’t just about bouncing back — it’s about building the future before it arrives. It’s the difference between surviving the unexpected and shaping it into opportunity.” 

A future-ready organization, in her view, has designed agility into its operating model before crisis arrives — and has given its teams the tools, authority, and mindset to move without waiting for direction from above. The question she puts to every leadership team is not how they responded last time. It is what they have already built for next time.

Which brings the conversation to the question that defeats most large-scale transformations before they ever reach the customer: execution. The strategy is rarely the problem. The problem is that a vision designed at the top must be delivered by teams moving at different speeds, across different functions and geographies.

Most organizations respond with governance frameworks. Questioni’s response cuts closer to what the problem actually is.

“Large-scale transformation operates like a symphony — an intricate performance where each element must harmonize under the guidance of a skilled conductor.” 

The conductor she has in mind is not ceremonial. It is a deeply operational C-level leader who holds the granular and the panoramic simultaneously — who understands how individual performance feeds collective outcomes, and who can align diverse functions without erasing what makes each of them effective.

The failure mode she sees most often is not a shortage of talent or resources. It is teams executing brilliantly within their own lanes while the overall composition falls apart. “True transformation isn’t about managing chaos,” she says. “It’s about precision, collaboration, and leadership that turns vision into reality.”

The conductor is not optional. Neither is the score. And the brands that understand the difference between noise and music — between change and transformation — are the ones that will still mean something when the disruption settles.

The post The Organizations That Survive Disruption Never Had to Recover From It appeared first on MartechView.

The psychology of design in branding: why the most powerful visual decisions are the ones customers never notice.

There is a version of the Tropicana story that gets told as a cautionary tale about consumer attachment to packaging. In 2009, PepsiCo redesigned the orange juice brand’s iconic carton — replacing the familiar straw-in-orange image with a clean, modern glass of juice. The backlash was swift and disproportionate. Sales dropped nearly 20% in two months. The company reversed course within weeks, having spent an estimated $35 million on a redesign that lasted less than two months in the market.

What went wrong was not the design. By conventional aesthetic standards, the new packaging was arguably cleaner and more contemporary. What went wrong was psychology — specifically, the severing of a visual cue so deeply embedded in consumer memory that removing it felt, to loyal buyers, like a small act of theft.

That episode, now studied in marketing schools worldwide, illustrates the central tension in brand design: that the most important design decisions are not really about aesthetics at all. They are about the architecture of trust.

The Brain Decides Before the Consumer Does

Color, shape, typeface, spatial composition — the elements that constitute a brand’s visual identity are processed by the human brain in milliseconds, long before conscious reasoning begins. Research in consumer neuroscience has consistently found that visual brand cues trigger emotional and associative responses that precede and often override rational evaluation. A consumer does not decide to trust a brand and then reach for it. They reach for it and, if asked, construct a reason afterward.

This is why color choices carry consequences that extend far beyond aesthetics. Studies have shown that up to 90% of snap judgments about products are based solely on color. The dominance of blue in financial services — JPMorgan Chase, American Express, PayPal, Visa — is not accidental. Blue consistently tests as conveying reliability, security and calm across cultures. Red accelerates heart rate and stimulates appetite, which is why McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and KFC have used it for decades. Green has become the default signal for health, sustainability and permission — which is why so many better-for-you brands reach for it instinctively, and why it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate within it.

Consistency as the Product

Airbnb’s 2014 rebrand, which introduced the now-ubiquitous Bélo symbol, was initially met with widespread mockery on social media. Within a year, the conversation had shifted entirely. The symbol — designed to represent belonging, people, places and love in a single unified form — had become one of the most recognized marks in travel. What changed was not the symbol. What changed was the consistency and context of its deployment, and the story the company told about what it meant.

The lesson applies directly to what the best brand designers already know: that visual identity is not a communications exercise. It is an infrastructure decision. And infrastructure, once built consistently, becomes invisible in the best possible way — it simply works.

That principle is being tested in new ways as AI tools accelerate the production of visual content. As Nik Kleverov, chief creative officer of Emmy-nominated Los Angeles agency Native Foreign, told MartechView: “The gap between something that looks good and something that’s culturally resonant is still huge. If anything, taste matters more than ever.” Kleverov, who was among the first creative professionals given early access to OpenAI’s Sora video generation tool, argues that the democratization of high-end production has paradoxically raised the stakes for genuine creative judgment. When every agency can produce visually polished work using the same generative tools, the differentiator is no longer craft. It is meaning.

The Rebrand That Worked — and Why

In 2022, Burberry appointed Daniel Lee as creative director and immediately began dismantling the visual identity his predecessor had built. Out went the clean, sans-serif logo introduced in 2018. Back came a version of the equestrian knight that had anchored the brand’s heritage for a century. The response from luxury consumers was immediate and positive — not because the old logo was objectively superior, but because the return to heritage resolved a tension that had been building since the modernization: that Burberry, in trying to look like a contemporary luxury brand, had started to look like every other contemporary luxury brand.

The psychology at work was not nostalgia for its own sake. It was the reassertion of a distinct identity — a signal that the brand knew what it was and who it was for. In luxury markets, especially, that clarity is the product. Consumers are not buying a coat or a bag. They are buying membership in a category of meaning that the brand’s visual language either confirms or undermines.

The contrast with Gap’s 2010 logo redesign is instructive. That rebrand — a Helvetica wordmark that lasted exactly one week before the company reverted to its original blue-box identity — failed not because consumers are inherently conservative, but because the new design communicated nothing. The original logo, for all its age, had accumulated decades of association. The replacement had none. A logo cannot manufacture meaning. It can only organize and amplify the meaning that already exists in the relationship between a brand and its customers.

When Design Fails the Experience

The problem with most conversations about brand design is that they stop at the visual. A logo is a promise. What determines whether that promise is kept or broken is the experience that follows every impression.

This is where the psychology of design intersects most directly with customer experience strategy. Kleverov’s observation about creative work applies equally to brand design: the bottleneck is not production — it is selection and judgment. “Tools can generate infinite options,” he told MartechView, “but knowing what not to use has become the real creative skill. The fundamentals of storytelling, pacing, and design judgment still act as the compass.”

That compass matters most when brands face the temptation to redesign for change’s sake — to signal modernity, respond to competitive pressure, or simply justify a marketing budget. The Tropicana mistake was not a design failure. It was a judgment failure: the failure to recognize that the brand’s visual equity was doing structural work that a cleaner aesthetic could not replace.

Design as CX Infrastructure

The most forward-thinking brand teams have stopped treating design as a communications function and started treating it as customer experience infrastructure — the visible layer of a system that either earns trust or erodes it at every touchpoint. Every time a customer encounters a brand — on packaging, in an app, in an email, on a billboard, in a store — they are running an unconscious verification check. Does this look like the brand I trusted? Does it feel like the same promise?

When the answer is yes, the transaction continues. When the answer is uncertain, the hesitation begins. And in a market where switching costs are lower than they have ever been, hesitation is expensive.

The Tropicana redesign did not fail because consumers disliked the new carton. It failed because it interrupted a verification check that millions of buyers had been running successfully for decades. The straw in the orange was not a design element. It was infrastructure. And infrastructure, once removed, reveals exactly how much weight it was carrying.

As Kleverov put it in his conversation with MartechView: “The biggest cost is thinking of AI as a speed hack instead of a creative system.” The same is true of design itself. The brands that treat visual identity as a shortcut — a signal of change, a response to a brief, an aesthetic update — will keep learning the Tropicana lesson. The ones that treat it as infrastructure will keep earning the trust that makes their customers reach, without thinking, for the same thing every time.

The post When a Logo Changes Everything — and Nothing appeared first on MartechView.

In February 2024, OpenAI gave a small, selective group of creative professionals early access to Sora, its text-to-video generation tool. The list was short. Nik Kleverov was on it.

That alone tells you something. Kleverov is the Chief Creative Officer and co-founder of Native Foreign, an Emmy-nominated Los Angeles creative agency that has spent the last several years building what it calls AI Labs — a practice dedicated not to experimenting with generative tools, but to embedding them as foundational infrastructure across every stage of production. The agency designed the Narcos title sequence for Netflix. It produced the first brand film ever made using OpenAI’s Sora, for Toys”R”Us. It has won twelve Davey Awards for creative innovation in emerging tech.

When Kleverov talks about AI in advertising, he is not theorizing. He is reporting from work.

And what he is reporting is that most of the industry is asking the wrong question.

The Infrastructure Argument

The dominant conversation about AI in creative agencies centers on efficiency. How much faster can we concept? How much cheaper can we produce? How many rounds of iteration can we compress into a single afternoon? Those are real questions with real answers — but Kleverov argues they miss the point, and that the miss is costly.

“The biggest cost is thinking of AI as a speed hack instead of a creative system,” he says. “When it’s treated like a shortcut, there’s novelty and surface-level savings, but not strategy. When it’s treated as infrastructure, it changes how ideas are developed, prototyped, and executed from day one.”

The distinction is architectural. A shortcut is something you reach for after the idea already exists. Infrastructure is what the idea is built on. The difference between the two isn’t visible in the output of a single campaign — it becomes visible over time, in the compounding gap between agencies that have rebuilt their creative process around AI and those that have not.

For CMOs navigating vendor conversations, Kleverov frames the test simply: “The honest question is: do you have an AI workflow, or are you just tinkering? There’s a big difference between occasionally using generative software and actually rethinking how ideas move from concept to production. The companies that treat it as infrastructure will move faster, think bigger, and leave their competition in the dust.”

The Carl’s Jr. Case Study

The clearest recent illustration of the Native Foreign approach is the Carl’s Jr. campaign featuring Paris Hilton — a piece of work that required Kleverov’s team to make a series of deliberate decisions about where AI entered the process and, just as deliberately, where it did not.

The campaign, created using Freepik, leaned into Hilton’s early-2000s cultural moment, framing her as a boss overseeing an AI-automated version of the famous Starwash. The conceit was precise: in the age of AI, Paris Hilton uses it to run her operation — while she oversees it. The nostalgia was not incidental. It was structural.

“We didn’t just prompt ‘2000s aesthetic’ and call it a day,” Kleverov says. “We studied the textures, lighting, and slightly over-the-top tone of that era’s advertising and rebuilt it intentionally — but for today’s audience. Nostalgia works when it feels like memory.”

That distinction — memory versus algorithm — is where the campaign’s creative judgment lived. AI played a significant role in the production workflow, handling elements that could be generated, iterated, and refined at scale. But the scenes featuring the real, present-day Paris Hilton were kept entirely outside the AI pipeline. The boundary was not arbitrary. It was a considered decision about where human presence creates irreplaceable authenticity and where generative tools could amplify without distorting.

What Narcos Taught Him About AI

Before the AI era, Kleverov’s most celebrated work was the title sequence for Narcos on Netflix — a piece built on traditional motion design mastery, painstaking in its craft, executed without a single generative tool. It remains one of the most recognized title sequences in recent television history.

The skills that made that work possible are, Kleverov argues, more valuable now than they were then — not less. Not because AI hasn’t changed the game, but because AI has changed it in a specific way that makes certain human capabilities more critical rather than redundant.

“Tools can generate infinite options, but knowing what not to use has become the real creative skill,” he says. “The fundamentals of storytelling, pacing, and design judgment still act as the compass. Especially with AI storytelling.”

The infinite options problem is one that anyone who has spent serious time with generative tools will recognize immediately. The bottleneck in AI-assisted creative work is not generation — it is selection. Producing a hundred viable options takes seconds. Knowing which one is worth developing, and why, requires everything that cannot be prompted.

What Creative Directors Must Unlearn

That shift has implications for how creative leadership itself needs to change. Kleverov is direct about what the transition demands from Creative Directors who want to work effectively with AI as a foundational layer.

“Creative Directors have to let go of the idea that the first good idea is the one you execute,” he says. “AI rewards exploration, iteration, and divergence. The job becomes less about protecting a single concept and more about guiding a field of possibilities toward the strongest story.”

This is a significant unlearning. The traditional creative director role was built in part around the conviction and the authority to champion a single idea against the instinct to dilate, hedge, or over-iterate. That conviction remains valuable. But the context has changed. When iteration is cheap and divergence is generative rather than dilutive, the skill set shifts from protection to navigation — from defending the best idea to finding it within a field that AI has made vastly larger.

The Democratization Question — With a Caveat

The argument that AI is democratizing high-end production is one Kleverov partially accepts. More people can now make things that look impressive on the surface. Access to tools that once required significant budgets and specialist teams has broadened meaningfully. That is real.

But it comes with a structural caveat. “The gap between something that looks good and something that’s culturally resonant is still huge,” he says. “If anything, taste matters more than ever.”

This is the counterintuitive consequence of democratization in creative industries: as the floor rises, the ceiling becomes the only differentiator that matters. When every agency can produce visually polished work using the same generative tools, the question is no longer whether you can make something beautiful. It is whether you can make something that means something, and that question has always been answered by the same thing it was answered by before AI existed.

Judgment. Context. A point of view that no model was trained to have.

That is what Native Foreign is selling. And if the Carl’s Jr. campaign, the Toys”R”Us film, and the Narcos sequence are any indication, it is a point of view worth listening to.

The post AI Won’t Save Your Campaign. Your Taste Will. appeared first on MartechView.

Raj De Datta has spent over a decade building Bloomreach into one of the most quietly formidable companies in commerce technology. With $260 million in ARR and customers like American Eagle and SPANX, the platform’s AI engine — Loomi — isn’t a bolt-on feature. It’s the whole architecture. But as generative AI rewrites the rules of how people shop, discover products, and interact with brands, De Datta is less interested in celebrating how far things have come and more focused on what comes next. 

In this conversation, he makes a case for why the traditional e-commerce site is becoming infrastructure rather than interface, why personalization and automation are converging faster than brands are ready for, and why the winners of the next era of commerce won’t be those who automate the most — but those who automate responsibly.

Excerpts from the interview; 

Bloomreach just crossed $260 million in ARR, powered by Loomi AI and brands like American Eagle and SPANX. What did you get right in scaling an AI-native platform — and what nearly broke along the way?

We got a few core decisions right early. First, we built Loomi AI as the foundation, not as a feature. It is the intelligence layer that powers our applications and agents across email, search, personalization, and conversational shopping. That architecture meant that as AI advanced rapidly over the past few years, we remained ahead of the curve.

Second, we focused on real-time data and first-party context. Loomi AI combines customer and product data with real-time infrastructure, AI decisioning, and orchestration across channels. That allowed us to deliver personalization that compounds — every interaction feeds the system and improves the next one.

Third, we invested early in agentic capabilities. Nearly half of our customers now use at least one next-generation AI tool, and that adoption has more than doubled in the past year. We also saw strong engagement with our conversational shopping agent, including a significant uptick during the recent holiday season. That momentum reflects a clear product direction: move from static tools to systems that can take action.

The one ongoing challenge — though really more of an opportunity — was the pace of change in AI. Every day unlocked a new possibility. We constantly had to examine what we were building to ensure it was maximizing AI’s potential. That meant a lot of rapid iteration and required us to be willing to take products we thought were great and challenge ourselves to make them even better.

The past two years have rewritten the rules of AI almost quarterly. How do you build a durable product strategy when the underlying technology shifts this fast?

The technology will keep changing, and our strategy is to stay one layer above it. We built Loomi AI as the intelligence layer beneath all of our applications and agents. Because that foundation is consistent, we can adopt new AI capabilities as they emerge without rebuilding the core each time the model landscape shifts.

Durability comes from that architecture — every interaction feeds back into the system, so the platform continuously improves. The goal isn’t to predict the next breakthrough. It’s to build a system that seamlessly incorporates it. That’s what allows us to move quickly and keep innovating while maintaining stability for enterprise customers.

You’ve spoken about agentic commerce. What changes when AI stops assisting shoppers and starts transacting on their behalf?

When AI moves from assisting shoppers to acting more autonomously, commerce shifts from reactive experiences to outcome-driven ones. Instead of simply answering questions or suggesting products, AI can understand context, predict intent, and guide the entire journey in real time — from discovery to decision to purchase.

But this changes a great deal for brands. It means they risk losing control over customer journeys and relationships. That’s why this is such an inflection point for businesses right now. The brands actively investing in agentic commerce — preparing catalogs for agentic discoverability, building their own apps — are the ones that will be prepared for this new era of commerce.

If AI becomes the primary interface for product discovery, what happens to the traditional e-commerce site? Is the homepage becoming obsolete?

It’s more a case of “the website is dead… long live the website.” In reality, the website becomes infrastructure rather than interface, as we know it today. All of the data it houses — about your products, about your customers — remains as relevant as ever. But that data and infrastructure will transcend the website, too. It’ll extend into conversational experiences in AI apps, and into channels like email and mobile, as it already does today. The homepage isn’t obsolete. It just isn’t the front door anymore.

Every AI transformation has its blind spots. What assumptions about AI in commerce turned out to be wrong?

There were assumptions about speed and scale that were somehow both too big and not big enough. At the onset of generative AI and large language models, there was real fear that e-commerce would become irrelevant almost overnight. Obviously, that hasn’t been the case.

But at the same time — it will, and already is, wholly transforming what commerce looks like. The way people discover products, compare brands, build wardrobes — all of that is now done with AI in ways we couldn’t have imagined a few years ago. And I think the scale of that transformation hasn’t even peaked yet.

At what point does personalization cross into automation? And how do brands ensure agency remains with the consumer?

Personalization becomes automation the moment systems start acting without asking. That’s the real inflection point. For years, personalization meant better recommendations or more relevant messaging. Now, with agentic AI, systems can execute decisions across channels. The question isn’t whether that’s possible — it’s how it should be governed.

Brands need to be clear about intent. Automation should reflect what a customer has already signaled, not replace it. When AI is grounded in real customer context and real-time signals, it can reduce friction and help people complete their journey. When it drifts from that, it stops being helpful and starts becoming opaque.

Agency remains with the consumer when technology is designed to respond to their intent, stay transparent in its decisioning, and keep humans in control of outcomes. The more autonomous systems become, the more important those guardrails are.

In this next phase of AI, the differentiator won’t be who automates the most. It will be who automates responsibly — and keeps the customer at the center of that automation.

In 2030, what will feel outdated about how we shop today — and what will Bloomreach have built to stay ahead of that shift?

Today, much of e-commerce still centers on browsing: navigating pages, filtering options, and manually managing campaigns across channels. But the shift we’re already seeing is toward agentic experiences — systems that understand intent and take action in real time. As AI moves from insight to execution, customers will expect more conversational, personalized, and responsive interactions, not just better search results or product recommendations.

What will matter most is whether brands can operate across touchpoints as one connected system. Experiences won’t be confined to a single website or channel. They’ll need to work across email, messaging, mobile, search, and beyond — with intelligence that adapts instantly to customer context.

The post Your Homepage Isn’t the Front Door Anymore appeared first on MartechView.

For years, AI in retail was framed as an efficiency play: better inventory forecasting, smarter demand planning, faster ticket resolution. It was about reducing costs, shaving seconds off handle times, and streamlining back-end systems.

That era is over.

Today, AI sits much closer to the revenue engine. It influences how customers discover products, how they interact with brands, how issues are resolved, and, increasingly, whether they return. In retail, travel, and hospitality, where loyalty is fragile and competition is relentless, customer experience is no longer a support function; it is a core function. It is a strategy.

Few executives have observed that shift from both the operational and technological sides as closely as Michael Klein, Director of Retail, Travel & Hospitality Product Marketing at Talkdesk. Before moving into enterprise CX technology, Klein spent more than three decades in retail merchandising and leadership roles, including time with Adobe and Williams-Sonoma.

That background, he says, fundamentally shapes how he evaluates enterprise software.

“I’ve spent more than three decades in retail,” Klein said. “My background in retail merchandising keeps me focused on how technology actually improves the customer experience and drives real business outcomes. It’s never been about leveraging technology just for the sake of it.”

In merchandising, every decision — from assortment planning to store layout — is tied to measurable results. Klein brings that same lens to AI.

“AI is a strong example,” he said. “When applied well, it helps increase average order value, drive repeat purchases and improve retention.”

In other words, the question is not whether AI is impressive. It is whether it sells more sweaters, books more rooms, or deepens loyalty.

“At Talkdesk, we’re focused on using it where it truly makes a difference for retailers and their customers,” he added.

The Persistent Myth of the Demographic Customer

Retailers have more customer data than ever before. Yet, paradoxically, many still design experiences around broad assumptions.

“One of the biggest misconceptions is that everyone in a demographic bucket behaves the same way,” Klein said. “That Gen X shops one way, Millennials another, and Baby Boomers another.”

The reality, he argues, is messier.

“If it were that clean, personalization would be easy,” he said. “But I’ve seen plenty of Baby Boomers who are perfectly comfortable booking travel online and plenty of younger customers who want to speak to a person when something goes wrong.”

The mistake, he suggests, is building customer journeys around stereotypes rather than behavior. Digital-first consumers are not defined by age alone; they are defined by context, urgency, and preference at any given moment.

Designing around assumptions creates friction. Designing around actual signals creates loyalty.

From Cost Center to Growth Engine

Perhaps the most profound shift underway is the redefinition of the contact center.

For decades, contact centers were treated as overhead — necessary to resolve complaints, but disconnected from growth. AI is changing that calculus.

“From a customer standpoint, AI makes it easier to self-service when they want to,” Klein said. “That convenience drives satisfaction — and satisfied customers tend to spend more.”

Self-service is not about removing human interaction; it is about giving customers control. When done well, automation reduces frustration and accelerates resolution.

For brands, the internal impact is just as significant.

“AI frees up contact center teams to focus on higher-value work,” Klein said. “Whether that’s helping design a room, building a wardrobe, or solving a complex issue. Those are real revenue-driving conversations.”

By removing friction in knowledge access, documentation, and agent training, AI shifts human effort toward consultative interactions — the kinds of conversations that build trust and increase basket size.

At its best, automation does not replace people. It elevates them.

Why So Much “AI-Powered CX” Falls Flat

In a market saturated with “AI-powered” claims, differentiation often dissolves into jargon. Klein has spent years translating complex enterprise technology into language retailers actually understand — and he is blunt about what works.

“Great marketing and complex jargon just don’t mix,” he said. “Instead of relying on technical words that only developers or product managers use, brands should drop the IT acronyms and language that’s too deep in the weeds.”

Retailers do not buy platforms. They buy outcomes.

Plain language, he argues, forces vendors to clarify their value proposition. If a product cannot be explained without abstraction, it likely lacks practical grounding.

Separating Real AI From Marketing Noise

Klein is equally pragmatic about the current AI moment. Not all AI is new — and not all of it is transformative.

“We first need to be clear about which AI we’re talking about,” he said.

Retailers have long used predictive models to forecast inventory, optimize distribution, and manage replenishment. Those systems quietly shape customer satisfaction by ensuring products are in stock.

“That has a direct impact on product availability and customer satisfaction,” Klein noted.

More recently, generative and agentic AI have begun to deliver tangible value in marketing and service environments — drafting content, assisting agent,s and streamlining workflows.

Where the narrative drifts into hype, he says, is in the idea of full automation.

“We’re a long way from AI taking over everything,” Klein said. “Human oversight still matters, and consumers will want the choice between automation and a real person depending on the situation.”

The future, in his view, is hybrid — not robotic.

The Context Problem

If there is one area where brands consistently misstep, it is context.

With so much data available, companies often mistake volume for insight.

“The key to designing better experiences is relying on context signals, like timing and intent, coupled with history and preference,” Klein said.

Without context, personalization becomes misdirection. A customer who once purchased a gift for a relative may be permanently misclassified, leading to irrelevant recommendations.

“Imagine you visit a store for the first time to buy a present for your grandmother,” he said. “If the retailer caters your experience based only on your first visit, your experience won’t serve your current needs.”

The difference between intelligent personalization and awkward irrelevance often comes down to whether brands understand why a purchase occurred — not just that it did.

The Hardest Part of Modernization

Enterprise modernization is rarely blocked by technology alone.

“The biggest hurdle brands encounter is not doing anything for fear of disrupting operations,” Klein said.

Legacy systems may be aging, but they are stable. Change introduces uncertainty.

“The next hurdle is weeding out bad data,” he added. “And the third is dealing with people who are stuck in their old ways or too protective of their territory.”

Transformation demands both technical cleanup and cultural shift. It requires encouraging teams to experiment, test openly, and share ownership across departments.

Without that alignment, even the best technology stalls.

The Metrics That Will Matter Next

As AI becomes embedded in CX systems, traditional metrics such as handle time and surface-level satisfaction scores may lose their primacy.

“In the next few years, customer lifetime value, recency, and frequency will become key metrics to monitor,” Klein said, particularly in retail and hospitality.

Those measures capture relationship strength rather than transaction speed. They reflect whether AI is driving durable loyalty rather than short-term efficiency.

In that sense, the next phase of AI in customer experience is not about the volume of automation or technological sophistication. It is about commercial impact.

For Klein, that is the through line connecting his merchandising past to his product marketing present. Technology is not the hero of the story. The customer is.

And in a competitive landscape where switching costs are low and expectations are high, the brands that treat customer experience as a growth lever—not a service line item—will be the ones that endure.

The post Retail’s AI Reckoning Is About Revenue — Not Robots appeared first on MartechView.

In Silicon Valley, obituaries are often written too soon. First, it was email. Then the press release. Now, the target is the public relations agency itself.

The argument is seductive in its simplicity: if artificial intelligence can draft a pitch, summarize a strategy, and produce passable thought leadership in seconds, what need remains for the humans who were once billed by the hour to do it?

To test that thesis, I sat down with Susan Thomas, CEO and founder of 10Fold, a woman who has guided more than 500 companies toward the grueling scrutiny of the public markets. Her answer was neither defensive nor nostalgic.

“Traditional PR is dying,” she told me. “That does not mean media outreach or thought leadership campaigns are going away any time soon. What I mean is the traditional boundaries and limitations of PR no longer apply and firms must adjust quickly to adapt.”

It was not a lament. It was a warning.

For decades, public relations operated under a comfortable ambiguity. Visibility was presumed valuable. Influence was inferred. Impressions were counted and filed away in quarterly reports. In a world before dashboards and CRM pipelines, that was enough.

It is no longer enough.

The rise of measurable marketing—SEO, performance advertising, revenue analytics—has forced communications into a harsher light. Chief executives now ask questions that clip books cannot answer: How much pipeline? How much attributable growth? What business outcome changed because of this campaign?

Thomas believes the industry’s real reckoning is not with AI, but with accountability.

“AI is not the existential threat to PR and communications agencies,” she said. “To survive in today’s volatile environment, they simply have to earn their place. That means having client discussions that begin with business objectives, which serve as the basis for a communications plan. It’s about reverse engineering the desired business outcomes.”

A press release, she added bluntly, “has no inherent value.” It is a cost unless it drives measurable movement — website traffic spikes, CRM engagement, investor attention. At 10Fold, she said, teams correlate coverage with direct traffic patterns, AI rankings and campaign timelines. It is not perfect, she admits, but it is far more rigorous than impressions and advertising equivalents, the old currency of the trade.

In this framing, AI is not the villain. Mediocrity is.

The AI Paradox: Speed vs. Substance

The fear animating many agencies is that large language models have commoditized content. Thomas sees it differently.

“AI adoption is not killing agencies; it is critical for both agencies and companies alike,” she said. “The problem is that most don’t use it correctly. AI relies on data and input — something very hard to find when you have an original idea, solution, or approach.”

AI, she argues, is a powerful thought partner and time saver. But it draws from what already exists. Without original insight and a defined position, it produces content that is technically fluent and strategically hollow.

“Without a strong human point of view,” she warned, “AI-generated content quickly becomes generic and indistinguishable.”

In a discovery ecosystem increasingly shaped by large language models that prioritize credible third-party validation, indistinguishability is invisible.

The IPO Illusion

Thomas has seen another recurring misstep: high-growth technology companies failing to evolve their narrative as they move toward an IPO.

“The biggest mistake executives make,” she said, “is not understanding how communications plans must evolve as the company matures and moves toward an exit.”

Early-stage companies talk about innovation and disruption. But as they approach public markets, the narrative must broaden. Investors look for ecosystem relevance, customer validation, and operational discipline.

Hiring a CFO can signal financial maturity. Strategic partnerships signal integration. Vertical expertise signals durability. And once financial institutions are secured and paperwork is filed, the quiet period reshapes what can and cannot be said. Even subtle language shifts in press materials become regulated terrain.

Companies that fail to prepare in stages, she noted, often find themselves constrained at precisely the moment clarity matters most.

The Measurement Reckoning

Public relations has struggled to quantify its impact, not because it lacks impact, Thomas argues, but because it failed to adopt modern measurement frameworks.

“For much of its 100-year history, PR operated on a simple premise: visibility and influence were assumed to be valuable,” she said. “Anecdotal success stories are not enough in today’s environment.”

Compounding the issue is timing. Reporting delivered months after a campaign’s peak offers little strategic leverage. Measurement, she insists, must be continuous and integrated with the systems marketers trust — website analytics, CRM dashboards, pipeline models.

Agencies that sell “activity as value” will not survive. Those that demonstrate proof points aligned to business goals will.

Investors, Narrative, and the New Discovery Engine

Investors, Thomas said, are not interested in marketing spin. But they care deeply about credible narratives that resonate with buyers, partners, and future backers.

With large language models reshaping how information surfaces, third-party validation has become even more important. Discovery is shifting away from keyword density and toward authority and originality. In that environment, earned media and differentiated thought leadership are not ornamental — they are strategic assets.

Strong brand programs, supported by credible external voices, increasingly serve as signals of long-term value creation.

Crisis in the Always-On Era

Corporate reputation no longer moves in neat cycles. Social media and activist stakeholders compress timelines and amplify scrutiny. Yet Thomas resists the notion of a permanent state of emergency.

Preparation, she argues, is the antidote. Establish baseline sentiment before a crisis. Benchmark normal conditions. Define response protocols in advance.

“When leaders understand where their organization stands in normal conditions,” she said, “they are better equipped to respond with clarity and confidence.”

Beyond the Hype

Having spent decades in Silicon Valley, Thomas has seen hype cycles crest and collapse. She does not place AI among them.

“AI is beyond a hype cycle,” she said. “It is fundamentally transforming business processes at every level.”

The exuberance will normalize. Integration will deepen. The tools will become infrastructure. What will remain scarce is not automation, but originality.

The obituary for traditional PR may well be accurate. But obsolescence is not inevitable. Reinvention is.

In the age of automation, the agencies that endure will not be those that defend legacy practices. They will be those that prove — with discipline, data, and differentiated thought — that narrative, when aligned to business outcomes, remains one of the most powerful assets a company can possess.

Prove your value, or be automated out of the conversation.

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