The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström® | What CMOs Need to Know About Marketing Technology, AI & CX

Kaz Ohta, CEO and CMO of Treasure AI, helped pioneer the customer data platform category. Now he's betting that customer data matters less for what it stores than for what autonomous agents do with it. Recorded at Agentic World, he and Greg Kihlström get into what that shift asks of enterprise marketing leaders.

The CDP label stopped describing the work. Why Treasure Data became Treasure AI, where the company's engineering investmen...

Ankur Goyal, CEO and Co-Founder at Fibr AI, says your website now has a second audience that never looks at it: the AI agents reading and summarizing your brand before a buyer ever arrives.

He and Greg Kihlström get into what that does to pages enterprises have spent a decade optimizing for humans.

Owned properties become the control point. Models keep changing what they cite and how, so the durable investment is in the properties a ...

Ken Stillwell, CFO and COO at Pega, says most enterprise AI business cases fund a label rather than a specific capability — and that the gap shows up later, on the P&L. He and Greg Kihlström get into what financial discipline around AI actually looks like.

"AI" is not a budget category. A rules engine, a predictive model, and a system that acts on its own carry different costs, risks, and payback periods. Stillwell on maki...

Tom Kaneshige, Chief Content Officer at the CMO Council, says there is no best martech stack — only a best-aligned one. New research on 988 enterprise stacks shows why more functionality rarely means more value.

Alignment beats functionality, and the data says so. The Apex Martech Matrix compares real deployments against companies in the top 30% for revenue per employee in their industry. The same investment that correlates wi...

Jon Hyman, Co-Founder & CTO of Braze, joins Greg Kihlström live at Braze Forge 2026 in Las Vegas on what's left for marketers when AI handles experimentation, verification, and execution.

Recorded at the Fontainebleau Las Vegas, the conversation gets into where the line sits between what AI decides on its own and what still needs a person.

1:1 decisioning needs guardrails, not just more tests. Decisioning Studio Go moves teams be...

We spend a lot of time asking how brands can be memorable. We spend almost none asking what happens when the memory is the product.

Agility gets talked about as moving fast with new tools. It's really the ability to change repeatedly without losing what makes you recognizable — and that gets harder when what you sell is something a customer plans to keep for twenty years.

Today, we're going to talk about:

- Why designing...

John Rockhold, VP Market Engagement at Spotlight, says AI answer engines treat a company's own content as a ceiling — the citations that move buyers come from sources it doesn't control. He and Greg Kihlström get into what replaces the old B2B influence playbook.

Self-citation is a ceiling, not a strategy. Publishing more owned content doesn't raise AI visibility past a point; third-party validation does the lifting.

Analys...

Brands have spent millions building out customer experience platforms — so why does the experience so often fall apart at the exact moment it matters most?

Agility isn't just about moving faster or scaling up. It's about staying recognizably yourself when the pressure is highest — so the experience still holds together when every system is under strain.

Today we're going to talk about what happens when the experie...

What happens when an organization's AI ambition moves faster than its frontline's ability to absorb it?

Agility isn't just deploying new technology quickly. It's whether the people and processes closest to the customer can change alongside it without the experience coming apart at the seams.

Today we're going to talk about the friction between enterprise AI deployment and frontline readiness — and why the last mile of s...

Matt Spiegel, EVP of TruAudience Growth Strategy at TransUnion, says AI is not a shortcut around your data problems — it's a force multiplier that makes them bigger. New TransUnion research found 89% of marketers are increasing AI investment while only 13% have fully scaled it.

Adoption is not the same as scale. Nearly half of surveyed leaders say AI now spans multiple core marketing functions, but only 13% have scaled it full...

If your best marketing people feel like they're doing the work of three, is that a workload problem or a structure problem?

Agility isn't just moving faster. It's being able to change how your team is built, repeatedly, without the work coming apart in the process.

Today we're talking about the architecture of the marketing team itself. Budget pressure, a tight talent market, and rising expectations for output have a lot of l...

Deena Zenyk, VP of Customer Engagement, Service Delivery at Spotlight, argues that customer advocacy stopped being a content quota the moment AI tools started assembling B2B shortlists from analyst research, peer reviews, and community threads. She and Greg Kihlström get into what that changes.

The first reader of your customer's testimonial may not be a buyer. Zenyk co-wrote The Messenger is the Message on the premise that a credib...

Airstream CMO Mollie Hansen and Nomadics founder Chris Pendl built Camp Airstream as a product owners pay to attend, not a campaign — then had to prove to the business what that community is actually worth.

An experience becomes a product when people come back to it. Camp Airstream runs as an ongoing program rather than a campaign moment, which changes who owns it, how it's staffed, and what "finished" means.

The hard part is i...

Peter Giordano, Head of DoorDash Ads at DoorDash, argues that retail media stopped being an ad channel the moment the gap between an impression and a delivered order collapsed to minutes. He and Greg Kihlström get into what that changes for enterprise brands.

Commerce platforms are becoming full-funnel media, not a lower-funnel add-on. DoorDash isn't a traditional retailer, and Espinosa explains what its data shows about consumer in...

What if, by the time a B2B buyer ever talks to your sales team, the decision is already mostly made, and somewhere you can't see and can't measure?

For years, agility meant being quick with the latest tools. Now it means something harder: letting go of long-held assumptions about the buyer's journey and accepting that influence has scattered across a decentralized network of peers, creators, and AI — much of it happening in pl...

If a growing share of your customers now begin their shopping journey on a platform you don't own — and can't see into — is your website still your most important marketing asset?

Agility here isn't just about reacting to new customer behavior. It's about building an infrastructure that can meet customers wherever they show up, and still have the brand behave like one company when it gets there.

Today, we're going...

Hilary Smith, CMO at Linnworks, argues that most ecommerce brands believe their operations are already automated — and that the manual work quietly grows as they scale. She and Greg Kihlström get into where it hides and what it costs.

AI's most consequential move in retail is happening in the back office, not the front end. After years of chatbots and personalization, the investment is shifting into inventory, fulfillment, and...

As companies invest billions in AI and automation to scale customer interactions, are they unintentionally building a wall between their brand and the very people they're trying to serve?

Agility requires that as technology accelerates, our ability to listen to and understand the customer must accelerate even faster.

Today, we're going to talk about how organizations can maintain and deepen their connection to consumers in an era inc...

Mike Kaput, Chief Content Officer at Marketing AI Institute, joins Greg Kihlström to unpack the gap between an AI pilot that demos well and an AI capability the enterprise can actually run on.

"AI strategy" describes very different things at different companies. Kaput on what he finds underneath the phrase once you start asking what the systems actually do, and who is accountable when they do it wrong.

The pilot-to-production gap is ...