#788: Year-end review with Greg Kihlström, The Agile Brand

Summary

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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Year-End Review 2025

Podcast: The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström® (Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX)
Host: Greg Kihlström
Episode: #788 – Year-end Review
Date: December 24, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this special year-end solo episode, host Greg Kihlström reflects on the major themes, eye-opening trends, and standout insights that dominated The Agile Brand podcast in 2025. Drawing from over 150 interviews with martech leaders, tech executives, and brand strategists, Greg distills the most pivotal developments in AI, data, marketing operations, customer experience, and brand agility. Instead of recapping individual episodes, Greg frames the year through five transformative themes and shares advice for staying agile in a rapidly changing landscape.

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Key Themes and Discussion Points

1. The Shift From Automation to Agentic AI

(Starts at 03:10)

• Not Just a Tool—A Strategic Partner:
  2025 witnessed AI progress from simple automation (e.g., writing emails) to serving as a strategic, autonomous agent in marketing operations.
• AI as a Trusted Thought Partner:
  • Greg Shove (Section): Executives should use AI to “role play” scenarios before high-stakes meetings to expose blind spots and biases.
  • Sid Banerjee (Medallia): We’re “entering a post-dashboard era”—AI will proactively surface insights and even autonomously act, removing the need for static reporting.
  • Robin Ross (Activate Insight): Brands must be “agent ready,” preparing for a future where consumer AI agents research and purchase on their behalf.

“This shifts the marketing dynamic from influencing a human to ensuring a brand is agent ready and can communicate value to a machine.”
– Greg Kihlström [05:05]

• Consumer Adoption is Happening:
  Holiday shopping trends show consumers beginning to use AI agents, signaling the urgency for brands to adapt.

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2. From Static Segments to Real-Time Signals

(Starts at 06:05)

• Behavioral Signals Over Demographics:
  Marketers are moving away from legacy demographic segmentation and focusing instead on real-time signals—customers’ current behaviors, not historic segments.
  • Michelle Bukoff Bajik (Sitecore): “Moving from understanding the customer as a static identity to dynamic intent or signals.”
  • Heidi Bullock (Tealium): Real-time data—“a customer’s behavior in the last 30 seconds”—is more valuable than years of purchase history.
  • Raj Dadatta (Bloomreach): Personalization (anticipating needs) is now the primary driver of loyalty, overtaking perks and rewards.

“The expectation is that the brand anticipates needs rather than rewarding past transactions.”
– Greg Kihlström [07:29]

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3. The Human-in-the-Loop Paradox

(Starts at 08:04)

• As AI Rises, Human Differentiation Becomes Key:
  Despite rapid AI adoption, authentic human connection, creativity, and empathy are differentiators in an era of impersonal “AI slop.”
  • Lindsay Irvine (Square): "You cannot AI your way to real brand connection."
  • Ken Hughes: Brands must fight for “emotional heart space,” citing stories like Virgin Atlantic’s unscripted, above-and-beyond service.
  • Robbie Ferrara (Monday.com): Creativity and emotional resonance are crucial for breaking through B2B noise.

“Technology is the enabler and always will be, but humanity is the differentiator.”
– Greg Kihlström [08:25]

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4. Data Unification & Composable Architectures

(Starts at 09:25)

• From Monolithic to Composable:
  Rigid “all-in-one” marketing clouds are giving way to modular, composable architectures, prioritizing unified and accessible data.
  • Stephen Stouffer (Tray AI): The integration layer is the “single biggest blocker” to AI adoption—an integration-first mindset is essential.
  • Ravi Shankar (Denodo): Advocates for connecting data “where it lives” rather than centralizing it, for speed and flexibility.
  • Mark Wheeler (Storyblok): Composable, API-driven content systems let marketers publish instantly without dev bottlenecks.

“AI models are useless without a pristine, accessible data foundation.”
– Greg Kihlström [09:54]

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5. Proactive (But Invisible) Customer Experience

(Starts at 11:00)

• Predictive, Seamless CX is the New Standard:
  Customers expect solutions before problems arise and prefer “invisible” experiences where friction is absent.
  • Peter Galvin (NMI): “The best payment experience is the one the customer never really saw” (e.g., Uber’s seamless payments).
  • Tina Van Kalster (Telenet): Their “Click and Smile” initiative suggests service downgrades to save customers money—short-term revenue loss, long-term trust gain.
  • Gerardo Dada (Catchpoint): “Slow is the new down”—even small delays ruin brand perception.

“Millisecond performance can destroy brand perception just as effectively as a total outage.”
– Greg Kihlström [12:00]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• AI as Agent Quote:

  “Treat AI as a strategic thought partner rather than just a tool.”
  – Greg Kihlström, echoing Greg Shove [04:10]

• Human Differentiation in AI Era:

  “Authentic connection becomes a competitive moat.”
  – Greg Kihlström [08:20]

• Marketing as Jazz, Not a Factory:

  “Think of the modern enterprise marketing function less like a factory and more like a jazz ensemble… The CMO’s job is not to script every note, but to ensure your team and AI agents are listening to each other, have the skills to improvise, and are playing in the same key.”
  – Greg Kihlström [12:35]

• Advice for Staying Agile:

  “I always try to stay curious and put myself in uncomfortable positions. If I’m a little too comfortable, I’m probably not pushing myself enough.”
  – Greg Kihlström [12:58]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Welcome and Reflection on the Year: [02:10]
• Theme 1 – Automation to Agentic AI: [03:10]
• Theme 2 – Real-Time Signals: [06:05]
• Theme 3 – Human Connection in AI Era: [08:04]
• Theme 4 – Data & Composable Architecture: [09:25]
• Theme 5 – Proactive Invisible CX: [11:00]
• Marketing as Jazz Metaphor: [12:35]
• Greg’s Agility Routine / Closing Thoughts: [12:58]

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Tone & Style

Greg’s style is insightful and future-focused, blending strategic advice with actionable examples and memorable metaphors. He maintains an optimistic but realistic perspective on the challenges facing marketers as AI and CX rapidly evolve.

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Summary Takeaways

• AI is evolving from assistant to autonomous agent, demanding brands become “agent ready.”
• Real-time behavioral data now outpaces static segmentation and drives true personalization.
• Human creativity, empathy, and brand storytelling are more essential than ever as AI-generated noise increases.
• Data unification under composable, modular architectures is the foundation for AI and next-gen CX.
• The best customer experiences are seamless, predictive, and nearly invisible.

Greg frames the future of marketing as improvisational jazz—requiring agility, unified vision, data integrity, and the human touch to rise above the noise.

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For more episodes or to connect with Greg Kihlström:
Visit theagilebrand.com or gregkihlstrom.com.

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End of Summary

Transcript

[Liberty Mutual Spokesperson]

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[Liberty Mutual Companion]

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[Liberty Mutual Spokesperson]

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[Liberty Mutual Companion]

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[Liberty Mutual Spokesperson]

Anyways, get a [e-mail] or with your local agent.

[Liberty Mutual Companion]

Liberty Liberty. Liberty Liberty.

[Strayer University Announcer]

At Strayer University, we help students like you. Go from Will I To why not? For over 130 years, we've been innovating higher education to make it more affordable, accessible and attainable so you can reach your goals. Go from thinking can I? To Yes, I Can. And keep striving. Visit Strayer. Edu to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chev and its many campuses, including at 212115 Street north in Arlington, Virginia. The agile brand.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and Martech platforms as we explore marketing, technology, AI, e commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees

and continued business growth.

I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now on to the show.

Welcome to the show. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom and first, I want to say a huge thank you to you for listening. Whether you've listened to 1, 10, 100 or more episodes, I really appreciate your attention and your support. We're just finishing year seven and soon enough we'll be in season eight with over 800 episodes. Couldn't have done this without listeners like you. And while you're here, I'd love to ask that you rate and leave a review so others can find this show as well. So in this episode I'm going to do something a little different. Usually I have guests, but Today it's just going to be me. As we wind down for the year, we're going to be running down some of our favorites from 2025 until the new year begins. So in this episode I wanted to take a look back at some of the overall themes discussed and point out a few highlights for me. I won't be able to highlight everything, of course, but I found five themes really interesting. And I won't lie, I had a little help from AI in doing this, but that's also kind of the point. We've all been using AI to do things to make our work easier, and I thought that pouring through 150 plus episodes recorded over 12 months is the perfect thing to have AI help me with. So here goes. The first theme is the shift from automation to agentic AI and the strategic partnership with AI. So a dominant theme across multiple interviews this year is this evolution of AI from a tool for things like basic automation, write me a blog post, check my email, things like that, to an agentic force that acts as a strategic partner in your work. Leaders are moving beyond using AI solely for efficiency, things like writing copy and other things like that, towards using it for high stakes decision making and autonomous action. So in terms of AI as a thought partner, Greg Shove, CEO of Section, emphasized that executives should treat AI as a strategic thought partner rather than just a tool. He suggested role playing with AI before high stakes meetings like board meetings, to uncover blind spots and even challenge biases. Sid Banerjee of Medallia argued that we are entering a post dashboard era. Instead of humans staring at static reports to derive insights, AI agents will proactively tell leaders what to focus on and in some cases take the neck, take necessary actions autonomously. Robin Ross from Activate Insight warns that brands must prepare for a future where consumers deploy their own agents to research and purchase on their behalf. And to me, this shifts the marketing dynamic from influencing a human to ensuring a brand is agent ready and can communicate value to a machine. Lots of things changing and you know, as I saw the stats from the holiday shopping, I definitely saw this, this the beginnings of this shift to AI agents used by consumers. The second big theme that I saw was this idea of moving from static audience segments to using real time signals to communicate with customers. As you probably know, the traditional marketing reliance on demographic segmentation is still in use. It's still valuable, but it's slowly being replaced by a focus on real time behavioral signals. CMOs are being urged to build architectures that react to what a customer is doing right now rather than who they were historically or even what they did yesterday. Michelle Bukoff Bajik of sitecore highlighted a critical reframe moving from understanding the customer as a static identity or a segment to understanding dynamic intent or signals. This requires bringing together data from clicks, from searches and other interactions to create a living picture of the customer. Heidi Bullock of Telium noted that real time data is often more valuable than historical data. For example, a customer's behavior in the last 30 seconds can be more predictive of their immediate needs than even 10 years of purchase history, preventing irrelevant retargeting for items either they already purchased or they no longer want. Raj Dadatta of Bloomreach suggested that in the new era of loyalty, personalization has replaced traditional perks as the primary driver. The expectation is that the brand anticipates needs rather than rewarding past transactions. The third theme that I found throughout this year's shows was this human in the loop paradox, and I'll explain this a little bit as AI adoption continues to accelerate, there's a counter trend emphasizing that brand distinctiveness and trust now rely more heavily on human connection, empathy and creativity. Technology is the enabler and always will be, but humanity is the differentiator in an era of AI slop. I'm sure you've seen plenty of that even in the last week. Authentic connection becomes a competitive moat. Lindsay Irvine of Square noted that you cannot AI your way to real brand connection, emphasizing the need to spotlight real human stories within the community. Ken Hughes, the king of cx, argues that despite the tech stack, brands must fight for emotional heart space. He uses the example of Virgin Atlantic staff going above and beyond to save a child's goldfish as the type of unscripted human empathy that builds tribal fandom, something AI just simply can't replicate. Robbie Ferrara of Monday.com points out that while B2B marketing is traditionally logical and risk averse. Breaking through the noise requires emotional resonance and creativity that challenges convention. The fourth theme that I saw was this idea of data unification and composable architectures. The monolithic or all in one marketing cloud is giving way to composable architectures where data is unified but accessible by various best of breed tools. This trend is also being driven by the realization that AI models are useless without a pristine, accessible data foundation doesn't mean that we don't have a hub in terms of our marketing and marketing technology architectures, but it does mean these monolithic systems are not as flexible in a composable world. Stephen Stouffer of Trey AI identifies the integration layer as the single biggest blocker to AI adoption. He argued for an integration first mindset, noting that point solutions often fail when a second or third department tries to use them. Ravi Shankar of denodo advocates for a logical approach to data management, connecting to data where it lives rather than physically moving it into a central repository. Lots of other challenges with that as well. This allows for faster access to insights without the delays of traditional ETL processes. Mark Wheeler of Storyblock discussed how composable API first content management systems allow marketers to bypass developer tickets and the wait times associated with them and publish content instantly across channels, meeting the speed demands of modern commerce the last theme that I saw in in the shows this year is this idea of proactive but invisible customer experiences. The bar for customer experience has risen from responsive to predictive and invisible customers. Customers no longer want to ask for help. They expect brands to solve problems before they occur. We also saw continuing challenges as Forester CX's index fell for what is it, the third year in a row. We're seeing a lot of challenges across the board with customers that have increasing expectations and brands are struggling to deliver. Peter Galvin of NMI described the best payment experience as the one the customer never really saw, citing examples like Uber where the transaction is almost invisible. Tina Van Kalster of Telenet shared the Click and Smile initiative where their brand proactively suggested downgrades or service changes to save customers money. Think about that. While this may hurt short term revenue, it builds immense long term loyalty and trust. Gerardo Dada of Catchpoint highlighted that slow is the new down 53% of organizations now view poor performance as damaging as downtime, meaning milliseconds of latency can destroy brand perception just as effectively as a total outage. So for those marketing leaders out there, think of the modern enterprise marketing function less like a factory where you optimize an assembly line to produce static campaigns efficiently and think about it more like a jazz ensemble. In a factory, you control every variable. In a jazz ensemble, the current market, the tempo can change, tempo being consumer behavior and new instruments join in unexpectedly new ways and different ways. This could be AI agents or who knows what 2026 will bring. The CMO's job is not to script every note, but to ensure that the musicians or your team and your AI agents are listening to each other, have the skills to improvise and are playing in the same key. This means unified data strategy, agility and human creativity and brand strategy are all increasingly important. Just as AI agents and whatever comes next will be as well. Well, thanks again for listening to this episode. I know I ask everybody that is a guest on my show the same question, so I'm gonna ask myself the same one. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently? Well, for me, I always try to stay curious and I always try to put myself in uncomfortable positions. I know that if I am a little too comfortable in something, I'm probably not pushing myself enough. And I always just try to stay curious, try to not only keep up on the latest industry stuff, but read and listen to stuff that I might not have normally wanted to do and push myself a little bit to learn that. And by being curious, by constantly pushing myself, I try. I think of myself as, as. As an agile person. Well, thanks again for listening and thanks for all your support. I look forward to seeing you in the new year.

Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagile brand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.greggkilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S T r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.

[Strayer University Announcer]

The agile brand.

[Liberty Mutual Spokesperson]

And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.

[Liberty Mutual Companion]

Hey everyone. Check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date?

[Liberty Mutual Spokesperson]

Oh no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.

[Liberty Mutual Companion]

Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.

[Liberty Mutual Spokesperson]

Anyways, get a [e-mail] or with your local agent.

[Liberty Mutual Companion]

Liberty. Liberty. Liberty Liberty.

[Strayer University Announcer]

At Strayer University, we help students like you go from will I To why not? For over 130 years, we've been innovating higher education to make it more affordable, accessible and attainable so you can reach your goals. Go from thinking can I? To yes I Can and keep striving Visit strayer. Edu to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chevinus. Many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia.