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

Summary

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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström® – Episode #788: Year-end Review with Greg Kihlström

Date: December 24, 2025
Host: Greg Kihlström
Theme: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, and CX—2025 Industry Review

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Episode Overview

In this special solo episode, Greg Kihlström closes out 2025 by recapping key trends and insights from over 150 episodes, focusing on how marketing, technology, AI, and customer experience (CX) have evolved. Drawing on guest commentary and industry findings, Greg revisits the five most significant themes from the year—reflecting on the shift to agentic AI, the emergence of real-time data, the continued importance of human connection, composable technology architectures, and the rising bar for proactive, invisible CX. This "best of" look provides actionable lessons for marketing and CX leaders navigating today's rapid digital transformation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Shift from Automation to Agentic AI (02:18–04:09)

• Theme: AI is moving from being a simple automation tool to acting as a strategic partner—an "agent" making decisions and taking autonomous action.
• Insight:
  • Organizations are using AI beyond basic tasks ("write me a blog post") to support high-stakes decisions and even operate independently.
  • AI is now a "thought partner" in the boardroom and beyond.
• Notable Guest Quotes:
  • Greg Shove, Section:

    “Executives should treat AI as a strategic thought partner rather than just a tool… Role playing with AI before high stakes meetings can uncover blind spots and challenge biases.” (03:05)

  • Sid Banerjee, Medallia:

    “We're entering a post-dashboard era. AI agents will proactively tell leaders what to focus on and, in some cases, take necessary actions autonomously.” (03:23)

  • Robin Ross, Activate Insight:

    “Brands must prepare for a future where consumers deploy their own agents to research and purchase on their behalf.” (03:35)

• Greg’s Reflection:

  “This shifts the marketing dynamic from influencing a human to ensuring a brand is agent ready and can communicate value to a machine.” (03:51)

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2. From Static Audience Segments to Real-Time Signals (04:09–05:42)

• Theme: Traditional demographic segmentation is giving way to real-time behavioral signals to drive customer communication.
• Insight:
  • Marketers are expected to react to customers’ current behavior (“what a customer is doing right now”) over historical data.
  • Dynamic personalization and intent are preferred over static identity segmentation.
• Notable Guest Quotes:
  • Michelle Bukoff Bajik, Sitecore:

    “It’s a critical reframe: moving from understanding the customer as a static identity or segment to understanding dynamic intent or signals.” (04:47)

  • Heidi Bullock, Telium:

    “Real-time data is often more valuable than historical data… a customer's behavior in the last 30 seconds can be more predictive of immediate needs than even 10 years of purchase history.” (05:08)

  • Raj DeDatta, Bloomreach:

    “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.” (05:26)

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3. The Human-in-the-Loop Paradox (05:42–07:06)

• Theme: Amidst soaring AI adoption, brand trust and distinctiveness depend more than ever on authentic human connection, empathy, and creativity.
• Insight:
  • “AI slop” makes genuine human brand moments a critical differentiator.
  • Authentic stories and unscripted empathy create “tribal fandom” that tech cannot replicate.
• Notable Guest Quotes:
  • Lindsay Irvine, Square:

    “You cannot AI your way to real brand connection; you need to spotlight real human stories within the community.” (06:10)

  • Ken Hughes:

    “Despite the tech stack, brands must fight for emotional heart space… unscripted human empathy is what builds tribal fandom, something AI simply can’t replicate.” (06:30)

  • Robbie Ferrara, Monday.com:

    “While B2B marketing is traditionally logical and risk-averse, breaking through the noise requires emotional resonance and creativity that challenges convention.” (07:01)

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4. Data Unification and Composable Architectures (09:28–11:02)

• Theme: The shift from monolithic marketing clouds to “composable architectures” unifying data—while allowing best-of-breed tools for flexibility and speed.
• Insight:
  • AI demands pristine and accessible data.
  • Integration, not centralization, is the big challenge.
  • Composable content and data systems empower marketers and accelerate go-to-market efforts.
• Notable Guest Quotes:
  • Stephen Stouffer, Trey AI:

    “The integration layer is the single biggest blocker to AI adoption… an integration-first mindset is needed because point solutions fail when multiple departments try to use them.” (10:13)

  • Ravi Shankar, Denodo:

    “A logical approach to data management—connecting to data where it lives rather than moving it—allows faster access to insights without ETL delays.” (10:26)

  • Mark Wheeler, Storyblok:

    “Composable, API-first CMS lets marketers bypass developer tickets and instantly publish content across channels, meeting the demands of modern commerce.” (10:46)

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5. Proactive but Invisible Customer Experiences (11:02–13:29)

• Theme: The gold standard for CX is now predictive and invisible—solving customer problems before they arise, with seamless experiences.
• Insight:
  • Brands are expected to solve issues proactively, without the customer having to ask.
  • Invisible transactions (e.g., Uber) and proactive service (e.g., auto-suggested downgrades) deepen trust and loyalty, even if they impact short-term revenue.
  • Performance (even at the millisecond level) is critical: slow is now as damaging as downtime.
• Notable Guest Quotes:
  • Peter Galvin, NMI:

    “The best payment experience is the one the customer never really saw—like Uber, where the transaction is almost invisible.” (11:46)

  • Tina Van Kalster, Telenet:

    “Our Click and Smile initiative proactively suggested downgrades or service changes to save customers money, building immense long-term loyalty and trust.” (11:54)

  • Gerardo Dada, Catchpoint:

    “Slow is the new down—53% of organizations now view poor performance as damaging as downtime. Milliseconds of latency can destroy brand perception as effectively as a total outage.” (12:12)

• Greg’s Metaphor:

  “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 the musicians—your team and your AI agents—are listening, improvising, and playing in the same key.” (12:29–13:18)

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Greg Kihlström’s Guidance on Staying Agile (13:31–14:27)

• Question to Self: "What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you do it consistently?" (13:44)
• Greg’s Answer:

  “For me, I always try to stay curious and put myself in uncomfortable positions… If I’m too comfortable, I’m probably not pushing myself enough.” (13:48)
  “I try to not only keep up on the latest industry stuff, but read and listen to things I might not have normally wanted to do and push myself to learn.” (14:03)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “AI agents used by consumers… This shift to AI agents is just beginning.” – Greg Kihlström (04:06)
• “Humanity is the differentiator.” – Greg Kihlström (06:06)
• “Unified data strategy, agility, and human creativity are all increasingly important, just as AI agents and whatever comes next will be as well.” – Greg Kihlström (13:21)

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Timestamps

• 00:10 – Greg welcomes listeners, outlines episode focus
• 02:18 – Theme 1: Automation → Agentic AI
• 04:09 – Theme 2: Real-time signals > static segments
• 05:42 – Theme 3: The Human-in-the-Loop paradox
• 09:28 – Theme 4: Data unification/composable architectures
• 11:02 – Theme 5: Proactive/invisible CX
• 13:31 – Audience Q&A: Staying agile
• 14:27 – Closing gratitude and looking ahead

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Conclusion

Greg’s year-end review distills complex trends into five actionable themes: the rise of agentic AI, real-time data-driven marketing, the power of authentic human connection, flexible and unified technology ecosystems, and the new bar of invisible, proactive CX. For leaders in marketing and customer experience, 2025 was a year of transformation—and, as Greg reminds us, curiosity and discomfort are essential to staying agile in the face of whatever 2026 brings.

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Transcript

[Intro/Outro Announcer]

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 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. And now onto 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.

I 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.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

I won't be able to highlight everything.

[Greg Kilstrom]

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 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 dedada 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 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 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.

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[Greg Kilstrom]

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 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.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Services or are looking for a speaker.

[Greg Kilstrom]

For your next event, go to www.gregkilstrom.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.

[Intro/Outro Announcer]

The Agile Brand.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Before we continue, I wanted to share a key strategic resource that a majority of the Fortune 500.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Are already aware of.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

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