Brillio's Kathleen Ulrich and Anuj Mathur on moving from personalization to agentic transformation

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
Episode: Brillio's Kathleen Ulrich and Anuj Mathur on Moving from Personalization to Agentic Transformation
Air Date: June 11, 2026
Host: Greg Kihlström
Guests: Kathleen Ulrich (Managing Director of Marketing, Brillio) and Anuj Mathur (Managing Director of CX Transformation, Brillio)

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Episode Overview

This episode of The Agile Brand explores the evolution of marketing and CX from basic personalization toward the next frontier: "agentic transformation." Greg Kihlström is joined by Brillio executives Kathleen Ulrich and Anuj Mathur to discuss what agentic experiences mean for enterprises, how organizations can practically move beyond personalization, the operational and talent changes required, and how leaders can prepare for a fundamentally new brand-customer dynamic shaped by AI and intelligent agents.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

What is Agentic Transformation?

From Personalization to Intelligent Agency

• Traditional personalization relies on linear, pre-crafted customer journeys and minor tweaks like name changes or basic segmentation ([07:13], Anuj Mathur).
• Agentic experiences fundamentally shift this model: AI-powered agents orchestrate real-time, context-aware interactions across devices and channels, making campaigns less about pushing messages and more about meaningful, adaptive dialogue ([08:08], Anuj Mathur).
• Example: In healthcare, agentic assistants help patients fill out digital forms by pulling in relevant personal records, dramatically improving both user experience and data accuracy ([09:42], Anuj Mathur).

Memorable Quote:

"It's really about a white glove experience...making that journey seamless for the customer...a conversation that is material and meaningful for both parties."
— Anuj Mathur [08:08]

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Strategic Imperative: Re-Architecting, Not Just Dreaming

• Agentic transformation is not merely "blue sky" ideation; it's practical, outcome-based re-architecting of journeys to align with business goals ([11:06], Anuj Mathur).
• Customers no longer follow linear journeys; agentic approaches enable perpetual, frictionless re-engagement across touchpoints, matching the fluidity of real-life behaviors ([11:09], Anuj Mathur).
• Leaders must start with desired business outcomes, then reimagine workflows—balancing innovation with legacy constraints (such as budgets and existing systems) ([11:34], Anuj Mathur).

Example:

• For a global credit card company, Brillio helped redesign the customer journey for a complex multi-currency product, making it more intuitive and dynamic while leveraging existing backend systems ([12:12], Anuj Mathur).

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Building an Agentic Foundation: Content, Orchestration, and Workflow

• Agentic Content Supply Chain: Traditional marketing automation required manual, large-team asset development; agentic approaches break content into modular "Lego blocks" dynamically assembled by AI agents at the moment of engagement ([16:13], Anuj Mathur).
• Agentic Campaign Orchestration: Messages aren’t just sent and forgotten; they are contextually tailored when opened, learning from history and behavior in real time ([17:51], Anuj Mathur).
• Human oversight still critical: Marketers remain in the loop to approve and direct agent actions, ensuring alignment with brand standards ([18:15], Anuj Mathur).

Notable Quote:

“AI agent is assembling that message for that customer at the open time of that email. Not based on when that email was sent, but based on when the email has been opened...a dynamic personalization.”
— Anuj Mathur [17:51]

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First Steps for Leaders: Where to Begin

• Don’t scrap what works: Start by analyzing your current funnel for drop-off points or friction that intelligent agents could address ([20:00], Anuj Mathur).
• Focus investment on moments with highest business value impact ([20:54], Anuj Mathur).
• Test, learn, and iterate: Rapid prototyping and continuous improvement beat waiting for a "perfect" system ([21:35], Anuj Mathur).
• Ensure robust governance and human oversight as agentic systems scale.

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Measurement & KPIs: Shifting from Output to Outcomes

• Centralize measurement around business outcomes:
  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ([22:21], Anuj Mathur)
  • Market coverage and operational throughput
  • Products per customer (for industries like banking)
  • Step-by-step improvement at drop-off points for cumulative gains ([23:32], Anuj Mathur)
• Agentic approaches blur the lines between marketing and sales, potentially merging functions into a seamless organization ([25:08], Kathleen Ulrich).

Memorable Quote:

“In the agentic world, those touch points with humans will compress...the handoff between marketing and sales will be even smoother or just disappear.”
— Kathleen Ulrich [25:08]

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The Talent Shift: New Skills & Roles

• Marketers’ roles move from campaign operators to system architects, orchestrating AI agents and managing agentic stacks ([27:50], Kathleen Ulrich).
• Domain expertise remains vital, but so does understanding how to design and manage agentic workflows.
• Teams need to be "business dreamers"—creative strategists who understand both technology and the customer’s real needs ([29:14], Anuj Mathur).
• Functional silos break down; marketers must be curious, multidisciplinary, and adept at continuous learning ([30:31], Anuj Mathur; [35:06], Kathleen Ulrich).

Memorable Quote:

“CMOs...we’re almost architects of systems of a whole entire organization...My role is shifting to architecting systems rather than managing a function.”
— Kathleen Ulrich [27:50]

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The Future: The Lean Agentic Marketing Organization

• Predicts a convergence of sales, marketing, and customer experience into seamless, hybrid human-machine organizations ([32:33], Kathleen Ulrich).
• Decision-making will become faster, more data-driven, and increasingly delegated to intelligent agents overseen by agile, business-savvy humans ([31:20], Anuj Mathur).
• Success will require curiosity, ongoing skill reinvention, and a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom ([34:53], Anuj Mathur; [35:06], Kathleen Ulrich).

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• "It's really about a white glove experience...making that journey seamless for the customer... a conversation that is material and meaningful for both parties."
  — Anuj Mathur [08:08]

• “AI agent is assembling that message for that customer at the open time...a dynamic personalization.”
  — Anuj Mathur [17:51]

• “In the agentic world, those touch points with humans will compress...the handoff between marketing and sales will be even smoother or just disappear.”
  — Kathleen Ulrich [25:08]

• “CMOs...are almost architects of systems of a whole entire organization...My role is shifting to architecting systems rather than managing a function.”
  — Kathleen Ulrich [27:50]

• "The pace is not going to slow down. It'll only pick up."
  — Anuj Mathur [31:49]

• "There's absolutely no way that one person will have all the answers...For me, it's being curious."
  — Kathleen Ulrich [35:06]

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | |-----------|-----------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:41 | Host's introduction to agentic marketing and the episode theme | | 07:01 | Defining agentic experiences vs. traditional personalization | | 09:42 | Healthcare “agentic assistant” example | | 11:06 | Rearchitecting journeys, not just ideation | | 12:12 | Credit card use case | | 16:13 | Agentic content supply chain vs. traditional marketing workflow | | 17:51 | Live, AI-driven content assembly | | 20:00 | First steps – where to start | | 22:21 | KPIs and outcome-based measurement | | 25:08 | Merging of marketing and sales | | 27:50 | The future of marketing roles & required skillsets | | 32:33 | Five-year outlook for agentic organizations | | 35:06 | Importance of curiosity and learning |

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Conclusion

Kathleen Ulrich and Anuj Mathur offer a blueprint for how enterprises can move beyond personalization toward agentic transformation, fundamentally reshaping marketing and CX. Success in this new era requires rearchitecting workflows for outcomes, fostering hybrid roles that blend domain expertise with AI orchestration, measuring impact in business terms, and cultivating a culture of curiosity and adaptability.

Bottom line: Agentic transformation is about more than technology. It’s a wholesale shift in how brands create value—requiring new mindsets, new structures, and new skills.

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Transcript

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[Greg Kilstrom]

hi, I'm Greg Kilstrom, host of the Agile Brand, and here's a question for you. What if the future of marketing isn't about creating better campaigns, but about designing intelligent agents that render campaigns obsolete? Agility requires not just adapting to new technologies, but fundamentally re architecting our operating models to harness their potential. Today we're going to talk about the move from personalization to agentic experiences and what that means for enterprise marketing. We're going to cover how agentic experiences are moving beyond simple personalization to fundamentally change the economics of customer acquisition and retention. The shift in talent and technology required moving from managing campaigns to orchestrating AI agents across the customer journey, and the practical first steps for building an agentic foundation within a complex enterprise environment focusing on governance and core systems. Welcome to season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. Again, I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of MarTech AI and marketing ops Hit subscribe or Follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. This episode is brought to you by Brilio. Founded in 2014 as a full service digital transformation services and consulting firm. They apply expertise in customer experience, transformation, data analytics, artificial intelligence, platform and product engineering, cloud infrastructure and security to help customers quickly innovate for growth, create digital products, build service platforms and drive smarter data driven performance. They strive to provide not only what the customers want, but also what they need. To them, success means leading customers to better outcomes and aligning priorities so that Brillio wins when their customers win. This ensures that every individual is fully invested in the success of their customers. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Kathleen Ulrich, Managing Director of Marketing and Anuj Mater, Managing Director of CX Transformation at Brillio. Kathleen and Anuj, welcome to the show.

[Kathleen Ulrich]

Thank you so much Greg. It's great to be here.

[Anuj Mathur]

Thank you for having us.

[Moderator/Interviewer]

Yeah, looking forward to talking about this topic with you. Definitely timely topic here. Before we do that though, why don't you each give a little background on yourselves and your roles at Brillio.

[Kathleen Ulrich]

Sure, I'll go ahead and go first. As Greg mentioned, I'm the Managing Director of Brand and Comms here at Brillio. I lead the global marketing across our four verticals, cmt, bfsi, Healthcare and Life Sciences and Consumer. And when I came into this role, I came in with a very specific mandate to take a traditional marketing function and rebuild it as a commercial engine, source, pipeline, vertical, depth, ainative, go to market. It's pretty easy, right?

[Anuj Mathur]

As for myself, Greg, Anuj, Mathur here. So as you know, as the global head for customer experience transformation, I play multiple different roles for the practice across our front office, transformation and touch points like whether it is a sales motion or sales of feed sales, customer service, commerce. And then today we're going to talk about marketing and it spans across whether it's our differentiation, go to market activity, driving innovation, leading some of that with our customers jointly and overall I think where we've seen a lot of the transformation happen or pivot happen most recently is really about agentic experiences. And now we're going to talk a

little bit later today about that as well.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Great.

[Moderator/Interviewer]

And I know each of you gave a little background on your roles, but why don't we talk a little bit about Brilio and give a little background for those that are less familiar.

[Kathleen Ulrich]

Yeah, sure Greg. So Brillio we just celebrated our 12th anniversary a couple months ago. We are an AI first digital transformation partner to global enterprises. AI engineering has always been at our core since day one. And we're deeply rooted in AI intelligence. We put this into production, not pilot. And we do this across customer experience, data and platform engineering. And we're organized around the verticals I mentioned earlier. We have 14 delivery locations across North America, Europe and Asia. And we are 5,500 AI first professionals strong.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Great, great.

[Moderator/Interviewer]

So, yeah, let's dive in here and

[Greg Kilstrom]

we're going to talk about a few

[Moderator/Interviewer]

things, but I want to start from the strategic aspect of this. And while the concept of personalization is surely not new, the idea of agentic experiences feels like a significant leap forward. So let's talk about this from a strategic standpoint. What's the core business problem that this newer approach of agentic experiences is uniquely positioned to solve for enterprises where maybe more traditional personalization methods may fall short?

[Anuj Mathur]

You know, where we're seeing a lot of the great opportunity is looking at the missed opportunity in the traditional world. Yes, there were some linear processes and the customer journey was kind of curated

and almost kind of, for the most

part, people saw and predicted the journey and crafted it much before the customer actually took that journey. And oftentimes that was not really what it was. Right. So it was more about like, you know, chasing up and trying to do.

I think the bigger opportunity here is

there's lots of drop offs that happen in that customer touchpoint journey across the physical domain, digital domain, the intersection. You know, the customer is getting smart about using different surfaces.

So it's really about a white glove experience.

So you can partake in some part

of the journey on one channel, one

surface, and then kind of you're on the move and then at a later

point in the day you pick up

another device and then you basically start at the same exact point.

So that's one example of vital experience.

It's really about making that journey seamless for the customer.

It's all about, you know, identifying that

points from a value added perspective.

Right.

It's not really just about, hey, I got to engage you with something. It's really about what value am I serving in this conversation? How am I kind of driving you to become an advocate of the brand or how am I kind of, you know, helping create a conversation that is material and meaningful for both parties? So another, you know, an example I'll,

I'll kind of talk about here.

One of the recent conversations I had in healthcare, life sciences, right. So we all go to the doctors for some reason or the other, they have like pages and pages of forms. Oftentimes, you know, at least I don't understand some of those questions and either you skip it.

So that's it, that's an opportunity to

kind of improvise and advance the healthcare.

Because again, you're not filling the form

for the just to get an entry into the doctor's office, but it's actually a checkpoint, right, A gate for you as a self declared kind of information.

So that's an area as an example where

we're helping digitize these forms. Also during that process, have an agentic assistant alongside that's actually a kind of a sidekick that'll actually help you understand what the question is. Pull in information from your past records, et cetera.

So you're only filling out things that the doctor's office is not already aware of. And all of this is HIPAA compliant.

Right.

So, so again you still have to follow all of the best practices regulations, et cetera. But now what you're doing is you're, you're compressing the amount of time that you're really meeting with the patient and it's really about what has changed since

the last visit, as an example.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, so, yeah.

[Moderator/Interviewer]

And one of the other things that I want to talk about here too is just how these things get envisioned and planned, right? I mean, in simpler scenarios there's a different approach taken. But building this kind of future often requires what some might call a business dreamer to reimagine end to end workflows really in new and different ways, using agentic approaches. How should leaders balance the need for this kind of blue sky thinking with the practical realities of those things that we all live with? The legacy systems, compressed budgets, quarterly pressures. How should someone think about this?

[Anuj Mathur]

Yeah, that's an excellent question, Greg.

It's not really. I mean, I do want to double click and clarify.

It's not necessarily the old way of blue sky thinking because that is just ideation.

What we really kind of embarking on

is an outcome based re architecting the entire journey that the customer goes through. And also not a linear journey in any way. The customer can start at any point in time, drop off, reconnect, etc.

And it's really about driving towards what

KPIs, what business outcomes are you actually putting effort to even have that conversation with the customer? Right.

So it's really about rewiring all of it with the end in mind. And that's how you reimagine the future experience.

Right.

So an example I'll give is most recently been working with one of the

largest global credit card company and they've had this product, one of the plastic products been out there in the market for 20 years and people know what that is and they've been using it.

But with the

newer banking technology first companies that are coming in, they've been facing a lot of headwind around like okay, but how do I connect increase the consumption or the amount of spend people are doing on that plastic.

And so what we did was we actually then worked with that global brand

across multiple different countries and touch points and in terms of how we can reimagine the entire customer centric conversation.

And this was a very complex product

where a customer would load up one currency, travel to five different countries and use different currencies locally and then come back home and be able to settle everything in their home currency. You know, it seems simple but in execution it has a lot of different kind of airy things that have to not only from you know, back end systems that have been figured out last 10, 15 years, but it's about how

do you make that available to the

customer and easy to use on at the point of that transaction. And I think that's where we are

seeing a lot of innovation come through.

[Kathleen Ulrich]

Anuj was mentioning it's a nonlinear journey. It definitely is. And Brilio is our own customer zero where we've rethought, re architected what that looks like within Brillio and across all of our functions and product put into production, AI across every function that we have here in Brillio, all with our customers in mind. So not only do we go on the journey with our customers, but it's really important that we dog food, we eat what we say, we're putting out into production and, and I think that's really important.

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[Anuj Mathur]

Foreign

[Moderator/Interviewer]

let's talk a little bit more. Maybe dive a little deeper in how we build the engine, so to speak. And this involves terms like agentic content supply chain, agentic campaign orchestration. You can see a theme here. Things like this are emerging and a lot of organizations are looking at these things. Can you break down what these look like in practice and how they differ from. I'm sure a lot of marketers out there very familiar with marketing automation and digital asset management and all of those things. How, how are some of these things different from what they might be used to today?

[Anuj Mathur]

There's actually quite a stark difference in what we are looking at from a content supply chain. Let me kind of start there. So what we really mean, why, um,

you know, in the, you know, about

six months, eight months ago, when we said personalization for an email campaign, what, what we were all kind of doing and hoping for is, you know, the masthead, the imagery, the messaging is pretty much same for what Kathleen may receive, you may receive what I may receive from that brand. It's the salutation, it's the name. That's the level of personalization. If there was some purchase history and kind of bring in that element from a grass setupsell perspective, that's really where we were kind of in that space.

Where we're looking at now and what happens in that past world is the effort and the cost and number of people and man hours that goes into

finalizing the brand direction.

The creative brief for that one campaign,

figuring out what assets and content are required. It's an army of people that are

working through and then you're also looking at, okay, how do I translate into different languages and then how do I make it culturally viable for like, you

know, US English versus a British English? It does matter Right.

How you connect. Now, what we're starting to see with the agentic experiences is think of it

as a Lego block. Right.

So you would create these smaller assets, but then AI agent is assembling that message for that customer at the open

time of that email. Right. So based on, it's not based on when that email was sent, it's based

on when the email has been opened.

And it's a dynamic personalization to that

individual with an assembly of these Lego

blocks that make that complete email.

That's a complete different piece. The second part of that is how do you even create these Lego pieces

of content, assets, etc.

And that's where we have been able to, you know, we've been fortunate to work with a couple of our consumer customers and clients to really kind of create these assets through some of the newer agentic capabilities. And so what we actually do is we train the models on their digital assets that, you know, the content and messaging that they may have records of the last 10 years to kind of inform about the brand, own theme, et cetera, of that brand. And then these assets are dynamically creative. So now you imagine. So again, you know, the ease and the speed and the time to market has significantly reduced. However, I do want to emphasize on one critical thing, Greg here, which is we always keep a human approver in the loop. So it's not the wild, wild west where the systems are going out and doing whatever. No, the system creates these things. The assembly of these Lego blocks are components. And then a human marketing manager would go in and approve different flavors of that. And then it basically executes on it, if you will.

[Moderator/Interviewer]

And so for those, for those that, you know, all of the, all of this sounds great, but maybe it sounds a little complex. You know, what are maybe some of the essential first steps in building the foundation to be able to do this, you know, where do you recommend that a leader focuses their investment?

[Anuj Mathur]

Yeah, no, I think it is, you know, for all of us. Right.

The speed of innovation is so, so fast. And with so many companies releasing everything every week, it is humanly impossible to

keep track of a lot of these things.

Right.

So I think a few thoughts, and this is what we practice in our programs as well, is don't throw what you've got. You've got some data marketing ecosystem that's been working for you last 10, 15, 20 years, etc. So don't have to throw that. The first thing is have a deep analysis of where those drop offs are happening. What are the specific use Case or actions that could potentially have a material impact on your conversion and start there. Identification of those next would be in those moments identify what kind of interactions can actually improve or give that significant

benefit to unlock that business value.

So if you really look at the funnel, if you were able to unlock like you know, 10 steps in different funnel, if you were able to unlock even like a few percent point at every of these drop off points, it's a cumulative huge gain that you're looking at, right? So I think that's how I would suggest kind of starting to approach, test and learn, right? You know, improving your foundational processes, whether it's control tower, governance of AI, your business rules, etc. I think again, depending on where the organization is in that curve, you want to dip your feet but also not take too much time because I think

this is something you can actually unlock fairly rapidly.

[Moderator/Interviewer]

Let's talk about measurement then. When an organization's rearchitecting for an agentic approach, often there's a focus on outcomes versus simple outputs. I wonder, can you talk a little bit about what are the KPIs that either new KPIs that need to get adopted or how does measurement change when an organization is successfully making this transition?

[Anuj Mathur]

I think it's a very important aspect of. As I was saying before, start with the end in mind.

So I'll take a few examples in terms of the KPI. You know, for any marketing organization, customer

acquisition cost is one of the key KPIs passionately called as CAC.

And that is something you need to look at, right? What does it cost for you to get a net new customer and how are you looking at the human machine interaction to really bring that cost down? That's number one. Second is also about how much of the addressable market are you able to

go connect with, right?

And then the third thing that also happens within the marketing ecosystem is at some point in time when it is a marketing qualified lead, a marketing team is handing it off either to the sales teams or context and our teams. So that's another point to really measure the throughput and see how much of that is happening in true numbers and also, you know, trends. Another example I'll say, you know, give you is let's say in the banking industry, right? So product per customer is a very big KPI. How many products individual is kind of

having relationships with that bank.

And that's where I think again marketing comes into play very heavily. Whether it's personalizing the offers like we were talking before or you know, there's a lot of, you know, credit card benefits that a lot of the customers are not even aware of. Right. They sign up, they kind of read the brochure. But in the day to day you're not kind of constantly. So it's situational benefits. Right. The card companies know where this spends happening, so they probably know where you are and if there's any lounge access needed because they know you rebook your

flight, something changed, they have that information. Right.

Another example within the banking space is a lot of the banks go through

acquisitions and mergers and you're kind of

bringing two different families of products together. So again, not a very easy job for a marketer to really kind of have very simple, transparent, kind of, you know, bringing the products together and then

continue to kind of push the ppc. So if you're, you know about, you know, checking and saving and now you're also pushing a credit card and a

loan product and a mortgage product on top of it.

And the same marketer is kind of juggling so many balls.

So how do you really kind of think about it? So I think those are a few examples of KPIs, you know, in specific industries. I'd say very. So if you're starting with what do I want to measure, why do I want to do this marketing, kind of get down to the grass tags and then reimagine the entire process based on that, I think the results and the outcomes are going to be certainly very different.

[Kathleen Ulrich]

Yeah. And I think one other point is that I think in the agentic world, those touch points with humans will compress and be smaller. And I believe that the handoff between marketing sales will be even smoother or will even just disappear because marketing and sales will become one organization. So that's how I see it. And of course that all impacts talent. In the future of marketing,

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[Moderator/Interviewer]

What I wanted to talk about next is just what you know, how, how does this change things? You know this, it, it would seem to imply that there's a major shift in talent. You know, everything from marketers being much more tactical to now managing agents and, and, and things like that. So you know, what do you see as what new skills are going to be most critical and how should leaders approach upskilling their existing teams versus you know, hiring for different roles and things like that?

[Kathleen Ulrich]

Yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll tell you from my standpoint you're right about the roles change. Maybe from being a campaign manager to managing agents and workflows and that stack engineering. But I also believe that domain expertise and understanding how businesses run will be just as equally important. It'll be easy to code or to create an agent in the future, but understanding the business and how they run and also that human input of being more customer facing will be really important as well. And the one other shift that I see with cmos which is really important is that we're no longer managing functions. We're almost architects of systems of a whole entire. And that I see even from my role shifting where I'm looking at more folks who can manage agents and manage the stack. And also I see my role as shifting to engineer to architecting systems rather than managing a function.

[Anuj Mathur]

Yeah,

if I could add a little bit to that.

Right.

I mean we previously talked about business Dreamer and I think that is true

when it comes to talent. So the core depth in industry domain

understanding that is key.

It's not going anywhere. Right.

That is going to be, continue to be the foundation of the marketing function we're talking about now. What is expected is also the newer tools and capabilities that are like earlier it was very easy to say swivel around and say oh that's it is going to take care of it or the data team is going to take care of it. Right. I only focus on campaign. Right. That is going to change what is changing Is the human decision making in the entire reimagine process? What are the touch points? What are the points where you actually have to have a human make the right decisions and what agents to bring in to really kind of really ultimately take accountability for that KPI that we talked about. So I think the talent is, you know, you'll see an up leveling of the talent in terms of when you have smarter technology available, not only you need to know how to use it, but also where to use it and where not to use it.

Right.

So I think that's, that's a little bit of a pivot that we're going to. We are already starting to see in

the industry and, and individual functions, managers and, and overall CMO organizations.

[Moderator/Interviewer]

Yeah, well, and it would seem the, the end goal, I mean just looking forward a few months, a few years, is really building an agent, a lean agentic organization. I know you both touched on this a bit here, but what does this type of organization look like in five years? How does it operate differently from today's top performing marketing departments in terms of things like speed, structure and even decision making?

[Anuj Mathur]

Yeah, so I'll go, I'll take this one.

Right.

So in my view, I think it's a, you know, what we're looking at is, you know, overall kind of domain

knowledge, deep understanding of that, the inner workings of how that is, is happening.

Our curious continuous learners. Right. Because we're going to be seeing a lot of new things.

The pace is not going to slow down. It'll only pick up.

Right. And the application of that technology. So the way I kind of see that is it's really a deep business thinker who's constantly kind of looking at

how do I improve my APIs.

Right. What are the tools, what are the

new tools in the toolbox that I could use towards that?

[Moderator/Interviewer]

Well, Kathleen and Anuj, thanks for joining today and sharing all your ideas and insights. Got two last questions for each of you as we wrap up here. First one is, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?

[Kathleen Ulrich]

That sounds exciting and I hope we can do it in one year and bring a couple of other organizations together and have a panel. Because I think what you'll see is the marketing organization, the sales organization, that imaginary line, it'll be completely disappear. And I would love to see how other CMOs are moving in this journey to an agentic marketing organization or an agentic organization and how it impacts, you know, their KPIs, how it impacts, you know, sales and what they're reporting out on and how they're, how they're measuring it and the outcomes that they're seeing. I hope we have, we can do this.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah.

[Anuj Mathur]

Steer more and more of the outcomes based conversation. Right. What really matters. And I'm really excited about it because that just opens up a new aspect of possibility, whether it is, you know, driving new partnerships in the marketplace for that brand, whether it is having a slightly more diff, you know, advanced or different conversation with the customer. So as we kind of the brands start to focus more on those outcomes,

you know, we'll start to see the

narrative change and the customer behaviors also evolve over time. So I'm really excited for that.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah.

[Anuj Mathur]

Nice.

[Moderator/Interviewer]

And last question for both of you. What do you do to stay agile in your roles and how do you find a way to do it consistently?

[Anuj Mathur]

I'd say that that is a tough one.

Right.

One day you may feel like you're

kind of gotten it and then next

day you wake up and there's another

set of news and you're like, oh, I missed the entire thing or when I was sleeping. Right.

So no, I think there's a few things. Again, being consultants, we have to really be on the feet.

So again, I'm going to go back to the same three things. Deep understanding of the industry, know how and the domain functions, understanding of what tools are available today and business dreamer. I think you got to constantly challenge the status quo, constantly look at, not be satisfied with one. The first and the easiest answer.

And really kind of, you know, part of, part of that is like challenging

your subordinates to kind of come up with some new innovative ideas to drive that, drive that, you know, make that as a behavior.

[Kathleen Ulrich]

Yeah. And for me, I would say it's the shift I'm making is to listen more and to be curious because this is a really fascinating time. Of my entire career, this is probably the most fascinating time to be curious and to learn. And it's changing so fast that there's absolutely no way that one person will have all the answers. And the team that I have, they're curious and they're very agile too. And just bringing them into the process and letting them find the answers that, that I don't know, that I don't, that I don't know. So for me, it's being curious.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Love it. Again, I'd like to thank Kathleen Ulrich, Managing Director of Marketing and Anuj Matur, Managing Director of CX Transformation at Brilio for joining the show you can learn more about Kathleen Anuj and Brilio by following the links in the show.

[Moderator/Interviewer]

Notes

[Greg Kilstrom]

this episode is brought to you by Brillio. Founded in 2014 as a full service digital transformation services and consulting firm. They apply expertise in customer experience, transformation, data analytics, artificial intelligence, platform and product engineering, cloud infrastructure and security to help customers quickly innovate for growth, create digital products, build service platforms and drive smarter data driven performance. They strive to provide not only what the customers want, but also what they need. To them, success means leading customers to better outcomes and aligning priorities so that Brillio wins when their customers win. This ensures that every individual is fully invested in the success of their customers. Hit, subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in interested in consulting, advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit 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.

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