In MarTech’s “MarTechBot explains it all” feature, we pose a question about marketing to our very own MarTechBot, which is trained on the MarTech website archives and has access to the broader internet. Q: What’s the difference between visible and invisible AI in customer experience, and how can marketers ensure seamless transitions between the two? …
Read more “How visible and invisible AI shape the customer experience”
It’s January. The budget is set, campaigns are in motion and teams are executing the plan you spent months building and defending. You think you have a solid approach, and then management asks tough questions: How are you driving impact? How do we know we are delivering incrementality? Are we sure it’s working, and why? …
Agentic AI introduces a new dynamic to the consumer-brand relationship, particularly as autonomous shopping agents interact directly with brand marketing agents. In the past, AI systems primarily supported recommendations based on user preferences. Now, agentic AI can shortlist options and make purchase decisions on a consumer’s behalf. This shift moves decision-making away from the human …
As prices climb, shoppers aren’t just spending less—they’re spending differently. Nearly half are buying smaller quantities or trading down to lower-cost options, such as canned fruit instead of fresh, according to Capgemini’s report, “What matters to today’s consumers 2026.” It’s not about cutting things out entirely—it’s about making budgets stretch. Source: Capgemini Research Institute, What …
Read more “How inflation reshapes shopping habits and trust in private labels”
A consumer opens ChatGPT and types, “What laundry detergent has perfumer-grade fragrance that lasts?” The AI provides three specific recommendations, each with detailed explanations. Your brand, despite its SEO-optimized product pages and paid search budget, never appears. This scenario is playing out millions of times daily across product categories, and most DTC brands remain completely …
Read more “The retail visibility gap most DTC brands still miss”
Marketing still runs on a legacy of organizational diagrams designed for the old world. But the systems that now drive content production, distribution and optimization already behave as a single, interconnected machine where creation, decisioning and activation feed each other continuously. As we enter 2026, this gap between organizational structure and system architecture is becoming …
Read more “Why CreativeOps and MOps can’t survive independently”
The coming year had better be about improving customer experience because customers are not happy CX right now. They’re experiencing more problems and having a harder time getting help. And they are not keeping quiet about it. There is a “National Customer Rage Survey,” and just the fact that it exists should tell you a …
Read more “Why 2026 is the year customer experience has to change”
Think about the last time you shopped online. Now imagine that entire process — searching, comparing, buying — handled not by you, but by your AI assistant. Welcome to 2026, where agentic artificial intelligence isn’t just a tool. It’s your customer. These AI agents work on behalf of people. They scan catalogs, compare options, initiate …
Read more “How AI agents will reshape every part of marketing in 2026”
If you work in martech, marketing operations or related roles, you’ve surely heard colleagues and leadership complaining about data quality and their lack of trust in data. We often place the blame for data quality on the system, because we’re not willing to fully say the quiet part out loud: The No. 1 factor in …
Everyone is talking about incrementality these days, and that’s a good thing. It means more teams are finally asking the right question: Are our efforts actually moving the business, or are we just getting better at taking credit? The flip side is that many of the same mistakes persist, now appearing more frequently and with …
Read more “3 incrementality testing mistakes — and how to avoid them”