About five years ago, I was asked to evaluate whether my company should build a customer data platform (CDP). The market pressure was intense, and clients kept asking us to integrate with the platforms they were buying. It was tempting to follow the trend. But after digging into the use cases, the economics and the …
Shopify announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) yesterday, an open standard co-developed with Google that lets AI agents connect directly to merchants and complete transactions. Alongside the protocol, Shopify is rolling out native commerce experiences across major AI platforms, including Google’s AI Mode in Search, the Gemini app, Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT — all managed …
Read more “Shopify wants to put commerce inside every AI conversation”
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”
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 …