This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. You’re likely deep into your 2027 planning these days, so headcount, budget, and the people needed to execute your big plans for the year are likely top of mind. Beyond people, you also need to consider data and platform needs.

Gartner finds 57% of consumers trust brand messaging less because of AI-generated content. HBR, Marketing Week, and Gartner on the marketing decision nobody owns: what to stop producing.

This article was written for CMSWire by Greg Kihlström. What share of the sources behind your brand's AI mentions point back to your own website? Chances are, that number is declining, catching many by surprise.

Coordination consumes 35 to 60 percent of work time in knowledge-intensive organizations. McKinsey, Gartner, Marketing Week, and MarketingProfs on why the handoffs between workflow steps cap the return on marketing AI.

New research from HBR and Salesforce's Paula Goldman points at the same blind spot in AI-enabled marketing: speed at one step moves work to a step nobody measures. A practitioner's guide to finding it.

HBR, Gartner, and Marketing Week converged this week on one question blocking AI value in marketing: who holds the authority to decide. A practitioner's guide to assigning it.

Adrian Leow at Gartner named the gap this week: agents perceive information efficiently and fall short on contextualized decisions. Four sources supply the job description for the humans standing on the other side of that line.

Forrester, HBR, and Marketing Week converged inside five days on the constraint behind every AI routing decision: the manager layer making the call came up through channels. Selection is a judgment act.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. Marketers find themselves in a paradox: drowning in requests and feeling like they are doing the job of more than one person, yet also facing an existential crisis as AI could replace at least part of their work. Yet, there is a potential silver lining for marketers, brands, and even customers if the right AI adoption decisions get made.

Gartner, HBR, and the CMO Spend Survey converged inside five days on one change to martech economics: AI pricing moved from a seat to a meter. What that does to Q4 planning.

Gartner finds 11% of organizations cannot say what their function spent on AI in 2025, and 82% of marketers lack a clear view of campaign performance. Naming an owner was the easy part.

McKinsey, HBR, the CMO Survey, and Marketing Week converged in 72 hours on one constraint for AI value: diffuse accountability. How to name the owner.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. On February 3, 2013, during a 34-minute power outage at Super Bowl XLVII, Oreo posted an image of a single cookie with the line "You can still dunk in the dark."

Okta shipped agent identity into core SSO, Gartner put customer IAM among the top three value platforms and forecast a $4.8B securing-AI market, and MarTech named the correction test governance programs skip. Greg Kihlström on why the permission set is now the martech specification with the shortest fuse.

Correction labor, use case sprawl, and Gartner's shift from features to controls point to one constraint on martech buying in 2026: you can only buy what you can specify. Greg Kihlström on pricing verification work and writing acceptance standards.

ChatGPT ads go live across 31 European markets today with targeting stripped down to the current conversation. Agent identity moves under a Linux Foundation body. OpenAI and Anthropic split on data retention. Other parties now write the conditions that determine what your AI can do, and Q4 planning should treat them as contract terms.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. You wouldn’t purchase a forklift to carry a coffee cup. Yet that’s effectively what happens when enterprises apply complex AI systems to tasks that don’t need it. As AI adoption increases, it is essential to understand the costs of running these systems and their impact on existing people and processes.

Forrester's new AI Disruption Model, Experian's Identity and Fraud Report, and a B2B search overhaul at Akamai all point the same direction: durable martech budget is moving beneath the application, into data, identity, and trust. A practitioner's read for CMOs planning 2027.

Gartner forecasts AI inference costs per agentic workflow rising more than fivefold through 2028 while token prices fall. HBR's Stacia Garr says vendor subsidies are ending. IAB updates its AI disclosure framework. Greg Kihlström on why routing becomes the marketing operations discipline of 2027 planning.

Gartner finds 93% of audit teams use AI and 38% have a strategy. HBR names leadership drift. MarTech documents buyers paying for platforms that explain outcomes. Greg Kihlström on why explanation became the scarce good in marketing operations.