Marketing AI Institute's Mike Kaput on AI pilots vs. AI capability: only about 25% of organizations are scaling with a strategy

Rahul Shah, CEO of CommerceIQ, argues that discoverability has replaced shelf position as the battleground in retail, and that keeping retail media and product content in separate teams is now a competitive liability. He and Greg Kihlström get into what replaces the old model. Discoverability is where the sale is decided. Product quality still matters, but an item that an AI-mediated retail environment can't read, verify, and surface never reaches the consideration set at all. Retail media and product content are one system, not two budgets. Paid performance should be changing organic content, and organic performance should be changing paid — the separation between them is an org chart artifact that now costs money. Automation runs at retail speed; humans keep it coherent. Shah on where AI-driven execution takes over from dashboard analysis, what humans have to keep owning as output scales, and how to attribute the resulting lift.

Kyla Malone, Director of Marketing at IDT, talks with Greg Kihlström at Braze Forge 2026 about earning trust from customers who rely on one company to stay connected to family abroad and send money home. Moving into money movement raises the bar for the brand. When the customer who buys calling credit also trusts IDT to move their money, the brand has more to prove. Malone explains how that shift changed the way her marketing team works, and how IDT balances name recognition across brands like BOSS Revolution and net2phone with giving customers what they actually need. Personalizing for customers across languages and home countries. How IDT puts Braze to work, and where AI helps the team do what it already did faster versus where it makes something new possible. Measuring personalization and setting the pace of change. How Malone judges whether personalized experiences and content are working, and how she keeps her team moving together while keeping up with customers.

Robin Ross, Digital, Analytics and Loyalty Executive at Activate Insight, on how brands compete when a consumer's AI agent controls the consideration set. Recorded live at MAICON 2026 with Greg Kihlström. - Brand preference is now decided before the customer sees the options. - When an agent builds the shortlist, the direct-to-customer relationship enterprises have invested in for decades runs through an intermediary the brand doesn't control. - Loyalty and first-party data have a second audience.

Paul Meinshausen, CEO at Aampe by MoEngage, argues marketers never had individual-level control over customer experience — only rules applied at scale. He and Greg Kihlström get into what replaces it. Personalization was always rules in disguise. What marketers experienced as control was segment logic applied broadly. Meinshausen on what individual-level decisioning does that no rules engine reaches, however many people you put behind it. Guardrails are where the real design work happens. When an agent's read on a single user collides with a margin floor or a global frequency cap, something has to resolve it — explicitly, and with data behind the trade-off. A headline lift number is not proof. Meinshausen on how performance metrics mislead when leaders evaluate AI, what makes a holdout experiment credible, and how to measure value that doesn't show up as a conversion.

Jean-Christophe Pitié, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer at Contentsquare, says the rules of customer experience are being rewritten as LLMs and AI agents join the customer journey. He and Greg Kihlström get into what that means for how enterprise teams measure, test, and fund digital experience. The conversation is timed with CX Circle NYC, Contentsquare's digital experience event on October 13, 2026, and Pitié shares what he is most looking forward to there.