From MAICON: Robin Ross on making the shortlist when AI agents do the shopping

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.

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.

Brenno Valerio, Head of Sales, Americas at Treasure AI, joins Greg Kihlström at Agentic World in Miami on consolidating the martech stack and proving AI's value before renewal. Consolidation is a political decision before it's a technical one. Who on the buying committee resists replacing best-of-breed point solutions, and what kind of proof moves them. "Agentic" claims need a live pressure test. How skeptical enterprise buyers separate real capability from relabeled automation, and how marketers can plan for an attribution gap where downstream tools like an ESP often get the revenue credit, so the proof of concept produces evidence a CFO will accept. Engagement-based pricing changes more than the invoice. What it means for procurement teams used to predictable costs, for brands locked into fixed, multi-year contracts, and for how marketing teams decide when to reach out to a customer at all.

Dan Weirich, COO & CFO of Treasure AI, explains why the company moved to engagement-based pricing that ties its revenue to customer clicks, and what CMOs should expect as CFOs take a harder look at AI spend. Recorded live at Agentic World 2026 in Miami. **Finance is pumping the brakes on AI spend.** Weirich on how the push to maximize token usage gave way to cost scrutiny, why some high-profile companies didn't see it coming, and what capital discipline looks like for a well-funded vendor in the middle of a hype cycle. **Outcome-based pricing puts the vendor's money where its mouth is.** Why Treasure AI shifted from its 'No Compute' model to engagement-based pricing, what it means for new and existing customers, and whether the rest of the market is headed the same way. **CMOs and CFOs need a closer working relationship.** A CFO's view of how finance and marketing have worked together over the last five years, where the two can partner as marketing's staffing and work change, and how to structure vendor contracts to stay adaptable as the CDP category consolidates.