Agentic AI and the operating model

• Vendors ship agents while approval ownership stays unassigned
• 90.3% use AI agents, only 23.3% in full production
• Concepting fell eight days to two, brief to live only 26 to 24
• Phave swaps flowchart logic for objective based reasoning
• Claude dashboards move CRM reporting outside the CRM
• AI channels demote websites as bot traffic passes half
• As AI commoditizes access, owned data context wins

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Marketing operations and stack governance

• Only one of roughly 40 leaders could name their GTM stack owner
• Stacks accumulate by default, not by design
• Studies of 988 stacks show alignment beats volume
• Connecting systems is easy, aligning teams is the work
• Average martech utilization sits at 49%
• Most firms still rely on batch and blast email
• A $40 calendaring tool vanished and broke five workflows

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CRM, data and measurement

• A $25M manufacturer left Salesforce idle, then adopted HubSpot in a week
• A leftover filter hid one region's revenue for two years
• A $200 lead beat a $40 lead on cost per opportunity
• Measurement is moving from last click to incrementality
• Free Bing and Google AI citation reports are best read over months
• The $74.3 billion AI martech forecast is directional only
• The Customer Growth Loop links five stages from acquisition to measurement

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Launches, deals and events

• Webflow's Source repositions the website as growth work
• Incubeta acquired XPON's Google Marketing Platform division
• Augeo brings Grok and X sentiment into its THEO core
• LiveCRM previews its plan first and can reverse changes
• Dreamforce26 centered on RCS, loyalty and Personalization+
• Optimizely retired the DXP label for an agent platform
• Event themes were responsible AI orchestration and content

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Thanks to Jennelle McGrath, Dhawal Shah, Tom Grubb, Edward Ma, Matt Heinz, Kristin Runnebaum, Jacob Mackey, Amit Tiwari, Patricia Diaz-Hymes, Jodi S., Greg Kihlstrom, Alexander Burton, Paul Stevenson, Akshay Sura, Harmanpreet Kaur, Jon Farah, Gil Allouche, Charlie Nicholls, Alan Bluwol, Roger Beharry Lall, Pawan Verma, Arnold Macauley, Laura Thayer, Kristina Huddart, Martin Kihn, Alexander Atzberger, Stephan Goetze, Ana Mourão, Dom Nicastro and Tjorden Brumme and everyone else who contributed insights to this edition. Find the full list of posts and voices on LinkedIn: