Feature
The Gist
- Agentic AI is advancing faster than organizations can absorb it. Kihlstrom’s reporting highlights a widening gap between platform ambition and enterprise readiness.
- Operational reality still beats keynote vision. Most brands remain focused on workflow efficiency and foundational CX execution, not full autonomy.
- Experience progress depends on integration, not spectacle. Adoption, change management and cross-team alignment remain the real constraints.
Greg Kihlstrom operates at a rare intersection: embedded in the conference circuit where marketing and CX platforms shape their future narratives, and deeply involved in the real-world advisory work where those promises collide with operational reality.
As founder of The Agile Brand and a multi-year CMSWire Contributor of the Year, Kihlstrom’s 2025 reporting stood out not for chasing trends, but for pressure-testing them. His work consistently asked a harder question than “what’s new?” — namely, what’s actually usable, adoptable and aligned with how organizations work today.
Editor’s note: Greg Kihlstrom is a multi-year CMSWire Contributor of the Year. His 2025 coverage blended on-the-ground conference reporting with practitioner insight, offering readers a clear-eyed view of how AI, experience platforms and organizational change are really unfolding.
Table of Contents
- Reporting From the Field, Not the Slide Deck
- Agentic AI Everywhere — Adoption Still Uneven
- The Growing Gap Between Platform Vision and Brand Reality
- Blocking and Tackling Still Defines CX Progress
- What Holiday Shopping Data Revealed About AI Readiness
- Integration, Not Budgets, Defines the Next Advantage
Reporting From the Field, Not the Slide Deck
In 2025, Kihlstrom emerged as one of CMSWire’s most consistent on-the-ground reporters. From Qualtrics X4 and PegaWorld to Optimizely Opticon and Sitecore events, his coverage reflected something increasingly rare in martech and CX journalism: proximity.
Rather than relying solely on press briefings or post-event summaries, Kihlstrom spent time talking with product leaders, platform customers and practitioners navigating implementation. That vantage point gave his reporting texture — revealing not just what vendors were promising, but how customers were responding.
“Every conference has a different personality,” Kihlstrom said during his CMSWire interview. “And the character of the conference reflects something about the product, the user experience and everything like that.”
That observational lens became a throughline in his coverage. The demos were often impressive. The visions were expansive. But Kihlstrom consistently returned to a more grounded question: how much of this is actually making it into production?
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Agentic AI Everywhere — Adoption Still Uneven
One of the most dominant themes across Kihlstrom’s 2025 articles was the industry’s rapid pivot from generative AI to agentic AI. Nearly every major platform, by midyear, had positioned autonomous agents as central to its roadmap.
Yet Kihlstrom’s reporting showed that while agentic language was everywhere, adoption lagged far behind the marketing.
“Everybody’s got agentic now,” he noted. “Last year it was generative AI — now it’s agentic. ... But how many of those are actually getting implemented in real life?”
Across his coverage, a consistent pattern emerged: brands were far more comfortable deploying AI internally than exposing it directly to customers. Workflow optimization, content assistance and analytics acceleration dominated real-world use cases, while fully autonomous customer-facing experiences remained limited.
As Kihlstrom observed, brands were prioritizing safety, compliance and human oversight before moving AI closer to the customer.
The Growing Gap Between Platform Vision and Brand Reality
One of Kihlstrom’s most important contributions in 2025 was documenting a widening gap between what platforms are building and what organizations are ready to operationalize.
While vendors showcased increasingly sophisticated AI-driven experiences, many brands were still wrestling with fundamentals: siloed teams, fragmented data and manual workflows.
“There’s a growing gap,” Kihlstrom said. Platforms are going full speed ahead on amazing capabilities, but brands are still trying to get to step two, he added.
That tension showed up repeatedly in his writing — particularly in coverage focused on experience management, digital platforms and composable architectures. The technology itself wasn’t the bottleneck. Change management was.
Kihlstrom emphasized that AI adoption often requires rethinking how teams communicate, share ownership and measure success — changes that rarely show up in product demos.
Blocking and Tackling Still Defines CX Progress
Despite the industry’s fixation on AI breakthroughs, Kihlstrom’s 2025 work reinforced a quieter truth: most CX and marketing leaders are still focused on execution basics.
Forms still need to be built. Content still needs to be governed. Employees still need tools that reduce friction in daily work. And customers still judge brands on clarity, consistency and responsiveness — not novelty.
“There’s a big efficiency play they're gravitating toward first,” Kihlstrom said, who added brands are trying to streamline workflows before they leap into more advanced use cases.
That reality shaped much of his reporting. Even in articles centered on agentic commerce or AI-driven discovery, Kihlstrom grounded the conversation in what organizations could realistically support — and what they should prioritize next.
What Holiday Shopping Data Revealed About AI Readiness
One of Kihlstrom’s standout pieces late in 2025 analyzed Cyber Week and holiday shopping data, revealing just how deeply AI is already influencing consumer behavior.
He pointed to Salesforce data showing that AI-assisted experiences accounted for roughly 20% of Cyber Week orders — a level of adoption that surprised even seasoned observers.
“That’s a real number,” Kihlstrom noted.
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The implication was clear: while many brands remain cautious, consumers are rapidly normalizing AI-assisted decision-making. That disconnect, Kihlstrom argued, creates urgency for commerce and experience leaders — not to chase hype, but to ensure their content, data and experiences are discoverable and trustworthy in AI-driven environments.
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Greg Kihlstrom’s 2025 CMSWire Coverage
A year of reporting focused on agentic AI, experience management, trust and the operational realities reshaping CX and digital experience.
Integration, Not Budgets, Defines the Next Advantage
Across dozens of articles in 2025, Kihlstrom returned to a deceptively simple idea: progress in CX and marketing will not be dictated by spend, but by integration.
Whether writing about CDPs, experience platforms or AI research workflows, he consistently emphasized that disconnected systems and channel-specific ownership models undermine even the best technology investments.
"My hope is that 2026 ... is just getting real about we've got to change the way that these siloed teams have been thinking about owning one channel and that's all I think about all day and my incentives and goals are tied to one single channel," Kihlstrom said. "We've got to change that behavior if for no other reason than the customers just don't think like that."
