3 Forces That Will Redefine Marketing in 2026

The Gist

Agentic AI pushes marketing beyond classical computing. As multi-agent systems scale, marketers will turn to quantum power for optimization, prediction, and real-time decisioning that traditional stacks can’t handle.
CDPs lose ground to AI decisioning. Standalone platforms fade as vendors rebrand, consolidate, and embed decision engines directly into broader engagement ecosystems.
AI accountability becomes a global requirement. High-profile failures trigger new safety, auditability, and liability frameworks—forcing marketers to rethink governance before automation accelerates.

Martech is entering a transformative era where agentic AI and quantum computing will be converging to redefine the art of the possible. Let’s explore three critical trends I think will shape marketing in 2026.

Agentic AI Ignites the Need for Quantum Computing in Marketing

A recent study from Coleman-Parkes Marketers and AI: Navigating New Depths found 50% of agentic AI adopters have already started to incorporate quantum computing into their innovation roadmaps.

In the next couple of years as multi-agent semi-autonomous and eventually fully autonomous AI systems become more the norm, organizations will realize that to scale complex domains and environments, quantum computing will be necessary.

Quantum provides the high-powered computation needed for complex optimization, simulation and learning problems that these agentic systems will need.

In 2026, quantum computing will augment classical computing methods and could even be applied in a hybrid fashion – with classical computing offloading more complex tasks to quantum machines. Quantum will be applied to marketing use cases such as audience segmentation, customer behavior prediction, product recommendations, marketing optimization, digital twins of the customer and enterprise AI decisioning – among other areas.

Standalone CDPs Give Way to AI Decisioning

While customer data platforms certainly have their uses and efficacy in organizations, CDPs never quite lived up to their initial promise of creating a “golden customer record” or “unified customer profile”. Much of this is due to no fault of their own – but instead hinges on data disparity that is resident within many organizations.

As a result of this, many standalone vendors are searching for ways to diversify their offerings and GTM messages.

In 2026 you’ll continue to notice that traditional CDP messaging will be abandoned in favor of differing martech industry terms – ones such as “AI Decisioning” and “AI Marketing Cloud”. We will also witness the consolidation of these standalone vendors to become embedded or merged into broader customer engagement platforms.

Societal Pressure on AI Ratchets up

Recent serious missteps around generative AI will further be illuminated as agentic AI enters the scene. As a result, topics and issues will continue to arise around liability, safety, bias and auditability. This demonstrates that we are not quite at the point where the technology can be used in a fully autonomous manner.

As a result, I predict that societal, legal and ethical frameworks will evolve at a global level to account for the rapid technology advancements in AI we are seeing. In 2026, look for standards or frameworks for agentic AI safety and auditability to be created in the form or new global regulations or industry consortia.

The next wave of marketing innovation won’t be driven by incremental improvements; it will continue to evolve in leaps and bounds and will be powered by technologies such as quantum computing and quantum AI. Challenges that previously seemed insurmountable will be solved by AI, but it is not without risk. For marketers, 2026 will be a foundational year where you either level the playing field or get left behind.

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