Feature
The Gist
- AI maturity is mixed. At MAICON 2025, Greg Kihlström observed some marketing teams scaling AI while others still “just getting their toes wet.”
- Budgets and alignment still block progress. Nearly one-third of CX teams cite limited resources as their top challenge, echoing themes from CMSWire’s 2025 DCX Report.
- Smaller teams are moving faster. Agility and focus, not budget size, now define AI readiness — a shift Kihlström says is upending old assumptions.
- Realism replaces hype. Marketing leaders are focusing on value realization and customer outcomes, not flashy demos or one-off pilots.
Reporting from the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON) in Cleveland — the flagship event in Cleveland organized by the Marketing AI Institute — CMSWire contributor and The Agile Brand founder Greg Kihlström said the atmosphere was a mix of excitement and realism.
"We are just amidst lots of hype," he said from the 4-year-old conference, which featured 1,500 attendees. "And I think we can all admit that. But amidst that I think the thing that I've always felt about AI over the last several years is .. there's also a lot of real and tangible meaningful to businesses as well. Paul Roetzer (Marketing AI Institute founder) really set the stage here of we're at that kind of ... watershed moment of really being able to take advantage of this stuff. And again, amidst the hype, there are real things that businesses can do. There are real opportunities for customers to actually have better experiences out of all of this."
From Demos to Real Deployment
Kihlström said he noticed a stark contrast between marketing organizations still experimenting and those embedding AI at scale. Nearly three years post-ChatGPT, many marketing leaders are still at the exploratory phase of AI implementations in marketing.
“Some are just still kind of getting their toes wet,” Kihlström said, describing teams with scattered pilots and disconnected use cases. “Their teams are kind of let's say at Stage 1. There's some disconnected use of well ... we've got co-pilot or we got this or we got that but one hand isn't really talking to the other."
Kihlström noted that some marketing organizations are already exploring the next frontier — the rise of consumer-facing AI agents and their potential impact on retail and commerce. While those capabilities aren’t fully realized yet, he said many teams are actively preparing for what’s coming. He also highlighted a session led by Google’s Eva Dong that focused on how companies can measure value realization from their AI investments, a topic he described as both pragmatic and essential.
With the consumer agents for retail and commerce, these teams are “anticipating some of that stuff” even if the market isn’t quite there yet. The CMSWire State of Digital Customer Experience Report 2025 found that 32% of organizations now use AI extensively across customer experience (CX), up from just 11% the year prior — confirming that experimentation is rapidly giving way to implementation.
Related Article: Is Your Board Ready for AI? Questions Every CX Leader Must Answer
Table of Contents
- The AI Marketing Readiness Divide: Small and Fast vs. Big and Careful
- The Vendor Landscape at MAICON: How They Stacked Up
- What’s Next for AI in Marketing?
The AI Marketing Readiness Divide: Small and Fast vs. Big and Careful
Interestingly, Kihlström said AI progress doesn’t always correlate with budget size. “It’s not necessarily the biggest companies with the most dollars that are further ahead,” he said. “Some of those they have deep pockets and they can invest in a lot of stuff, but … they tend to move a little slower than some smaller orgs.”
That agility is becoming a competitive differentiator. And marketers are definitely all-in on AI. The CMSWire 2025 CMO Report shows that generative AI has rapidly evolved into one of marketing’s most widely adopted technologies. Over the past year, 80% of organizations have used it for content creation, 77% for social media marketing, 72% for chatbots, and 71% for personalized marketing.
Despite that momentum, governance remains uneven. Seventy percent of leaders say their organizations have established formal usage guidelines, while 25% are still developing them — and 5% have no plans to do so.
The main themes at #MAICON25 today were leadership, literacy, and humanity. From @MktgAi @paulroetzer's actionable insights to @mryongpradit & @codeorg inspiring everyone to see AI literacy as a civic responsibility, the future of AI feels human, and it’s happening in @Cleveland pic.twitter.com/oOojEtSHZN
— Brandon Tidd 🟧 (@BrandonTidd) October 16, 2025
How Marketing Teams Are Measuring Value
At MAICON, Google’s Eva Dong emphasized “measuring value realization with AI investments,” which resonated strongly with Kihlström. “As much as they want to do cool stuff,” he said of marketing leaders, “they’ve got to actually at the end of the day say, ‘Okay, this is the needle that we’re moving.’” Is it driving value? Where are we going with AI in marketing?
That pragmatism is spreading fast. According to CMSWire research, 47% of digital experience leaders now use customer satisfaction (CSAT) as their top metric, while 39% track customer acquisition rates and 34% focus on customer retention — the top three answers. Kihlström said that alignment is key: “There are real opportunities for customers to actually have better experiences out of all of this.”
Related Article: Customer Retention > Customer Acquisition. Period
The Vendor Landscape at MAICON: How They Stacked Up
Walking the exhibition floor, Kihlström said the mix of exhibitors reflected the industry’s transformation. “There’s the Optimizelys and Aquias right alongside the Jasper and HeyGen crowd,” he said. “It’s a nice kind of temperature check on who’s marketing to this audience and who wants to be seen here,” he said.
That convergence of AI-first startups and traditional martech giants is accelerating industry change.
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DXP and CDP Vendors and AI Innovation
This table highlights examples of how digital experience platform (DXP) and customer data platform (CDP) vendors are implementing artificial intelligence, based on insights from Simpler Media Group’s 2025 DXP Market Guide and 2025 CDP Market Guide.
| DXP Vendor | AI Innovation Highlight |
|---|---|
| Adobe Experience Cloud | Uses Adobe Sensei GenAI to deliver predictive insights and automated personalization across Real-Time CDP and Content Supply Chain. |
| Optimizely | Introduced AI-powered content recommendations and experimentation scoring to improve multivariate testing efficiency. |
| Sitecore | Integrates composable AI services for real-time audience segmentation and content generation at scale. |
| Acquia DXP | Leverages machine learning models to unify customer profiles and deliver personalized journeys across channels. |
| Kontent.ai | Implements an agentic CMS layer that automates metadata tagging, translation, and compliance validation via embedded AI agents. |
| CDP Vendor | AI Innovation Highlight |
| Amperity | Uses patented AI/ML methods to stitch together fragmented customer interactions into unified profiles for activation and analytics. |
| Adobe Real-Time CDP | Employs AI-driven enrichment to update consumer and account profiles automatically based on behavioral and transactional data. |
| Bloomreach | Combines customer data and marketing automation with AI-driven predictions to optimize eCommerce personalization. |
| BlueConic | Applies machine learning for dynamic audience segmentation and predictive campaign targeting within a unified customer view. |
| mParticle | Delivers AI-powered insights to enrich data and automate personalized engagement workflows across the customer lifecycle. |
What’s Next for AI in Marketing?
Asked what’s ahead, Kihlström drew a parallel to the early days of the internet. “You never know,” he said. “It could follow similar trends of like how we talked about the internet in 1999 versus now.” But unlike the web revolution, he noted, today’s marketing leaders are more skeptical and grounded. “There’s a lot of hype as I said earlier,” he added, “but there’s also just a lot of real stuff that people need to get to understand better.”
Kihlström, who has been attending MAICON since near its inception, summed it up this way: “These conferences are just a great chance to connect with people and have those conversations about real problems they’re having."
