Dissecting the State of Marketing in 2026 | Salesforce

Hi, my name is Katie Wheeler. I am in product marketing for AgentForce Marketing. I've been with Salesforce for about 9 years, and I am a true B2B marketer at Salesforce. So before we dig into some of the report findings, I wanna take a peek behind the curtain on the survey demographics. So State of Marketing is a Salesforce comprehensive research report. It's a double-blind survey. That provides the insights on the landscape of the marketing industry today. So we surveyed over 4,450 marketers. This spanned 26 countries across 6 continents, different company sizes, business types, whether you're B2B, B2C, B2B2C. Hopefully you'll get some insights from the findings of our report. And this is across multiple industries. Mm-hmm. So before jumping into some of the other findings, I wanna note that we have a couple different marketing performance levels you'll see in the insights. And this really just breaks down performers across tiers. Basically, our survey respondents plug themselves into these buckets based on how satisfied they are with the outcomes of their marketing investments. So for example, 26% of our survey respondents are labeled as high performers. They're completely satisfied with their marketing investments. 46%, moderate performers, and 28%, underperformers. They're moderately satisfied with their marketing investments. So before we really get into the report itself— Ahem. Uh-oh. Didn't want to pull up for me. I apologize. We had a survey and for some reason it's not— I had an audience poll and it's not wanting to pull up for me. And I just tested it right before this. I apologize. All right. We're going on the fly here. We're going to move forward. We're just going to show the survey results. I'm sorry I'm not able to have you participate today. I had a really fun QR code and everything. But right now, looking over to the right here, excuse me, the left, 75% of marketing organizations are using at least one form of AI. And it looks like generative AI is really high up in the pack.

Mm-hmm.

Looks like 83% of high-performing marketing teams are using all types of AI, which includes predictive, generative, agentic AI. And this is another very interesting stat to the far right. Compared to underperformers, high-performing marketers are almost 2 times more likely to have AI agents.

Katie, a quick suggestion. Maybe we can just go analog and do a hand raise out there in the crowd. How many of you guys are using Agentic AI?

Anyone using Agentic?

Oh.

Wow.

So I'd say maybe like 5-10%. Not a math wizard, but yeah.

Watch this though. How many of you all know what AI Jetik is? Okay, I just wanna make sure. Okay, okay. Just saying.

What about generative AI like ChatGPT, Claude, et cetera? Yeah, that's like 90%.

Okay, there we go.

Got it.

Yeah, I like that. Let's do that. Okay. My poll messed up, but we did not, Abby, thank you.

We did not, absolutely.

Looking at, this is one of the most surprising stats from the report that I saw. So looking at top priorities and top challenges among marketers surveyed, check out number 1 and number 2 in our priorities list, implementing or operationalizing AI, and the second one, adapting to AI's impact on marketing. Now when you look at marketers' top challenges, It's the exact same. Yeah. Wow. Wow. So it appears like AI is almost a double-edged sword here. I would love to hear from you all. What do you think about this? Is it because, you know, marketers want the efficiency of AI, but implementing it and adapting it is just a heavy lift?

Yeah. Yeah. I'll say absolutely. I think it's definitely a top priority for every industry, every organization, and the biggest hurdle is sort of like we want it, but How do we actually move forward with implementing it, right? Like, how do we think strategically around how can we produce like manageable content that's gonna actually be effective for our end user? And so while it's a top priority, it's also a challenge because everyone's like, we want it, but where do we start? What do we do tomorrow to make moves? Absolutely. So I would say the biggest hurdle I'll say from my organization is really sort of like, I'll say like, collecting all the data into one place to make it meaningful, to take action on it. So it's a top priority. It's also, it's very challenging to move forward.

Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a level of transparency tied to this as well, in that we just have to acknowledge that we are in fact moving in the direction of utilizing AI in a capacity. We can't keep pretending like that's not a reality. And so it's the elephant in the room. And so I can understand why it's also helping to operationalize many things within our organization. It's also incredibly intimidating when you don't have that base level understanding, right? So the orientation associated with AI, how we're implementing, making the necessary provisions so that we can build out strategically how it fits within the space. It's both and, it's both and.

Absolutely. I think I'll add that it's also a cultural shift. Symantec started as a very design-centric organization, and so we have a lot of creative folks that love their art.

That's right.

Right? Whether that's writing or design, and so there is a cultural shift that needs to happen, and I don't think that can happen without executive support. Like, it has to come from the top down.

100%.

And then expectation setting, right? Executives, finance want everybody to be more efficient and let's save time, et cetera. But that comes with some operations and data privacy and culture shifts. And I think a lot of people aren't accounting for that part of it.

And I think to expand on that too, when you mentioned how it kind of starts from the top down, I also think it comes from the, like, from down up, right? You have to really communicate with your teams that they want this, that this is going to be advantageous for them so that way they sort of ask for more resources, more training, whatever they need in order to move forward. So I think by really sort of training your teams early on, like, this is an advantage for you, and this is going to just make you work smarter, not harder, right, that it's beneficial for everyone. So start from, like I say, top-down, but also the down-up.

I like that. I know at Salesforce, it's definitely being pushed from the top-down and from the bottom-up. There's so much pressure just to have teams figure out, you know, what, what are the best use cases? What is the best way to make my day-to-day job as a marketer at Salesforce more efficient? And we've been taking, we've learned we have to take some time out of our day to offer some trainings.

Yeah.

To have, we have like a Slack channel that's all about AI collaboration and sharing use cases. And that's helped me because this is, This is overwhelming to me as a marketer. This is new stuff. So I think just maybe companies having some grace with their employees and saying like, hey, this is a steep learning curve, or this is something that is, we definitely need to adapt to.

Yeah.

It'll be worth it, but let's take some time to learn.

For sure.

All right, I don't think we're able to poll the audience on this one. How are you using AI for marketing today? But let's take a look at what the State of Marketing survey respondents said as the top AI use cases in marketing. Personalizing content, predicting campaign performance, ROI, generating visuals and copy. I know this is a big one. And then being able to predict customer behavior. We know that AI is definitely making an impact, but what does that really look like today? And I wanna get into this with our panel here. Some of the benefits that we found from the report achieved from AI: 20% increase in marketing ROI. Not sure how easy that is to measure yet. We can talk about that. 20% increase in customer satisfaction. Conversion rates are going up. Customer retention rates are seeing the benefit. And then marketing costs overall seem to be down 19%. Mm-hmm. This stat I found so interesting at the bottom here, that once agents are fully implemented, marketers expect to spend 8 hours or more a week on creative work. So work that we actually want to be doing. How about that? Strategic work. Getting rid of some of the manual. Just really curious as to, I'd like to dig into use cases with you all and share with our audience. Can you tell me how you're using AI today or how you're planning to use it in your organizations? And then twofold, are you seeing any benefits from it today? And it's okay if you're not. I, I think a lot of people are kind of in that realm of, okay, what is actually working and what's not?

Right.

Sure. So a lot of different use cases. I could leap First, we started internally, right? Like, how can we start to really take advantage of it internally to really speed up some of our processes, reduce time in meetings because everyone's calendars are so full that what we found is that we're able to have a lot more free time. I say free time, whatever that means, but to really focus on like higher priority items that will really move the needle. So we've been able to reduce sort of time to launch because we're able to, make things a lot more efficient. Campaign briefs are able to be done with agents, sort of back and forth are all done. Agents no longer need 2 or 3 or 4 meetings to iterate on an idea. We're able to do it async, which just makes things a lot more faster and the speed to market is a lot better. So to that end, once things are in market a lot faster, Yeah. We're seeing obviously marketing costs go down, but also customer retention and conversions and things like that be a lot more efficient and increase because we're able to produce a lot more relevant content that our customers actually want, right? That's going to be beneficial for them, but also for us as well. So we're seeing a lot of great results. And then externally, we're also using some Agentic agents for— we have a servicing line of business. And so on that—

Mm-hmm.

Really marketing. We kind of thought that sort of low-hanging fruit, like if people just want to pay a bill, they can do that through an agent, right? They don't need to always speak to a human to do that if it's very transactional. So we started with a lot of like our transactional use cases to actually collect a lot of our data from our customers. What were the, what questions were they asking? What were they curious about? What information were they willing to provide to us? That way we have in the background all that data sort of collected. Mm-hmm. So now we can move forward with the, I'll say like the fun and exciting things as marketers we love to do, right?

Yeah.

So how can we cross-sell? How can we launch more campaigns that's based on this information that we're collecting? So I always say like, start with like the lowest hanging fruit because a lot of times you were sort of saying it earlier, there's so much information out there and sort of like analysis paralysis of like, okay, I wanna do all this, but where do I start? So just start honestly, even if it seems too simple, too straightforward, just dive right in and do it, even if it's a simple use case, because you'll definitely benefit for some long-term value there.

Yeah, absolutely, I agree. I'll give you 3 examples with different levels of effort. So one of the things that we did just recently was do an A/B test, very simple, 50/50 split of what our brand team had written for our customer newsletter And then we gave Einstein the prompts to do the same Einstein copy. Well, our benchmark click-through rate is about 3%. On the Einstein newsletter, it was 8%. Granted, that's just one example, right? So now the team's like figuring out, well, what do we do next? Do we test Einstein versus ChatGPT and see if there's anything different there?

Yeah.

So that was super low effort and we saw results immediately because We put that out into market quickly. The next thing that we did is we have a wiki, right? Or like an intranet just for our own employee information. But it's pretty big now and there's examples that are hidden in PowerPoints and PDFs, et cetera. And so what we did is we created an agent, connected it to the wiki, and now just in natural language you can ask, Hey, find me a presentation where we did X, Y, and Z, and it'll get you that link so that people don't spend a lot of time digging through the wiki. So super simple, and most agents can handle that unstructured data that's all like PDFs and PowerPoints and spreadsheets. And so it's a really easy way to get people to go, oh, that was easy.

Yeah.

Right? And then I would say the, The biggest level of effort is we do media buying, and this is still in progress. And so we're trying to automate some of the QC that we do in the media department because it's pretty tedious if you've ever done that to make sure like the right creative and the right size is going to the right platform. And so we're using, I'll remember the name later if you're interested, let me know. Yeah. But we're using, Zapier and another piece to kind of automate that and call out any red flags. And of course, when we launch it, we'll do our regular process and compare it to what AI did, and then we'll teach it better, and then it'll get better and better. But—

Yeah.

Like the low-hanging fruit, right? There are some things that you can do internally that won't affect operations, that won't affect marketing, or, you know, maybe the bottom line, but it will convince the internal folks like, oh, this is easier than I thought. Yeah.

Creates buy-in for sure.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, as a nonprofit, our focus has to be on donor relations. As an organization who doesn't receive any federal funding, how we tell the story of the NAACP to a larger subset of individuals is very, very key. So customer segmentation, how we're speaking to our donors, There are donors who are interested in the NAACP specifically from a health equity standpoint. Those, those who are interested from a GOTV mobilization standpoint, being able to A/B test some of the messaging before we engage them to make sure that we're reaching them around the appropriate conversation is very, very key. I'd add to that, as we get into midterms and different things of that sort as well, from our organization standpoint, it's important for us to have a voice with our community consistently.

Mm-hmm.

Um, around October, there's gonna be a bunch of people that says, "Get out and vote," from everywhere. They need to be hearing from me throughout the course of the year so they can differentiate my voice, uh, from those who are just gonna pop up and blast our traditional radio and digital advertisement, different things like that, around the October-November timeframe. And so how I can message and, um, really help to get with infrequent voters, who— those who are not participating, in a much more substantial way through testing over a period of time is absolutely essential. So— Mm-hmm. Customer satisfaction is absolutely key. Donor segmentation, how we're speaking to those different audiences becomes very key. And AI helps us in being able to, I like to say, fail fast. Let's figure out whether or not this works. And if it's not, grant us the opportunity to pivot very, very quickly and try something different very quickly.

Yeah, I love that. It's like about going back, let's give each other some grace. We're still learning about the benefits and just use cases. I love what you said, Eric, about low-hanging fruit. It's true.

Take advantage of it.

I mean, in terms of use cases, I know today in my day-to-day job, I live in Slack. I know Slack is a Salesforce product, but it's what I use day in and day out. I mean, I check my email a few times a day, but I live in Slack. So having Slackbot available, I've been playing with it just to say like, hey, How can you help make my job easier? One use case that I'll share, we have so many incredible customers at Connections today and tomorrow, so many customers telling their stories, just like you all are right here on stage with me. And we wanna be able, Salesforce wants to be able to capture those stories.

Yes.

So we can continue to share them, continue to iterate on them as our customers grow. And I'm like, how can we, gather all of the good nuggets, the conversations that marketers and sales folks are having with customers about their sessions, that unstructured data, right?

Mm-hmm.

It lives in meeting notes and transcripts. It can live in Slack. We have notes, you know, as we were talking and preparing for our presentation today, I'm taking notes in our slide deck. All of that can live in the Slack bot, it has access to. Excuse me, Slackbot has access to all this content. So for me just to write a simple prompt like, "Hey, can you pull together all of this information about that Trevon shared with me about the NAACP and craft me a customer story slide?" Bam, I have it. That's not a blank slate. I'm not coming in saying, "Okay, I've got a blank slate. Where do I even start today? Ah." I have this drawn up to where then I can go to Trevon and say, What do you think about this? What am I missing? What can we edit? And there's a beautiful customer story slide.

Katie, I'll take on this last one here, 'cause I know the elephant in the room is the marketing calls piece as well. And I mean, this is from my own insight. I think that because we are in such an introductory phase within the AI space as well, there are a lot of organizations that are just trying out a lot of different things. And because we haven't done, like Eric was alluding to, sort of sat and figure out strategically how we want to utilize these things, you are going to assimilate a lot of costs here because you aren't factoring in what is the long-term sustainability, what are we trying to do with it? And don't throw no money away, y'all. We can do better than this. We can figure this out. Let's sit in a room, let's figure it out. It's not the sexy part, but it's the part that needs to help us right-size some things.

You're right. When I saw that, I was like, mm. Is that legit? Okay, so analog again. How many of you are seeing decreased marketing costs from AI usage?

Exactly, exactly.

I'm talking to you after.

Okay, we got one. We need to talk.

Yeah, yeah, way to go. Oh, survey says, and I did not come up with these results, 4,450 marketers.

You got that locked in, I love it.

So let's keep moving. I wanted to poll our audience. Oh, look it, it's decided it wants to work, yay. All right, excuse me. So we have a live poll here. If you wanna pull out your mobile device, scan the QR code that you see right up here on the screen and answer this question. How satisfied are you with your marketing organization's ability to connect marketing, sales, and service touchpoints? Maybe it's not all three, maybe it's just a couple. You know, you're struggling to connect marketing and sales, maybe you're moderately satisfied. So options at the bottom there: completely, highly satisfied, moderately, slightly, not at all, or A, not sure, not relevant.

For this one, it is much easier than raising hands. That would have been hard.

It is, but I'm wondering if I need this. Are people able to scan it?

Nope.

There we go.

Let's try to go back. Oh, I'm making a huge mess of this. It didn't pop up. It didn't give me the results.

Oh, wow.

Did you guys get the results on your phone?

They did. You were able to see them? Yeah?

You have more information than we do.

That's beautiful.

Thank you for sharing.

My voice. Would you mind? Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so it looks like— 0% are completely satisfied. 3% are highly satisfied. Good for you. 27% moderately, 34% slightly. Ooh, these are the folks we gotta talk to. 33% not satisfied at all. So yeah, totally understand that.

Okay, thank you.

We'll give you your phone back, sir. Thank you.

Thank you so much.

So yeah, I do think that's one, and it always has been, you guys. And if you're in that 33%, like, you're not behind. You might have some systems that just need to talk to each other. And I do think this is where customers struggle to go past generative, like, I can do some cool stuff with copy, maybe create a couple images. But the true power that we're seeing comes from connecting agents to systems and to each other. And that's where things like MuleSoft—

Yeah.

I do not sell MuleSoft, I promise. But I recently learned some of the things that it can do. So if you have those questions or you're struggling to combine legacy systems, just ask for help. Like, the Salesforce Community is great about answering questions and giving their examples as well. So what do you guys think?

I think I'd be curious because going back to an earlier slide where it said top performers, sort of, it's a double-edged sword, right?

Right.

Of you want it, but how do you actually operationalize it? So I wonder if the really, I'll say like not satisfied is because we're all top performers and we want things immediately. And I think I'm curious if that's it or if it's across different industries. Because sometimes when you have a lot of data, again, it can be very overwhelming. And so you feel like you're not moving as fast as some other colleagues or peers. Yeah. But again, just take a step forward. You don't necessarily have to like, dive off the diving board, just dip a toe in because it can be very overwhelming. Just get started again with smaller use cases. I always say perfect is the enemy of great. Yeah. If you start with something good, it'll turn into great and obviously maybe not be perfect, but you'll be on your way there. Don't be afraid to just get started because If you don't, you're only gonna fall further behind. Yeah.

Data without insights is chaotic, and insights are informed by where your organization is trying to go. I think in most cases, people are sort of intimidated by what the measure of success is, or like what does success look like from us as an organization, and how this AI in that instance helped me to arrive at that destination sort of collectively. So I'm not as surprised by the number, but it's just a reality of where we are. Right now where we're trying to, we're dating AI right now. We're having to figure out where we wanna be married yet.

Yep.

And that's fine. That's fine. Go on coffee. It's fine.

Recording AI. So based on the poll that we are supposed to have, the results from the actual survey respondents in State of Marketing, 71% of marketers are at least satisfied with their organization's ability to connect marketing, sales, service touchpoints. Over here to the left, I find this kind of interesting that full access to customer data from the following sources, only 58% of marketers are saying that they have access to customer support—

Mm-hmm.

Or service data, 56% access to sales data, and 51% commerce. I feel like, I feel like data is the fuel for— Yeah. Especially when we start talking about agents. How is an agent— agents are supposed to perform on their own, right? Like autonomously. So how are agents supposed to know how to resolve a support issue if they don't have access to the support ticket?

Yes.

How are agents supposed to do their marketing job and recommend a product product when they don't have access to that abandoned cart data or browsing behavior. So the more we can connect, I feel like the, the customer wins.

Yeah.

Like these silos start breaking down. Do you all have any insight on how your organization has been not just collecting data, but connecting it, unifying data, to give agents the fuel that they need?

For us, it's having clean data. As a member-based organization, being able to use— Salesforce has been amazing to work with in terms of really figuring out our member. We use a membership database to stand up, you know, millions of members from across the country itself. So being able to inform the profiles of those individuals themselves so that we can integrate that with an AI so that we can get a more, you know, realistic expectation or efficiency associated with it. Becomes vital. So it's an ongoing process. As an organization that's 117 years old, we are reimagining advocacy in this moment, and it starts with first the members itself. We have branches and units all across the country in 47 states right now. How we communicate to them in those particular states, depending on what backgrounds they are, educational backgrounds, local, all those things are factored in as well. And working with customer or student organizations like Salesforce, It's helped us to be able to clean our data up, get clean profiles, but then also utilize this for marketing expertise and stuff, different things of that sort. So I, you know, we're in the process very much so, but we've seen tremendous efficiency added to our organization because of the adoption of AI within it.

Yeah, so one of my part-time jobs at Symantec is DPO, and so, It's scary to connect an agent to your data.

Yeah.

I get that. But it really can't do its job until you do that. And so my conversations back and forth with IT and kind of our AI champions is, okay, well, let's start with a slice of data and see what it can do with that. Prove it out and then we'll check all the T's and C's. Not the favorite part of my job, but necessary.

Not the sexy part.

Yeah, no, not at all. But you gotta click through all those links and you gotta see what they're doing with your data. And once you understand that, it feels less scary. So think about that, T's and C's, that's your takeaway.

Yeah, I kind of mentioned it earlier, but we started with our servicing department, right? Some transactional data that we were collecting because we found that again, it was low-hanging fruit to use that analogy again. But the information that people were willing to provide about their account and about their information has been really beneficial because we're sort of collecting, like I said, for marketing purposes. So our other lines of businesses, our marketing team's able to sort of have that content resource and that hub of all the data and information that customers have provided. And now they know how to remarket to them, right? Put them on drip campaigns, produce highly relevant content based on the information that they're collecting to us. It also helped identify a lot of pain points that our customers were having, which is not something, to be honest with you, we were really thinking about when we were producing this agent, but that's helped actually us produce a lot of content on the front end to prevent a lot of pain points on the back end. So, our marketing team has been hard at work putting together a lot of lifecycle touchpoints to reduce the friction that our customers are having. And we found that it's just been really beneficial. And again, it really helps us have sort of that hub of information. And to your point, right, like starting with a slice, right? Like transactional information, it's not sexy, but it is helpful.

Thanks everyone. All right, so I want to take a shift here into SEO, and we know that, AI is shaking up customer engagement and what we're doing on a day-to-day basis. But something to think about is marketers' top of mind with their SEO strategy. 85% of marketers surveyed said AI is reshaping their SEO strategy today. A lot of marketers are already beginning to or have optimized for AI search.

Yes.

ChatGPT. Yep. Google AI overviews. 40% are saying we've optimized, 48%—

48%.

48%, thank you, Trevon, are in the process of optimizing. So we know we have to be thinking about this.

Absolutely.

What do you all think? Are you starting to think about this today or have you already? What's some advice?

Absolutely. So I come, some of my background, past life was sort of traditional digital marketing, whatever that means, but really of SEO, paid search, things like that. And it was always like, okay, how do we land like first on Google search? That's the most important thing. Let's optimize these keywords and let's produce content to really rank on those keywords and let's do competitive analysis, right? And obviously with the launch of all these AI tools, it's completely done a 180, right? But I think the one thing that has remained consistent is really making sure brand consistency.

Yes.

Right? Making sure that how you show up in any channel is consistent. So how you show up obviously on your site and that your messaging has to be consistent. Any social posts, any communication, whether it's an email, SMS, push, because you wanna make sure that any information that the customer has access to that they may let's say produce, whether it's through Reddit or when they Google you or they go to your site, that is consistent. So I always kind of liken it to how we were talking earlier, how a lot of organizations are overwhelmed with the amount of data that we have. You kind of just have to start somewhere. Think of all these AI tools of they have so much data out there about you. So you wanna make sure that the information that they're pulling from is how you actually want to populate, right? Like how, what messaging do you want to send to your customers or your prospects? How do you wanna show up? So I always say like, start with an audit because a lot of times you'll find that you think like, oh, our content strategy is great. But a lot of times you have content that may be outdated.

Yeah.

Not super relevant. So start with honing in on how you wanna show up and then do a content audit on what, how you're showing up and don't be afraid to really sort of dig in and say like, how do we, how are we showing up versus how do we wanna show up? And really sort of relaunch a lot of your content. That's what we've done. And really make sure it's optimized for these AI tools, right? Because how, what content you're producing, these AI tools are just sort of pulling directly from what's available. So if you don't make content available to them, Yeah. They're just gonna make a lot of assumptions or they're gonna scrape from, corners of the internet that maybe you don't want to populate. So be very intentional with the content you're producing and the messaging and make sure again, it's consistent across every touchpoint.

Yeah.

Thanks. Yeah, I'll just add one quick thing. If you Google or put into ChatGPT, like, how do I make my website more AI-friendly for SEO? It's gonna give you a long list and it's gonna, have two sides, one's content and one's technical, and it can be overwhelming. So if you take that to your web team and they're like, yeah, we'll do it next year. One simple thing that you can do is create, we called it an LLM page, right? So the large language models at least can have like a hello, and it, it will look at your website and pull up the questions that are specifically answered by the content on your website, hand that to your web dev team and they can put it on there. So at least there are some answers there for the LLMs from your website that you can approve.

Yeah, frequently asked questions page is so—

Yes, absolutely.

Straightforward and a lot of sites have them, but don't be afraid again to sort of dig in, reiterate, and put it through any tool that you use to optimize because that's— 'cause that's ultimately what sort of they're gonna be pulling from to start with. So that's a great starting point.

Yeah, I love that advice. I hear that it's optimizing for answers, not clicks, right?

Yes, 100%.

And being able to be thought of as, you know, providing those comprehensive answers. Like you said, data can live all over the place, but the consistency across channels or across all of the different content areas you have on your website is key. Consistency, maybe doing an audit. I love that advice. Good stuff. All right, we have just a few minutes left. I would love to put you all on the spot and ask you if you could share with our audience any advice. What advice can you give in terms of a first step for any marketing organization to enable agents, agentic AI?

I think most marketers want to be in the creative space. They want to take advantage of the opportunity to ideate, to come up with different ideas, to work with their teams around creative campaigns, etc. What I found with enabling agentic AI is it grants our team the opportunity to be able to do the creative portions because we're optimizing the other parts. We're checking the box on the stuff that we just, we just don't wanna do, y'all. The stuff, just be honest, the stuff that was just not, it's not as much fun and it allows us more opportunity and capacity to do that things. So I would say the more you can build in enabling Agentic AI into helping to operationalize components that you grant your teams the opportunity to be more creative from a campaign standpoint and different things like that, that would be a necessary step for me because I think it helps us to, from a level of a nostalgia, return to the places that we enjoyed so much. So that would be my advice to you all.

Love it.

I'll go next. I would say get your leadership hands-on experience with agents. If your company stance right now is we're not using AI or we don't have AI-approved platforms or AI functionality in existing platforms, you're going to have shadow use of AI. Like people are just going to start using free accounts and putting data and information into platforms that don't have the right T&Cs. So if you can get your leadership on board with, yes, we need to figure out how to use this, bring me a recommendation, your life will be a lot easier and you won't be in the news because somebody put the wrong thing in the wrong agent. How about that? Yeah, yeah.

How about that?

Just a thought. Yeah.

Well, I think to your point too, Ask your team, right? Like, how are, if they're using it, because to your point, there's a lot of shadow use, if or how they would like to use it, where the benefits could be, but also think strategically like, okay, what are some internal operations that we have that may be a bit clunky that maybe would be great to start with to reduce time to market and reduce meetings or just really look for operational efficiencies first so that way you can create, to your point earlier, buy-in for external uses. So that way you can go to your leadership team and say, hey, this is what people are asking for internally. This is the value drive. So again, sort of start small and scale.

Yep.

Yeah.

Thank you all. I love that. Start small. To scan your copy of the full State of Marketing 10th Edition report, here is the QR code. I promise this will work. Go ahead and grab your full copy to browse through later. It is packed with stats. Thank you so much to our panel. Thank you to our audience. Have a wonderful time at Connections.

Bye.