No prompt can fix stale inventory or a mistaken identity. As Salesforce, Snowflake and HubSpot compete to own the context marketing AI runs on, CMSWire Columnist Scott Clark explains why the bigger martech decision may be which platform decides what your AI knows. ow.ly/Ax3j50ZRk7K

The customer you never met is the one you lost, and CMSWire Contributor Jesse Brock says the CEO probably approved the reason. His advice: if employees keep apologizing for the same thing, stop coaching better apologies and fix the thing. ow.ly/LFFv50ZQRlh

Tesla's brand value has fallen from $66.2 billion in 2023 to $27.6 billion in 2026, and CMSWire Contributor Liraz Margalit argues the real damage is psychological. When a CEO's identity fuses with a product, buyers lose the freedom to decide what owning it says about them. ow.ly/VRPG50ZQrwR

Some Buffalo Sabres fans were choosing between dinner and the game. Then they left a comment about it. Jeremy Cohen, Manager of Fan Development and Insights at the Buffalo Sabres, told Dom Nicastro the team read those comments. More than 40,000 of them last season. Then they did something about it. Grab-and-go concessions. A new sound system. Speed-of-service scores that finally climbed. “Because we don’t control what happens on the ice, we have to control as much as we can off the ice.” Jeremy covers so much ground, physical and digital, that Dom called the show The Digital Experience in the intro. It’s Beyond the Call. Jeremy thanked him for the intro anyway. What’s the one piece of customer feedback your org keeps hearing and keeps not fixing? Watch the full episode: ow.ly/N8Hq50ZQAQr

CMSWire Contributor Tod Chisholm breaks down why banking call centers are getting harder, not easier. With up to 65% of back-office tasks automated, agents are left handling the most complex, stressful calls. One fix: offer a callback. It turns a negative 3 NPS into a 28. ow.ly/c8HY50ZQ0wV

Your AI closed the ticket in nine seconds. Your customer is still fuming. Congratulations, you optimized the wrong thing. That's the trap in most AI customer service scorecards, according to @Nextiva co-founder and CEO Tomas Gorny. Deflection rate, first contact resolution and average speed all look great on a dashboard while completely missing whether the interaction built loyalty or quietly torched it. A fast resolution and a furious customer can post the exact same ""win"" in your reporting. 🔍 Real-time sentiment analysis needs to happen across voice, chat, email and social; read the room while the conversation is still happening 📊 Customer lifetime value is the actual scoreboard, since nobody upsells themselves onto a brand they already resent 🤖 Human handoffs should be built in for the complex cases, letting your team to do the part AI still can't A dashboard that's all green isn't proof your CX is working. It might just mean you stopped asking the right questions. Read more 👉 ow.ly/Iquo50ZPx26 #SponsoredContent #CustomerExperience #ContactCenters

CMSWire Columnist Pierre DeBois breaks down how Netflix measures the marketing A/B tests cannot touch. Its Quasimodo tool randomizes whole media markets instead of people, turning every campaign launch, takedown and relaunch into a fresh statistical read. ow.ly/qup350ZPwpG

"Speed isn't the problem. Confidence is. Every AI vendor is racing to prove how fast their tool can turn data into insight. Ryan Tamminga, Chief Customer Officer at @AlchemerHQ says that race might be pointed at the wrong finish line. Teams don't stall because insights arrive too slowly. They stall because nobody trusts the insight enough to act on it. 🔍 Trust in AI accuracy, not speed, is the top barrier to adoption ⚡ ""Human in the loop"" lets AI handle low-risk cases while routing nuanced ones to people 📊 No action without buy-in: if you can't prove value to your CFO, the idea dies on the dashboard A faster dashboard means nothing if nobody's confident enough to click ""go."" The real AI upgrade isn't speed. It's the courage to act on what the data already told you. Read more 👉 ow.ly/Q9p150ZP0EF #SponsoredContent #CustomerExperience #ArtificialIntelligence #CX #AI #DigitalTransformation"

AI doom or AI marketing stunt? CMSWire Contributor Alex Kantrowitz says both readings miss the point. Extinction percentages are guesswork dressed as data. Researcher fears are genuine, but public warnings cost labs more than they help sell anything. ow.ly/PlXh50ZP0Ec

Forrester's new Wave names Medallia the lone leader in customer feedback management, merging two prior reports into one. The real barrier for CX teams is not AI. It is messy data, weak identity stitching and governance gaps stalling every program in the category. ow.ly/Zc2w50ZOzic

Acquia just rebranded around Drupal and agentic content, following Optimizely and Contentstack in dropping the DXP label within 90 days. None of the three were struggling. Analysts say the category is being redefined around AI agents, not abandoned. ow.ly/7lS750ZOa40

NiCE Chief AI Officer Philipp Heltewig says the model isn't the risk. The harness around it, the tools, permissions and connectivity it's given, is what turns a bad output into real damage across contact centers built on it. ow.ly/t7PH50ZNFyZ

CMSWire Contributor Gregg Johnson says Adobe's new CEO pick was not about the person. The board chose the exec who ran its stickiest enterprise data business over the one running Creative Cloud, the half most exposed to Canva, Figma and Claude Design. ow.ly/Mv5e50ZN7T2

Automattic's board voted Matt Mullenweg onto paid leave without his consent, installing CFO Mark Davies as interim CEO. Mullenweg says he got 50 minutes notice and no time for legal review. He keeps his board seat and stays in charge of WordPress.org ow.ly/oqao50ZMqHu

What happens when three CDP vendors are asked where the category is actually going? You get three different perspectives, but quite a bit of common ground. Zack Wenthe, Tealium: real-time activation and orchestration are becoming increasingly important, with marketers likely relying less on traditional interfaces over time. Rafa Flores, Treasure AI: having the data is not enough. The real test is whether you can act on it quickly, in context and within the workflows marketers already use. Elizabeth Dobbs, Databricks: marketers increasingly want to interact with their data conversationally, but as AI starts recommending what to do next, trust becomes a much bigger question. Different platforms. Different approaches. But all three pointed toward a similar future: the CDP conversation is moving beyond simply collecting and unifying customer data. The battleground is increasingly what happens next. Can you act on the data in real time? Can AI understand enough context to make a useful recommendation? And can marketers trust it enough to act? Watch 3 CDPs Enter a Room. Only 1 Narrative Survives. 📺 ow.ly/qB7x50ZMqSK

The team looked into the billing complaints and came back with good news: the process was working as designed. Customers were still frustrated. Suzie Dieth is VP and Chief Experience Officer at NRG and CMSWire's 2026 CX Leader of the Year, the person who started CX at the company back when it wasn't a formal discipline. Rather than pushing from the outside, she found a leader embedded in that department to champion the feedback internally and built a mechanism to put customer comments in front of the team, and that leader eventually pulled a cross-functional team that redesigned and renamed the whole thing. "We're responsible for everything, but we don't own anything." How does your CX team get another department to act on something it doesn't own? Dom Nicastro goes deeper in the full episode of Beyond the Call, and applications for the 2027 CMSWire IMPACT Awards are open now. Watch here: ow.ly/5E8m50ZLtKY

A flawless AI dashboard is not good news. It is a warning sign. CMSWire Contributor Ricardo Saltz Gulko unpacks the two-ledger framework a Fortune 500 study exposed, where a rollout boosted newer agents and quietly cost the most experienced ones quality. ow.ly/AhiQ50ZL7aa

Three competing CDP vendors walked into the same room expecting a fight. Nobody threw a punch. Almost. Dom Nicastro asked Tealium's Zack Wenthe what Databricks can't do that Tealium can. "They can't operate as a CDP in general availability right now." Elizabeth Dobbs of Databricks took it on the chin. Then she, Zack and TreasureAI's Rafa Flores spent the rest of the hour agreeing on something more interesting: the fight isn't over platforms. Dobbs: "Ultimately, I think the real battle is going to be for trust." Would your team click the button an agent recommends without checking it first? Watch the episode 📺, 3 CDP Providers Enter The Room, here: ow.ly/PxLT50ZKKrm

Adobe just picked its next CEO from customer experience, not Creative Cloud. Anil Chakravarthy takes over Dec. 1 as Shantanu Narayen steps down after 18 years. The message: CX orchestration is Adobe's real bet, even though it's still the smaller side of the business. ow.ly/oUJ450ZK60L

CMSWire EIC Dom Nicastro talked to Webflow CEO Linda Tong about the company's pivotal moment. Source flips the platform inside out, making code the new source of truth. Enterprise MCP adoption jumped from 2% to over 50% in a year. The build was never the hard part. ow.ly/Wc3r50ZJeC1

Webflow unveiled Source at Webflow Conf 2026, a workspace giving marketing teams and AI agents shared, governed access to site code. The rollout adds agent collaboration tools, Webflow Campaigns and MCP updates, pushing the $4 billion platform past its visual builder roots. ow.ly/ePrx50ZIxti

Brand management software vs. DAM isn't a choice. It's a marketing trick. Vendors sell them as rivals because two SKUs beat one. In reality a brand portal is just the front end sitting on top of a DAM. Buying one without the other gets you either a pretty file library or a back-end system nobody outside IT can use. Melanie Duffy, product director at @papirfly put it bluntly: brand inconsistency breaks the psychological shortcut that makes people trust you in the first place. 🔍 52% of companies already run a DAM inside their CX stack and 34% more plan to within two years ⚡ Skip the front-end layer and your shiny DAM becomes a better-looking shared drive 🚀 Enterprise DAM only earns its complexity once you're syncing assets to a PIM or ERP, not before The real decision isn't DAM or brand portal. It's how much back end your front end needs to stand on. Read more 👉 ow.ly/Gyfh50ZIxGm #BrandManagement #DAM #DigitalAssetManagement #MarTech #SponsoredContent

58% of executives feel good about AI-driven change. Only 9% of employees do. CMSWire Contributor Myles Suer talks to BCG's Julia Dhar about why vague AI directives breed false consensus, and how Delta's VELVET program still wins two decades later. ow.ly/ilWz50ZI8PK

The Air Force designed its cockpits around the average pilot. The average cockpit fit exactly zero pilots. Jorge Camargo brings that story up a lot. He's Head of Digital Platforms at @BankofAmerica — the ecosystem behind Erica, who turned eight in June and has handled 3.4 billion client interactions. He told Dom Nicastro on The Digital Experience that designing for the average customer is the fastest way to build something that fits nobody. "If you're designing for the average — there is no such thing as an average customer." Where is your org still building for an average customer who doesn't exist? Watch the episode 📺, The AI Assistant That Was Winning Long Before ChatGPT, here: ow.ly/GR6s50ZIecj

More than a dozen CX vendors dropped agentic AI news in one week, and Twilio's new research explains the urgency: 78% of consumers admit they have tried to bypass an AI agent just to reach a human. ow.ly/56Ft50ZHz8v

CMSWire Columnist Pierre DeBois digs into why resolution rate proves nothing about whether your AI agent is any good. His fix is agent observability, tracing, scoring and cost tracking layered on top of the metrics you already trust. ow.ly/jAg550ZHemG

Oreo's 2013 blackout tweet looked spontaneous. It was a war room, delegated approvals and the discipline to wait. CMSWire Contributor Greg Kihlstrom argues agentic AI now encodes that same judgment call as a policy threshold instead of a person deciding to escalate. ow.ly/hfjE50ZGp6m

AI referrals to Shopify stores jumped 197% year over year, but organic search is still the bigger channel by far. CMSWire Columnist Scott Clark breaks down why the real fight isn't AI versus SEO. It's whether your product pages can stand alone as the first impression. ow.ly/6emr50ZFY3I

Franchise brand chaos rarely starts with a rogue franchisee. It starts with a slow yes from headquarters. When a local team needs an asset faster than central marketing can turn one around, they build their own in Canva, in PowerPoint or by asking whoever's ""good at design."" Tightening guidelines never fixes that math. Making the compliant route the fastest one does. 🔍 Most networks hit a breaking point somewhere past 50 to 100 locations, when review demand outpaces review capacity 🎨 Governed self-service locks brand-critical elements like logo, color and layout while leaving pricing, promos and imagery open to edit 🚀 Swedish franchise O'Learys scaled to 130+ restaurants across 15 markets on this model, with no added headquarters oversight required The real KPI for brand consistency isn't compliance. It's speed. If the approved route is slower than the workaround, the workaround wins, every time. Read more 👉 ow.ly/EJgY50ZFYj6 @papirfly | #SponsoredContent #BrandManagement #DigitalAssetManagement #MarketingOps #CX

A 200-year-old shoe brand's biggest AI problem right now is a color. The feed said navy. The site said blue. Mario Protano, Director of Performance Marketing at Clarks, just uploaded the company's entire product feed to OpenAI's beta so ChatGPT would actually know what Clarks sells. Then he went looking at the details and found mismatches that keep products from surfacing at all. Two centuries of brand equity, and the work is making sure your own data agrees with itself. "AI doesn't like that. It just doesn't match." When was the last time anyone audited your product data — not for search, but for how AI reads it? Dom Nicastro goes deeper on The CMO Circle — How Clarks Is Bringing 200 Years of Brand History Into the AI Era. Full episode here: ow.ly/38vt50ZFJc8

Your CDP says a customer is active. Your marketing automation platform disagrees. Add an AI layer and the mismatch just sounds more confident. CMSWire Contributor Ashutosh Kachot argues reconciliation has to come before consolidation, not after. ow.ly/8f7m50ZFtxF

CMSWire Contributor Ricardo Saltz Gulko points to new research showing individual AI users gaining roughly five times the productivity while only 29 percent of organizations see real ROI. The gains stop at the office walls. Customers still cannot feel a thing. ow.ly/lNnC50ZF2q4

Deloitte's 2026 Global Contact Center Survey finds AI-mature teams beating peers on customer experience, employee experience and profit. The real shift: leaders are ditching handle time for first-contact resolution, CSAT and revenue as the metrics that actually matter. ow.ly/57tJ50ZEoP3

CMSWire EIC Dom Nicastro talks with Loyalty Credit Union's Jessica Herring about Lumi, the AI chatbot built to step aside the moment someone says agent, human or person. About 60% of chats start before login. Trust here was tested, not assumed. ow.ly/I7xU50ZCih9

Google just gave marketers a new kind of visitor to design for: the AI agent shopping on a customer's behalf. CMSWire Columnist Pierre DeBois breaks down Lighthouse's new Agentic Browsing report and why a messy accessibility tree can quietly cost you the sale. ow.ly/9Qr250ZBIx6

Article 50 of the EU AI Act took effect Aug. 2 and a footer disclosure will not save you. CMSWire Columnist Scott Clark says the real test is not whether an AI notice exists but whether it lands before the customer decides they are talking to a person. ow.ly/tvzP50ZBlHu

Completion rate does not tell you if an AI agent made the right call. CMSWire Contributor Bhargavi Vepuri argues a low override rate is not always good news since it might just mean employees stopped checking the agent's work and started rubber stamping it. ow.ly/Ukwu50ZAk0L

The IRS awarded TTEC Government Solutions a one-year, $21 million contract to modernize contact center tech serving 30,000 agents and 200 million calls a year. The deal adds agentic AI to existing systems rather than replacing them entirely. ow.ly/TvN450ZzK8a

CMSWire Columnist Scott Clark breaks down why one customer call can quietly trigger a chain of billable AI events. Voice and agentic features multiply model, retrieval and tool calls behind the scenes. He says cost per resolution beats counting tokens. ow.ly/Ezgs50Zzj3J

She built an AI that makes it easier to reach a human, even if it hurt her adoption numbers. Dom Nicastro sat down with Jessica Herring, VP of Member Experience at Loyalty Credit Union, to talk about Lumi: the AI assistant designed to step aside the moment you ask. "We don't use technology to replace a conversation or a relationship." When's the last time your org's AI made it that easy to escape? Watch the full episode of Beyond the Call → ow.ly/v9LE50ZyXHR

CMSWire Columnist Pierre DeBois breaks down why Starbucks is paying baristas ad revenue for TikTok content instead of chasing influencers. 61% of Gen Z say they discover products through employee posts before a sponsored one ever shows up. ow.ly/lK0X50ZyPfZ

CFOs do not want to hear your NPS went up. They want a dollar figure tied to something already costing money. CMSWire Columnist Scott Clark talked to CFOs about what actually gets a CX business case funded and it is not sentiment. ow.ly/CUiK50ZymnV

Twilio stock hit a 52-week high after Q2 earnings, jumping more than 30% in a single morning. AI-native customers keep spending bigger, with two accounts already scaling to $6 million and $9 million a year. ow.ly/lExw50ZxYH6

CarMax handed its inbound sales calls to Sierra's voice AI in May and says resolution rates are climbing. It's the latest marquee win in a conversational AI land grab already claiming NiCE, SoundHound and Kore.ai as the market races toward a projected $78.9 billion by 2033. ow.ly/t94h50ZxloU

Five9 found 96 percent of CX leaders believe their AI handoffs preserve context. Eighty-three percent of customers say they still repeat themselves. CMSWire EIC Dom Nicastro breaks down why the cheapest fix is not new AI. It is a visible human option. ow.ly/TYzZ50ZxnvE

NiCE landed its biggest CXone and Cognigy deal yet, an eight-figure win with the British government, and beat its own Q2 guidance. Investors still sent the stock down on renewal discounts and slowing AI growth for the second straight quarter. ow.ly/sUZY50ZwS7p

Avaya tapped Jeff Clarke as CEO on Aug 3. ASAPP named Katie Stein CEO the next day. Two contact center vendors, two new chiefs, one day apart. Clarke once ran Kodak, which has analysts debating if that is an omen or an asset. It is CX's seventh CEO change since 2025. ow.ly/LCf550ZwqUE

"Our customers don't owe us anything." That's not a conference cliché. That's the CDO philosophy Justin Racine brought back to Geriatric Medical and DDP Medical Supply after six years on the consulting side. He's CMSWire’s four-time Contributor of the Year and four weeks into his new role as Chief Digital Officer, he sat down with Dom Nicastro on The Digital Experience to talk about what happens when someone who's been writing about CX for years finally has to live it. "We're in a transactional business. People need to order medical products. But how do we allow them to feel the experience, not just use it?" His answer: start with the customer, not the technology. The rest follows. What does earning your customers' business every single day look like in your org? Watch the episode 📺: ow.ly/xeFN50ZwBxE

A $1.9 billion SoftBank and PayPay stake in 7-Eleven's Japan stores is not just a loyalty play. CMSWire EIC Dom Nicastro connects it to Home Depot, Bank of America and Virgin Atlantic, all treating physical and digital CX as one system this year. ow.ly/vlaz50Zw1Ml

Virgin Atlantic skipped the if-then-else script for its AI Concierge. CMSWire Contributor Adrian Swinscoe explains how the airline trained its holiday agent to surface just seven contextual preferences through plain conversation and why that approach is winning bigger baskets. ow.ly/hOrm50ZvGab

Post-AI marketing will not look like campaign marketing with AI bolted on. CMSWire Contributor David M. Raab explains why real-time data demands, touchpoint versus central orchestration and shrinking channel manager roles will reshape the org chart. ow.ly/ZlTC50ZuUSe