In this issue
Five items. Roughly four-minute read total. Click through to anything that catches you; skim past anything that doesn't.
1. Research: where AI readiness actually lives
Priya Sharma published a research note this quarter drawing on the assessment work our team has done over the past year. The headline: AI readiness scores well on operations and trust, scores honestly on experience, and is overstated by roughly 3x on findability and AI maturity itself.
The piece is short — 7 minutes — and the framework is useful for any team running a 2026 readiness conversation with their leadership. Read the research note here.
2. The agentic AI counterpoint
There is a version of the agentic AI conversation that treats every AI-suffixed feature as agentic. Most of those features are not agentic in any operationally meaningful sense — they are scripted automations with an AI wrapper. Our team has been writing about how to tell the difference and what the genuine agentic features actually require to deploy responsibly.
The four-question test for distinguishing agentic from scripted features is here.
3. Two new case studies
We published two case studies this quarter. The first walks the structural shift in a stalled CRO program — from 0.2 points of lift over 18 months to 38% qualified-pipeline improvement over six. The second is a mid-engagement note from a personalization rebuild, where the conceptual shift from segments-as-states to segments-as-predictions has driven most of the value.
Both are anonymized. Both are real shapes of work our team has done. Both are worth reading if you are responsible for the equivalent program at your organization.
4. What our team is reading
Scott Brinker's State of MarTech 2026 report came out this quarter. We disagree with parts of it — particularly the framing that the landscape is "renewing" rather than "consolidating" — but the data on inflow and outflow of tools is worth your time. The genuinely useful part is the section on category renewal, which maps roughly to where our team sees the most defensible AI opportunities.
Worth ~30 minutes if you are involved in any 2026 procurement conversation. Available on martech.org.
Until next time
We will be back in roughly six weeks. If anything in this issue prompts a question — or if you want our team to walk one of these frameworks for your specific situation — reach out.
As always, this newsletter goes to people who opted in deliberately. We do not pad it. We do not send when we do not have something worth sending. Thank you for reading.