"AI isn't the risk in 2026 - fragmented, slow decision-making is, says Alice Anson, director of digital media at Nectar360, part of the Sainsbury's Group. She was underlining the fact that, if 2025 was the year marketing bedded in AI, 2026 is going to be the year when it blows everything apart. Incremental automation is no longer enough, our panel agreed: the next generation of leaders are re-architecting marketing for orchestration, not efficiency."
"Why? Agentic systems and predictive decisioning are compressing planning cycles, while consumers are abandoning traditional funnels for AI-led discovery. Demand is now shaped inside machines, not campaigns. And that creates a stark choice for brands: strengthen meaning and relevance or quietly disappear into algorithmic sameness. The problem is, though, most organizations are still built for a slow, linear world of fragmented teams and disconnected data."
""AI works really well when it is unseen," Anson says, explaining that it needs to be treated as a partner across the organization which brings teams together without actually, physically needing to get them together. Meanwhile, Billings advises: "it's about identifying the use case within your business and then empowering your internal and external network around that - not trying to do everything at once.""
Fragmented, slow decision-making poses the main marketing risk in 2026, not AI. Agentic systems and predictive decisioning compress planning cycles while consumers shift to AI-led discovery that shapes demand inside machines. Incremental automation is insufficient; leaders must re-architect marketing for orchestration across people, processes, and data to remove friction. Brands face a stark choice: strengthen meaning and relevance to avoid algorithmic sameness. CMOs should redesign operating models, collaborate differently with retail and commerce media partners, and prioritize targeted use cases rather than trying to do everything at once. Unseen, embedded AI can act as a partner to align teams and enable faster decisions.
Read at The Drum
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]