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Customer‑owned AI Agents Poised to Disrupt Marketing

Putting the final touches on our big "Martech for 2026" report — over 100 pages of lovingly, human-written explanation of what's actually happening with #AI and #martech headed into the next 6-12 months. Of course, there's a lot about agents.  But purged of the hype and BS, relentlessly digging down to the ground truth. We've categorized three very different kinds of agents in marketing: 1️⃣ Agents for Marketers — backstage marketing work 2️⃣ Agents for Customers — agents marketers deploy to the world 3️⃣ Agents of Customers — agents that customers control Categories 1️⃣ and 2️⃣ are mostly about improving marketing. Making it more efficient and, in the best and most creative cases, making it more effective. This is good stuff, even if a lot of it is incremental in its value. But it's category 3️⃣ (and a little bit of 2️⃣) that's truly DISRUPTING marketing. Agents that work on behalf of customers, outside the control of — and very often outside the visibility for — marketers are rewiring the go-to-market playing field. The shift from SEO to AEO/GEO is just the beginning. As Chris Andrew, CEO of Scrunch, eloquently phrased it in a webinar we hosted yesterday, martech needs to evolve from just "marketing technology" to "marketing TO technology" — serving the rapidly expanding space of agents that are intermediaries between marketers and their audience. Even with the hype fully sucked out of the room, these are FASCINATING changes underway. Want one of the first copies of our "Martech for 2026" report? Sign up for the launch event Frans Riemersma and I will be hosting on December 2: https://lnkd.in/dtP9-fRm You can catch it live or on-demand and get our 100+ page report the very moment it's released there. We promise to not just keep it real, but to also have some fun and amusement with it too.  P.S. Technically, 94 words in our report were written by Claude. But we'll explicitly call them out. And admittedly, they're pretty funny.