10 Marketing Leaders on What Stays, What Goes, and What Scales in 2026

By Lora Kratchounova
JANUARY 15, 2026

As we move into 2026, marketing leaders are fundamentally rethinking their go-to-market (GTM) strategies, driven by AI advancements, buyer fatigue, and economic pressures. AI is shifting from a mere novelty to an essential infrastructure across the marketing landscape, enabling improved compliance, streamlined workflows, and enhanced internal decision-making, all while maintaining human oversight.

Concrete applications of AI include the development of custom Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) for tasks like compliance verification, as mentioned by Pontera’s Ali Jawin. This innovation allows legal teams to focus on flagged issues, significantly boosting efficiency. Marketing leaders are also leveraging AI to refine account-based marketing (ABM) efforts, emphasizing meaningful engagement over broad, undifferentiated tactics. Kevin Cochrane of Vultr advocates for utilizing AI to empower developers within engaging frameworks like global hackathons, thus aligning product development with market needs.

The 2026 landscape will see traditional pillars such as storytelling, personalization, and sales alignment remain solid—core tenets that marketers refuse to abandon. The focus will be on actionable, emotionally resonant narratives rather than generic content or vanity metrics. As marketing becomes less about busywork and more about impactful engagement, clarity and intent will drive success.

As CMOs embrace these changes, the best strategies will involve simplified tech stacks, revenue-aligned metrics, and a commitment to human-centered customer experiences. In this evolving environment, those who combine AI capabilities with creative human insight will thrive, demonstrating that successful marketing is ultimately built around understanding and serving customers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally transforming the B2B marketing space, making it imperative for brands to adapt to new trends. AI is altering brand-audience interactions and is responsible for the decline of traditional demand generation funnels, giving rise to AI-driven discovery methods.

As consumers increasingly rely on AI recommendations, marketers encounter both challenges and opportunities. The 2026 Media Trends Report from AI Digital emphasizes the importance of unified customer data, cross-channel strategies, and updated success metrics to navigate this shifting landscape.

Mary Gabrielyan, AI Digital's Chief Strategy Officer, noted the astonishing impact of AI on organic click-through rates, which have plummeted due to AI directly responding to user inquiries, bypassing typical search pathways. This phenomenon necessitates brands to ensure their presence in AI-generated responses, as otherwise, they risk being overlooked during critical decision-making moments.

Looking towards the future, AI will transition from merely optimizing ad placements to orchestrating holistic customer journeys in real-time. This means dynamic management of budgets and messages tailored to intention signals. Effective use of AI hinges on clean first-party data and collaboration among systems, overcoming traditional silos within marketing teams.

Moreover, successful marketers will prioritize new metrics that reflect customer lifetime value and cohort conversion rates over outdated click-based measurements. Channels such as Connected TV (CTV) and retail media stand out for their full-funnel capabilities, offering robust data for measuring impact from impressions to sales.

In summary, brands that invest in data infrastructure, embrace AI’s role in consumer discovery, and maintain high creative standards backed by actionable insights will be well-positioned for long-term success.

Treasure Data Launches Marketing Super Agent
By Dom Nicastro
JANUARY 12, 2026
DIGITAL MARKETING

Treasure Data has introduced Marketing Super Agent, a groundbreaking multi-agent AI system designed to unify and enhance the marketing strategies of enterprise-level organizations. This innovative tool integrates various AI functions—such as identity-informed audience intelligence, strategy formulation, creative development, activation, and real-time optimization—within a governed workspace, ultimately improving campaign planning and execution for CMOs and marketing teams.

The system is powered by a Super Agent Orchestrator, which brings together specialized agents for tasks such as sentiment analysis, persona creation, and channel-specific ad generation. The collaboration among these AI agents, facilitated through a live in-session memory layer, fosters effective decision-making with context-aware reasoning. This approach ensures that marketers remain in control, approving and adjusting AI recommendations throughout the workflow.

Designed to be platform-agnostic, Marketing Super Agent enhances existing martech stacks without requiring enterprises to replace their current systems. This capability addresses the prevalent challenge of fragmented marketing tools and streamlines workflows, ensuring smoother operations and better results. Using AI-driven analytics, organizations can anticipate improved customer satisfaction and reduced costs, while personalized campaigns can yield a 15% increase in shareholder return.

As enterprises increasingly integrate AI into their marketing strategies, Treasure Data's Marketing Super Agent stands out as a comprehensive solution that not only accelerates campaign execution but also strengthens the marketing decision-making process. The system aims to enhance overall marketing efficiency, shortening time-to-market and boosting ROI, making it an essential tool for modern enterprise marketers.

Treasure Data has unveiled its Marketing Super Agent, a groundbreaking AI marketer integrated into the Treasure Data AI Marketing Cloud. Unlike conventional AI tools that generate standalone content, the Marketing Super Agent creates a cohesive marketing ecosystem that manages audience intelligence, strategy, creative work, activation, and real-time optimization within a unified enterprise workspace.

This innovative system operates like a true marketing department, addressing the needs of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) who have been inundated with narrow AI tools that lack comprehensive understanding of their specific needs. The Marketing Super Agent allows marketers to input prompts—like “Turn this brief into a campaign plan” or “Determine our target audience and GTM strategy”—transforming user intent into an efficient marketing workflow.

The AI is powered by a Super Agent Orchestrator that connects specialized task agents for in-depth research, sentiment analysis, and campaign development, fostering collaboration through a live memory layer. This enables the AI to understand context and execute multi-step marketing tasks effectively.

Key applications of the Marketing Super Agent include:

1. Strategy Development: Facilitates identity-informed research, competitive analysis, persona modeling, and journey mapping grounded in first-party data.

2. Creative Execution: Generates data-informed campaign concepts and personalized ad copy tailored to specific audiences and their lifecycle stages.

3. Efficient Execution: Streamlines customer engagement through CDP-native email campaigns and cross-channel audience activation, ensuring real-time orchestration backed by trusted data.

Marketing Super Agent signifies a paradigm shift for marketers, combining strategic, analytical, and creative capabilities into one powerful tool, while providing immediate, measurable value in existing workflows.