Cathleen Ryan

A powerful example of what happens when innovative leadership, comprehensive brand & consumer intel and the power of agentic AI collide.

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We made a GIANT eye 👁️ that analysis your colours, and recommends the perfect outfit, from 600 options, using natural conversation. - It was hard. Every item was generated with AI to stock our 'shop' - Iris broke through AI cliche's by not being a gradient orb, a robot, or an uncanny human - We create a voice with ElevenLabs and a sassy personality of a true fashion diva -Shopping was completely agentic, using natural conversation recommending based on colour, gender preferences, occasion and style - Post experience the team build a personalised website, which showed your own personal catalogue -The experience evolved around #CoulourAnalysis that has 2.3 billion views on TikTok - It brought shopping into a more emotive space, and further up-steam. Thanks so much to the Salesforce team for having us build this! Howard Boland Adina N. Erin Thomson Angela Soh Aurian Naidoo Dan Aukland

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Let's dig into some consumer spending data - here's what I saw around BFCM: - CNBC reports that 202.9 million shoppers shopped during the 5-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, up from the previous high of 200.4 million in 2023 - Shoppers spent $11.8B on Black Friday - Buy-now-pay-later usage up 8.9% YoY - Shopify reports that its merchants generated a record $14.6 billion in sales over BFCM, up 24% from last year, currency current - showing continued e-commerce growth. - AI-driven traffic to retail sites rose over 800% CX leaders - check out my #BFCM debrief to stay informed. https://okt.to/qnS3TN

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The standard agency reporting call is broken. I shared my thoughts with Search Engine Land on why enterprise leaders need to radically rethink their digital acquisition engines in 2026. The short version: Stop obsessing over being "found" in ten blue links, and start engineering your digital assets to be "cited" by AI. Brands that make this shift are currently seeing a 7.48% conversion premium. I break down exactly how to architect this shift, and how to use it to actively reduce your paid media dependency. Full article in the comments.

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As CMOs the challenges that truly occupy us rarely make it to panels or podcasts. What gets discussed publicly is the polished version of marketing. What we actually deal with is ambiguity, pressure and decisions with incomplete data where the cost of being wrong is high. One of the biggest gaps in this role is the lack of real sounding boards. People dealing with the same problems, at the same scale, in the same market. Very few spaces allow honest conversations on what is working, what is not and what is changing where you can be unsure, skeptical or still figuring it out without it being held against you. In a market moving as fast as ours, that gap matters. We need faster feedback, deeper context and a place to pressure-test thinking before it becomes an action. That is why The CMO Assembly matters A peer-led space built with CMOs, not at CMOs. Glad to be a Founding CMO Member and grateful to be part of this room and Thanks to Vivek Sheth for making this happen. https://lnkd.in/gs7QSuBz

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Why you should treat your brand as an operating system https://lnkd.in/g6QPGHfk Modern brands must go beyond visuals and messaging to function as organizational infrastructure that coordinates decisions, culture, and behavior. When brand serves as an operating system, it guides priorities, reduces friction, and helps teams act consistently under pressure — turning belief into performance across strategy, product, and experience. #BrandStrategy #OrganizationalAlignment #Leadership #BusinessResilience #BrandOperatingSystem #DecisionMaking #CompanyCulture

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💥💥BREAKING💥💥 A team of technical aces just dropped a 500+ page book on how to design and build Agentforce AI agents using common patterns. Here's why it's a holiday Kindle must-have: Co-authors Cynthia Q. and Andy Forbes (from Capgemini) do a heroic job moving the Agentforce conversation to another level, detailing primary patterns for AI agents, how they differ & thrive ... [FYI: I wrote the foreward ... and another holiday must-have book called "Agentforce: Harnessing the Agency of AI to Grow, Scale and Win Any Industry" (Wiley).] The patterns apply to Agentic AI in general as well as Agentforce. As they say the patterns are "abstract enough to apply anywhere" and reference common tools and frameworks beyond Salesforce like LangChain, Microsoft AutoGen, OpenAgents / CrewAI, #MCP etc. Since launching Agentforce in 2024 SF has been chanting "Don't DIY Your AI" -- which just means that agentic success is not as easy as it looks. Startups can show incredible brio but not a trusted, grounded, audited, governed, multi-#LLM platform that provides tools to help build and test agents & a Command Center to monitor the hybrid human-robot workforce ... such as Agentforce. Among the 8 patterns presented there are: 💥💥Sentinel (monitor-react): as an example, could monitor internal channels for policy violations and alert HR 💥💥Conductor (orchestration): coordinate the creation of a marketing campaign from brief writing through audience definition, media planning and optimization 💥💥Presenter (UX optimization): pull data from multiple disparate systems and present a rolled-up real-time view 💥💥Action (Task doer): automatically handle routine returns for an online retailer 💥💥Coach (insights/advisory): analyze a salesperson's upcoming pitch and suggest improvements And for each the authors provide detail around use cases across the enterprise -- Finance, Customer Care, HR, Marketing, etc. -- and event sources, evaluation logic, agentic actions, tools and tech. The latter spans platform events, Apex/Flow, Agent Builder, MuleSoft, #APIs and more, at times including actual code. In some ways, this is the design-thinking "handbook" that Agentforce users have been looking for ... And after detailing patterns, the authors delve deeply into topics like trust, handling memory and context, designing & governing multi-agent systems; and some sage hard-won counsel on deployment & staging ... There's no doubt Marc Benioff is right and the Agentic Enterprise is the present and future of business. There's plenty in here for readers from the merely agent-curious to the agent-adept, business-line users to architects and admins. Happy agentic holidays! (Link to buy Kindle edition in the comments; hardcover coming soon.)

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If you couldn't make it to Las Vegas for #CES2026, ADWEEK just published the highlights from my conversation with Jenny Rooney. 👉 https://bit.ly/3NmAiai In the piece, we preview the AI Disruption Index, Moloco’s new research with Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which maps 15 industries into four strategic realities. When 75% of consumers believe LLMs help them find better deals than they can find on their own, AI isn’t just optimizing discovery. It’s replacing it entirely. With the AI Disruption Index, we wanted to give brands a clear, data driven way to understand their exposure to AI driven disruption, based on the strength of their customer relationships. Check out the article for the initial breakdown, but stay tuned for the deep dive when the full report releases on January 21st. #AIDisruptionIndex #MarketingStrategy

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So how do you protect the future of #marketing leadership, #brand ownership, and #adagency relevance when CMOs and agencies are optimizing away the next generation of leaders? That’s the question posed in this thought-provoking article from Tom Ajello™ at my former employer Lippincott. Research confirms that AI-exposed entry-level roles (including those in marketing and advertising functions) are experiencing real displacement: 🔹 Workers age 22–25 showed a 13% decline in employment 🔹 Older workers in the same roles did not decline. 🔹 Employment in lower-exposure roles rose or remained stable. If the entry-level rung disappears, the entire ladder collapses. For years, we've functioned in an apprenticeship model where young talent does real work, develops instincts, makes mistakes, sees patterns, and eventually steps into leadership. AI disrupted that model faster than anyone expected. Instead of junior roles learning by doing, we now have senior talent orchestrating models that do the work directly. When CMOs hollow out the base layer, they cut off the long-term supply of institutional knowledge, judgment, creativity, and leadership. Agencies face an even sharper consequence: if they eliminate junior talent, clients will soon wonder why agencies are needed at all. A senior strategist operating AI doesn’t create differentiation if any client can pay for tools and skip the intermediary. If the bottom up career model is broken, we need to invent the next version: One direction is AI-augmented apprenticeships: where early-career talent learns not by replacing AI, but by leveraging it, interpreting it, improving it, stress-testing it, and translating its output into strategic relevance. Another is to shift early roles toward customer-driven learning: Expose them to real conversations, interviews, sales interactions, usage behavior, and segmentation in areas where judgment is formed, not automated. A third is to formalize rotational learning frameworks: Broaden roles to cut across channels, categories, formats, growth loops, and systems so tenure creates depth rather than repetition. And the fourth path may be the most radical: Design entry roles around decision-making, not execution. Give junior talent responsibility sooner, rather than task lists that AI could complete faster. Protecting the bottom rung as it once existed is impossible. Eliminating it outright is short-sighted. Redesigning it may be the only viable choice. This isn’t about “preserving junior headcount.” It’s about protecting the future of leadership, brand ownership, and organizational memory. Check out the article: https://lnkd.in/eeYt3uwQ I’m interested: Are CMOs and agencies thinking about this intentionally yet? Would love to hear perspectives from leaders who are actively wrestling with this transition. #MarketingLeadership #FutureOfWork #NextGenMarketers #AgencyLeaders #AIImpact #AgencyLeaders #CMOCommunity

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