The Agentic Enterprise

Dreamforce 2025 made one thing clear: the "agentic enterprise" is no longer theoretical. AI agents are moving from buzzword to infrastructure. I've been in the room for a lot of these conversations — the divide between organizations that get it and those that don't is accelerating, and the middle ground is disappearing.

The accelerating divide

Organizations with clean data architectures, leaders empowered to take bets, and strong governance will scale AI successfully. Those without — siloed data, risk-averse culture, no clear ownership — will face increasing competitive disadvantage. It's not even close. The organizations that moved early on CRM, marketing automation, and CDPs are the same ones pulling ahead on AI. Pattern recognition matters.

Sales and marketing are often the provocateurs. They feel the pain of manual ops first — endless spreadsheets, copy-paste workflows, approval bottlenecks. They push the organization forward. The immediate gains (faster cycles, better insights) hit the bottom line fast. That creates pull. The question is whether the rest of the org can keep up. Usually it can't, unless someone has been building the plumbing.

Chat as the winning interface

AI tools that fit into existing workflows get adopted. Dashboards with separate logins and MFA do not. I've watched teams reject perfectly good BI tools for years — the friction was too high. Slack and chat-based interfaces may succeed where traditional BI has struggled. Conversational by design, in your pocket, on your laptop — fundamental to how you communicate work. The awkward copy-paste into GPT will get better. The interface will disappear into the tools you already use.

Brand authenticity as the moat

Technical AI capabilities are democratizing. Everyone will have agents, RAG, and personalization. What remains hard: encoding authentic brand voice, values, and identity into AI systems. Agencies and brands that figure this out will have a defensible advantage. Everyone else will race to parity on features while losing what makes them distinct. This is why I care about design systems and structured brand logic — see Design Systems as Code and Brand Lockup — the brands that encode their identity into reusable systems will own the agentic future.

For marketers, the mandate is clear: AI is foundational, not optional. Move from primary creators to oversight specialists, brand guardians, and integration architects. The organizations that act thoughtfully and early will define the next era. The rest will be playing catch-up.