#698: Staying customer-centric in the race to adopt agentic AI with Stephanie Liu, Forrester

The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlstrom

The Agile Brand

Business, Marketing

5 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We are here at Forrester CX in Nashville, TN and hearing all about the latest insights and ideas for brands to create better experiences for their customers. If your AI roadmap doesn’t include your customer, is it really a roadmap—or just a bridge to nowhere? Agility requires remembering who pays the bills: the customer. When shiny new tech shows up, it’s tempting to sprint after it—often leaving the actual human in our dust. Today we’re talking about staying customer-first in the race to adopt agentic AI. To help me dig in, please welcome Stephanie Liu, Senior Analyst at Forrester. Stephanie—welcome to the show! About Stephanie Liu Steph focuses on the intersection of marketing and privacy. She guides clients on how to strike a delicate balance between privacy, trust, and consumer expectations, all while navigating a rapidly shifting data deprecation landscape that spans consumers’ privacy-protecting behaviors, regulation, tech limitations, and walled gardens. She examines topics like zero-party data, preference centers, data clean rooms, the customer data ecosystem, and how to deliver experiences that are personalized without being creepy. Steph has been quoted in publications such as the New York Times, CNBC, The Markup, Marketplace, and AdWeek; her work has featured in AdExchanger, Forbes, and elsewhere. Resources Forrester: https://www.forrester.com https://www.forrester.com Catch the future of e-commerce at eTail Boston, August 11-14, 2025. Register now: https://bit.ly/etailboston and use code PARTNER20 for 20% off for retailers and brands Don't Miss MAICON 2025, October 14-16 in Cleveland - the event bringing together the brights minds and leading voices in AI. Use Code AGILE150 for $150 off registration. Go here to register: https://bit.ly/agile150" Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.show Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The Agile brand.
0:03.0	Welcome to Season 7 of the Agile brand, where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know.
0:15.0	Stay curious, stay agile, and join the top enterprise brands and MARTEC platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, e-commerce, and join the top enterprise brands and Martec platforms as we explore marketing technology,
0:23.1	AI, e-commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience.
0:27.8	Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand, built for today and tomorrow,
0:32.1	and built for customers, employees, and continued business growth.
0:36.9	I'm your host, Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1,000 brands on Martec, employees, and continued business growth. I'm your host, Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on Martec, AI, and marketing operations.
0:43.3	To make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on,
0:48.3	and leave us a rating so others can find us as well.
0:51.3	Now on to the show.
0:53.3	If your roadmap doesn't include your customer,
0:56.5	is it really a roadmap or just a bridge to nowhere? We're here at Forrester CX in Nashville,
1:01.5	Tennessee and hearing all about the latest insights and ideas for brands to create better
1:05.7	experiences for their customers. Agility requires remembering who pays the bills, the customer. When shiny new tech shows up,
1:13.3	it's tempting to sprint after it, often leaving the actual human in our dust. Today we're talking
1:19.0	about staying customer first in the race to adopt agenic AI. To help me dig in, please welcome
1:24.0	Stephanie Liu, senior analyst at Forrester. Stephanie, welcome the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in, though, why don't we start with you giving a little background on yourself and the research you're leading at Forrester? Sure. So I'm a senior analyst. I'm actually on Forrester's B2C marketing team, and I cover the intersection of privacy and marketing. And that has
1:46.1	expanded over the years to include the customer data ecosystem, customer data strategy,
1:51.7	and now AI agents in terms of the data pieces and the privacy pieces.
1:57.2	Okay. Well, yeah, you're the right person to be talking about this topic with here. And definitely, I can see why it might have expanded over the years as well. But yeah, let's get started with talking about agentic AI, certainly, I mean, first it was AI had to be, there was an unwritten rule that I had to be mentioned in every single episode of my show. Now,
2:17.7	Agentic is certainly coming along, and it certainly seems to be everywhere already. But a lot of
2:24.4	consumers have never heard of the term. So what's the very first thing that brands need to
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Agile Brand, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Agile Brand and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.