The trend: AI-powered shopping and self-service are gaining traction with consumers and B2B buyers, putting more pressure on brands to modernize how their customer-facing teams work together.

That urgency goes beyond adopting new tools and requires fixing the underlying business models behind them.

“AI speeds things up, but if your organization is set up with functional silos, AI can just expose those weaknesses in a more obvious way to your customers,” Ian Kahn, partner and commercial and service excellence platform leader at PwC, told EMARKETER.

Three takeaways on the direction of AI:

1. Agentic commerce is becoming a real channel.

• “The most valuable customers are now leveraging agentic platforms, and we're seeing this in both B2B and B2C,” Kahn said. That raises the stakes for brands still treating agentic commerce as experimental.
• As AI becomes more embedded in how customers research and buy, marketers will need a clearer strategy for how their brands show up in those environments.

2. The CMO role is getting bigger.

• AI is making the gaps between marketing, sales, and service harder to ignore. That’s pushing customer experience higher on the marketing agenda.
• Kahn said the conversation he’s having with clients is squarely about how to “drive more integration across marketing, sales, and service.” For CMOs, that points to a broader mandate—not just driving demand, but helping unify the full front-office experience.

3. Governance is moving to the front office.

• “As we continue to see more agentic capabilities deployed in customer-facing environments, it brings us back to the need for … governance [and] guardrails,” Kahn said.
• No company can afford to fail on customer experience. “You get one chance,” he said, “so even as you invest in strategy and change, you must embed trust, security, and control at every step.”

Implications for brands: As AI touches more of the customer journey directly, governance is no longer just an IT concern. Brands need clear oversight on how AI is deployed, what decisions it influences, and how trust is maintained at scale.

• AI can accelerate growth, efficiency, and customer engagement, but it also magnifies existing organizational flaws. Brands with disconnected teams and messy handoffs risk creating faster, more visible customer friction.
• The real opportunity is not just in adding AI to marketing, sales, or service—it’s in rebuilding those functions to work as one system and better position brands to improve customer experience.

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