One Month Into 2026, and the Ground Is Already Moving
The future is unwritten, and marketing is being rebuilt in real time
One month into 2026, and my head is already spinning.
Not in a panic way.
In a things I was genuinely confident about six months ago are already being unlearned way.
The pace of change in AI and marketing right now is absurd.
Frameworks that felt solid last year.
Playbooks teams scaled.
Ideas we taught with confidence.
They’re quietly breaking underneath us.
If you’re a leader actively leaning into this shift, this is probably the most energized you’ve felt in years. I feel this acutely right now. It feels creative again. Alive.
If you’re not, it probably feels like the floor won’t stop moving.
What’s disorienting isn’t one big disruption.
It’s several deep ones colliding at the same time.
OpenAI Ads Don’t Kill Performance Marketing
They Change Who Evaluates It
OpenAI ads are coming. Fast.
This doesn’t kill performance marketing.
It changes who evaluates it.
For years, ads competed in auctions. Humans decided what to click. Bidding power and creative optimization won.
Now, the model decides what to show.
That flips the order of operations.
Eligibility comes before bidding.
If the model doesn’t understand you, doesn’t trust you, doesn’t know when to surface you, you never even enter the auction.
There is no CPC problem here.
There is an invisibility problem.
Most brands won’t realize they’ve been excluded. They’ll just see performance decay and assume something downstream is broken.
Early OpenAI ads will not look like traditional performance channels. At least not at first.
My bet is that DTC brands benefit first. Shorter consideration cycles and clearer intent mean brand exposure can translate to action much faster inside an AI interface (and I too will make more impulse buys I do not need).
B2B will lag early, not because it’s less valuable, but because trust formation, attribution, and multi-stakeholder buying take longer to map inside a model-driven experience. That said, B2B being B2B, it will still jump on the spend.
Early days will feel more like paid learning than paid performance.
The real work moves upstream.
Being legible, credible, and referenceable to AI systems before dollars ever matter.
Agentic Commerce Flattens the Funnel
It Doesn’t Optimize It
Agentic commerce compresses everything.
Discovery.
Evaluation.
Decision.
Action.
Increasingly, all of it happens inside a single interaction.
Funnels don’t evolve here.
They flatten.
That breaks attribution.
It breaks lifecycle logic.
It breaks most assumptions about how conversion actually works.
When an agent answers the question and executes the action, there is no journey to optimize. There is only the moment you are chosen, or not.
This is why dashboards still look fine while teams feel like they’re losing control.
We’re measuring motion that no longer reflects how decisions are actually made.
Upstream Influence Is the Only Thing That Compounds
In AI-driven discovery, intent forms before anyone clicks.
If AI discovery isn’t top of mind, you are invisible.
Owning answers isn’t a tactic anymore.
It’s the whole game.
Onsite still matters.
Offsite matters more.
Your website is no longer the center of gravity. It’s one input among many.
Decisions are shaped across:
forums
communities
reviews
secondhand explanations
fragmented conversations
…where AI systems assemble understanding.
Winning here means building systems that:
mine the real questions people are asking
recognize how those questions mutate across contexts
ensure credible answers exist everywhere models pull from
This isn’t content marketing.
It’s decision infrastructure.
Marketing Isn’t Campaigns Anymore
It’s an Engine
The uncomfortable truth:
Marketing isn’t campaigns anymore (I’ve felt this way for awhile, but now more than ever reinforces this).
Marketing is building an engine that AI systems can understand, trust, and propagate over time.
That engine compounds quietly or decays silently, whether you’re “running something” or not.
And that brings me to the line that’s been looping in my head lately.
The Future Is Unwritten
In my usual fashion of quoting punk rock warlords,
Joe Strummer used to say:
The future is unwritten.
That wasn’t optimism.
It was a warning and a dare.
Nothing about what’s coming next is guaranteed.
Not channels.
Not roles.
Not playbooks.
Not the things that made us successful five minutes ago.
The people who win moments like this aren’t the ones protecting the past.
They’re the ones willing to tear it down while it’s still working.
That’s what this moment feels like.
Uncomfortable. Loud. Unfinished.
And full of possibility if you’re willing to step into it instead of waiting for consensus.
(Sorry for below, GenAI image models have a way to go)
My Commitment for 2026
I’m not sitting this shift out.
Just like I’ve done with AEO, I’m going to keep testing, building, breaking, and learning in the wild alongside some of the smartest minds in marketing.
Out loud.
In public.
In real time.
No polished hindsight decks.
No fake certainty.
Just honest signal from the edge of what’s changing.
Because the future isn’t something we wait for.
It’s something we write.