The Agentic Shift
Quick ask before we dive in: We've had limited response to our internal AI tools survey, and even less to the Gartner PMM survey. Both are shaping important decisions — your input genuinely matters. If you haven't taken 5 minutes to fill them out, please do. Links at the bottom.
Now, onto this week's focus: the agentic shift — and what it means when your buyer stops being a person and starts being an algorithm.
I've been thinking about this for months, but this week I finally wrote it down: everything we assume about product marketing — personas, messaging hierarchies, content-to-conversion pipelines — breaks when an AI agent is doing the evaluation.
Plus: meet this week's User of the Week — Soo Shim, whose BattleCoach prototype shows what competitive intelligence looks like when it's designed for scale.
—Chris
Your Buyer Just Hired an Agent. Now What?
Here's what most product marketers haven't internalized yet: your buyer is disappearing. Not literally — but increasingly, humans are deploying agents to do the work that used to land them on your website.
What This Essay Covers:
- Why the old frameworks are broken — personas, SEO, content marketing all assumed human discovery patterns
- The K-shaped future — the widening gap between AI-native PMMs and everyone else
- Discoverability as the new battleground — what happens when agents don't use Google
- MCP vs. end-to-end activation — two strategic paths forward
Hyunsoo "Soo" Shim
Senior Director, Global Competitive Intelligence · SAP
Building BattleCoach — an agentic AI prototype that transforms static competitive content into dynamic coaching for sellers. The insight that sparked it: "Our competitive messaging often fails the logo swap test." If you can swap your logo for a competitor's and the messaging still works, you don't have differentiation.
Her approach: A 3-day workshop to create 9 solution-level playbooks (3 buying scenarios × 3 competitors), then encode that intelligence into an AI system that can scale.
The Agentic PMM Hype Cycle
Where PMM capabilities actually sit — not where vendors want you to think they sit.
🚀 Innovation Trigger
Agentic Buying Teams • MCP-Based Activation • Agent-Readable Positioning
📈 Peak of Inflated Expectations
AI Content Generation • AI Competitive Intel • End-to-End Agentic GTM
📉 Trough of Disillusionment
SEO-Driven Demand Gen • Traditional Persona Models
📊 Slope of Enlightenment
Consumption-Based PMM • AI-Augmented Sales Enablement
✅ Plateau of Productivity
Data-Driven Messaging • Product-Led Storytelling
See the full interactive graphic in the essay.
This Week in AI + PMM
📢 OpenAI Turns ChatGPT Into an Ad Platform
800 million users just became the product. OpenAI's February announcement validated what many predicted: every AI assistant builder is now an ad company.
PMM takeaway: Your brand's presence in AI-mediated conversations just became a paid media question.
🤖 Salesforce Spring 2026: AI Agents Across CRM
Salesforce expanded Agentforce with new autonomous agents for marketing, sales, and service. The agents can now handle multi-step workflows without human intervention.
PMM takeaway: The race to embed agentic capabilities into enterprise software is officially on.
🛒 Google Announces AI Mode Checkout Protocols
Google introduced standards allowing AI agents to complete purchases directly within its ecosystem. Buyer agents can now transact without human involvement.
PMM takeaway: If your checkout flow isn't agent-friendly, you're invisible.
⚰️ B2BMX 2026: The "Infinite Content Graveyard"
The Demand Gen Report's conference preview says it plainly: "AI-powered is no longer a differentiator—it's the baseline." Every whitepaper sounds the same.
PMM takeaway: The new question isn't "are you using AI?" — it's "what actually breaks through?"
🏢 Oracle Launches Role-Based AI Agents
New role-based agents for marketers, sellers, and CS teams can pull context from across Fusion applications.
PMM takeaway: The agent wars are heating up. SAP, Salesforce, Oracle—everyone's shipping.
📋 Two Quick Surveys
Response rates have been low on both of these, and we need more voices to make the data meaningful. Your perspective matters.
1. Internal AI Tools Survey — Which tools are moving the needle?
2. Gartner PMM Survey — Shapes how Gartner covers our function.
Yan Yan and I looked at cool GEO provider Evertune, building the next generation of SEO for agents. Stay tuned.
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