A Perfect Time to Recalibrate Frontlines Research

Technology continues to transform firm-customer interactions, creating increasingly complex configurations of human and machine interfaces. Orchestrating the actions of widely distributed actors and systems has proven difficult. Agentic commerce, involving interactions between autonomous machines, will add complexity, shift points of marketing influence, and require new tactics. The frontlines have changed faster than scholars’ approaches to studying them, and the gap is widening precisely when decision makers need guidance. Closing this gap requires four imperatives: adopt empirics-first thinking, provide more credible evidence, lead practice – inform decisions, and be prescient.