Juan Mendoza, CEO of The Martech Weekly, explores how AI agents are driving a new era of volitional personalization - where consumers use tools like ChatGPT to shape their own buying experiences.
Juan Mendoza, CEO of The Martech Weekly, joins the show to unpack a major shift in customer experience: volitional personalization. As consumers increasingly rely on AI agents like ChatGPT to guide purchase decisions, marketers are losing control over the touchpoints that once defined the buyer journey. Juan and Sara dive into how this pull-based model flips the script on traditional campaign strategies and forces brands to rethink their approach to data, content, and visibility.
Juan:
“Consumers actually using AI agents to do their bidding for them is an entirely new channel that we have no idea how to grapple with yet.”
Links & Resources:
Connect with Sara: linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Connect with Juan: linkedin.com/in/juan-mendoza-2b3a63a4
Read The Martech Weekly: themartechweekly.com
Learn more about Progress: progress.com
Timestamps:
00:25 – The rise of agentic AI in marketing
01:15 – Navigating the hype vs. harm of AI agents
02:45 – Real-world example: AI-driven real estate personalization
03:50 – Volitional personalization vs. speculative personalization
05:30 – Why combining push and pull strategies matters
07:00 – Alarm clocks, AI, and the new search experience
08:10 – Juan’s hot take: The death of marketing visibility
10:20 – Where Juan goes to learn: Hacker News & hands-on experimentation
0:00:00.1 S1: I'm Sara Faatz, and I lead community and awareness at Progress, and this is 10 Minute Martech.
0:00:04.9 S2: This sort of volitional personalization, consumers actually using AI agents to do their bidding for them, is an entirely new channel that we have no idea how to grapple with yet. And as a marketer and marketing technology leader, it's worth stepping back for a minute and going, in the future, how much of this customer experience will be reliant on my own data.
0:00:23.7 S1: That's Juan Mendoza, CEO of the Martech Weekly. Let's get started. So Juan, can you tell me what is your burning Martech idea right now?
0:00:40.6 S2: Everyone's talking about it right now, but it is agentic AI and its implications for the marketing technology profession and the marketing technology stack. All of a sudden, consumers and marketers are using these tools to actually automate a very large swath of their work as well. So that's sort of the big burning topic I have at the moment, is the role of these AI agents and how much of it is actually valuable and how much of it is actually quite harmful as well, both for consumers and brands.
0:01:09.0 S1: Yeah, very interesting. Help me unpack that a little bit. What do you think is, where is the danger or what should people be concerned about?
0:01:16.3 S2: On one side of the marketplace, you have all this anxiety around, well, these AI agents and a lot of these larger technology businesses are now looking to actively supplant employment and career opportunities in favor of AI agents and the efficiency it creates. On the other side of the marketplace, we have this extreme hype and enthusiasm around this stuff, from Mark Benioff getting on stage and announcing Agent Force and saying that, yep, you can use these AI models to basically drive a lot of marketing and sales use cases to almost every single technology vendor that we've been reviewing, and I'm talking hundreds and hundreds of vendors, embedding agentic AI capabilities into their platforms, and then working with some companies and brands actually seeing some amazing results through AI automation, from small stuff such as content automation and decisioning and versioning to big stuff like customer data management, personalization strategy, and actually delivering new consumer tools as well. It's not like this technology trend is something where it's all negative. It's actually positive and negative, but sorting through, and what we're seeing with a lot of companies and our clients and people that we work with, a lot of them are trying to get through that and think through ethically, morally, but also commercially, practically, creatively about how these tools should actually be working in their business.
0:02:40.0 S1: Yeah, that's super interesting. Do you have examples that you can share with us about somebody that's actually doing it really well right now?
0:02:47.5 S2: So this organization is a large real estate marketplace. So basically, they have a lot of consumer data. They have a lot of financial data, and their product is really about helping consumers find their ideal property, their next property. And we sort of work with them, and we've been looking at, okay, well, they want to embed agentic AI capabilities and large language models into their personalization customer experience stream of work. Initially, when we sort of worked on this idea, we looked at it as a dichotomy. So what I mean by that, there was two camps. So you have what we call volitional personalization, which is a better way to sort of explain that would be kind of a pull type personalization, where a consumer may use an AI, for example, a chatbot on a website or a tool on a website, to get a personalized experience through a large language model. They would ask it, hey, where I'm actually just looking for these specific features and this specific criteria from the thing I'm looking to buy. In that example, the AI model would use their probabilistic reasoning, and they would provide those options.
0:03:56.1 S2: And now that is actually a format of personalization. Can I tell you one more story on this, because I think it's a really interesting sort of domain. I've been looking for a new alarm clock. Like a lot of people these days, I'm sick of waking up and the first thing I see is my phone, because my phone is an alarm clock. And I was just looking for a very simple alarm clock with a specific feature. The one feature was I didn't want the alarm clock to be so loud that it would annoy my wife. So I actually went on to ChatGPT and I searched, I'm looking for these specific features for alarm clocks, and lo and behold, I found it. There's other tools like Perplexity. You can go into Perplexity, and they've just actually announced their own e-commerce integration with retailers. This is an entirely new channel for customer experience. And that's the thing that a lot of brands need to grapple with.
0:04:42.7 S1: Where do you see the human element in all of this? You've talked about consumer experience and things like that. Talk to me a little bit about how you think humans should be interacting with AI and what the humans can be doing to make sure that we're optimizing all of our experiences.
0:05:00.5 S2: Yeah, it's a great question. I might actually take that back to the second part of the marketplace story, which is this marketplace. So we're looking at that pool. So consumers pooling experiences from themselves using these AI agents. But then there's also what we call the speculative personalization, which is marketers sitting in a room and going, okay, we're going to take this data that we know about our customers, and we're going to do this campaign, this use case, and actually push something out. So it's a push motion than actually getting an experience out. And that's been the default way in which most customer experience strategies have come together is it's all push. So where this comes together, and I think this helps answer the question about the human element in all of this, is that for this company, the big opportunity is not in this dichotomy at all. It's integrating them together. So you can collect a deeper level of customer data. People are asking extremely different questions to a large language model than they would ask Google search, a search box on your retail website or your marketplace website. And so the big opportunity there is that in this sort of sector of real estate is that you've got this opportunity where people can converse with these AI agents and actually share more information about what they're really after.
0:06:18.6 S2: I want this house with like, I want at least this size backyard or I want this sort of living room space and this sort of, that's what's possible now. And so all of a sudden all these brands have access to this unstructured, qualitative, but extremely valuable data about their customers. And I actually think that that will help. One of the big blockers between a marketer and a consumer is a lack of knowledge and a lack of actual context to meet them where they're at. Brands should be able to use that data to actually create a better, personalized, less friction, overall better experience for the customer. And so that's the thing, like the big narrative out there right now is this story about, this is dehumanizing. People will lose jobs and then you'll never get another human on the other end of a phone call anymore, right? But guess what? These AI agents, there are tools and products out there where consumers are going to use AI agents to call brands anyway. And Google has been showcasing that. So there's actually consumers going, no, this is going to be more convenient for me and easier to do.
0:07:21.6 S2: And then there's going to be a lot of automation on that side as well. So that's the big sort of story there around, I guess, human interaction, human experience in relation to brands. I actually am pretty optimistic that it could actually lead to a better, more humanized experience between the consumer and the brand.
0:07:41.1 S1: I love that. And especially if we can normalize, I think my Martech hot take, I usually ask what other people's is, mine is going to be that we should normalize speculative and volitional personalization because the combination of those two is exactly what you've just talked about. And I love both of those terms. That's awesome. So I guess leading into that, I'm going to ask you, do you have a Martech hot take outside of anything else that we've talked about today?
0:08:03.6 S2: Yeah. Well, we actually recently just did an essay on this, which really tracks the evolution of AI agents right now and what's hype and what's not hype. And it's a fantastic essay from Keanu Taylor. So he's our global head of research here at the Martech Weekly. And we spent a lot of time talking to large enterprise brands and global companies and how they're thinking about embedding these technologies. And some of the biggest feedback off that is that this stuff is not just another marketing tool. The paradigm shift, and this is my big hot take, is that in the future, a lot of the data you're collecting, a lot of the customer experiences you're creating, a lot of the automation and the tooling and the marketing technology integrations and all of those things may not matter so much. Because if you take that example of me finding a radio and an alarm clock so I can wake up early in the morning, the only thing that matters in that equation with me asking Perplexity or ChatGPT to find products for me, the only thing that matters is the data that's exposed by the retailers. The listings on Amazon, the listings on all the other e-commerce websites.
0:09:14.7 S2: Because the experience that I'm getting is personalized and tailored to exactly what specifications I want for a product. And as a marketer and marketing technology leader, it's worth stepping back for a minute and going, in the future, how much of this customer experience will be reliant on my own data? And I would say my biggest hot take is that this sort of volitional personalization, consumer experience, consumers actually using AI agents to do their bidding for them is an entirely new channel that we have no idea how to grapple with yet. Because unlike SEO, you can actually peer into their search console and see which content is trending and which isn't, which is getting ranked and which isn't. Right now on all these mainstream platforms that have now hundreds of millions of users, it's a black box. You have no idea where you're visible. You have no idea what people are asking and there's no marketing visibility at all. And I think that is something that, going back to the top of this conversation really keeps me up at night. Because if all of a sudden there's no data, there's no collection and customers are not even buying stuff on your website anymore.
0:10:18.2 S2: And they're using AI agents as a gateway to do that, it means that the marketing technology function would be very much disempowered. So it's not a very happy story, but we needed the hot take because people would normally think like, yeah, we're always gonna have data, we're always gonna have marketing and we're always gonna have email, probably a future where that may not exist anymore. So that's my hot take, which is a little bit depressing.
0:10:41.6 S1: You know what, I think Juan, we should set a date a year from now. I mean, the way things are changing, we could probably set a date for two weeks from now and have a totally different conversation, but I would love to see if what you're saying does come to fruition. I think it's an exciting time. I think it's a time that we all should be experimenting and trying new things because to your point, we don't know exactly where things are going, but I do love that hot take. One last question for you and I'll let you go. Who do you follow for information or inspiration?
0:11:11.5 S2: You know what I've been doing recently, it's no one individual, but I've been on Hacker News almost every day at the moment. So Hacker News is a website that was founded by Y Combinator and Y Combinator is one of the really famous Silicon Valley incubators for startups. But they've created this blog and it looks like it's from the '90s, it's really ancient. But Hacker News is quite cool because it's giving me probably the best inside view of what's going on in Silicon Valley right now, particularly around AI and agenting AI. It's like my number one spot right now for this content. And it's a milieu of everything, you know, blog posts from developers, inside scoops to tech companies, you know, it's a really fantastic resource. And I've seen for my own educational learning around this, it's been kind of my main place where I would actually go and learn about this stuff because it's happening. There's no textbook, you know, there's everyone wants to say they're a thought leader and they've solved it or they've figured out the best framework for this, but we are in a constant state of flux here. You know, there is no normal, there is no authority right now around this stuff.
0:12:15.7 S2: It is a total world of experimentation. So my advice to listeners of your podcast is find those pockets where you have a lot of nerds talking about how this stuff actually works in practice and get around it. And for me right now, Hacker News has been a fantastic resource for that.
0:12:31.7 S1: I love that. That's great. Thank you so much, Juan. As always, it was amazing talking to you and I really appreciate your time.
0:12:37.5 S2: No problem. It was an absolute pleasure to talk about such a huge topic. So thanks for having me.
0:12:42.7 S1: Listeners, thanks for tuning in. Remember to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I'm Sara Faatz, and this is 10 Minute Martech.